Political Culture Overview of the Continuum

With respect to the scope of political culture, the most minimalist notion characterizes it as a set of attitudes, beliefs, and values that together establish a general 

Should the notion of political culture include political structures Political structures do not have direct relation to political culture, as evidenced by the formation of Polish national identity, which Stephen Welch describes as a negative response to the political structures imposed on the Poles at the time when their national identity was emerging. Since the Polish nation was characterized in opposition to existing political structures, these structures could hardly be considered a part of the Polish nation s political culture, although they helped it emerge. Nor do all already formed political cultures have a clear set of corresponding political structures. I define political culture, then, solely as a set of beliefs about and attitudes toward politics.  

Individual beliefs about politics can be presented as descriptive beliefs, while their attitudes toward politics can be presented as a set of normative beliefs. For example, I believe that Quebec is a nation is a descriptive statement, whereas I believe it is wrong that Quebec is not given national status is a normative statement. Hence, we can impose a more uniform description on what constitutes a political culture a political culture is a set of descriptive and normative beliefs about politics. Below, when it is not important for my presentation to separate beliefs and attitudes, I will use beliefs to refer to both descriptive and normative beliefs. For a political culture to characterize a nation, individuals need to self-identify with the set of beliefs characterizing the corresponding political culture. To self-identify with a set of beliefs, individuals have to both be capable of forming dispositions to behave based directly on these beliefs and to approve the beliefs propositional content. I will deal more with the notion of self-identification in the next section. When an individual is motivated to act directly in relation to a certain belief, this individual develops a disposition to behave. 

Defining nationhood in terms of political culture captures the properties of nationhood that are most important for the corresponding collective agents mutual relations. Political culture of this kind, however, permeates different areas of culture and is reflected in other kinds of beliefs about nationhood, such as attitudes toward immigration and immigrants and toward the protection of the national culture. 

In the previous chapter, I sketched a number of ways in which a potential political culture can be partially expressed. Some are expressed negatively a set of beliefs constitutive of the minority group agency is not expressed in public sphere, but beliefs and actions of the majority culture are mobilized against what they perceive as the collective agency of the minority. It is usually the case that a negative poten- 

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