CIVIC CULTURE
"The civil is that which restrains man from doing mischief" (William Blackstone)

    Although the idea of mutual trust goes far back in time, in political philosophy the concept of "civil society" reached its zenith in the works of Hegel (1770-1881) and Marx (1818-1883) as an argument, essentially, over compatibility between the Idea of political mind and the idea of civic heart.  In the conservative Hegelian tradition, civil society took the form of family, property, and moral obligations to neighbors, and it further "mirrored" the realm or sphere of activity that government engaged in.  According to Hegel (1820), by external necessity (dependence) and immanent end (the course of history), civil society was destined to work in tandem (dialectically) with the state toward ever-greater laws and liberties, and a person was not free unless they participated in civil society.  This conservative tradition eventually became part of political liberalism via reception of the work of figures like John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Ferguson (of the Scottish Enlightenment), and Alexis de Tocqueville (who more than anybody else championed the value of "associational life" in his famous 1835 book, Democracy in America).

    In the liberal Marxist tradition, for a society to live and thrive it needed an element which was political (but not so political as to be officious or bureaucratic) and at the same time represented the citizen without being directly involved in private or public interests.  Marx and Engels (1845) believed that a person can avoid alienation by participation in civil society.  In orthodox radical Marxism, civil society mediates between base and superstructure, sometimes softening class conflict, sometimes exacerbating it.  In modern, non-materialist Marxism (and British cultural studies), civil society refers to the silent majority who think but do not speak, yet maintain a "network of strategies and powers and articulations" (Hall et al. 1996).  We need not go into neo-Marxist debates over class conflict (false consciousness) versus ideological conflict (hegemony), but suffice it to say there have been a number of influential thinkers in this tradition like Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and Jurgen Habermas. 

INSIGHTS FROM MANY DISCIPLINES 

    In public management, the term "civic culture" was best articulated by Almond & Verba (1963), who referred to it as a set of specific attitudes which are crucial to the success of modern democracies.  Other synonymous sociopsychological terms include instincts, habits, and sentiments.  As commonly defined in social psychology, an attitude is a propensity to perceive, interpret, and act toward a particular object in particular ways.  In recent years, and with Almond & Verba's (1989) revision, the term "political culture" has come to take on less psychological overtones (with civic culture as a subtype of political culture).  Political culture, according to Almond & Verba (1989) is defined as a substantial consensus on the legitimacy of political institutions and the direction and content of public policy.  It also means a widespread tolerance for a plurality of interests and a widely distributed sense of political competence and mutual trust among the citizenry.  In many ways, the phrase "political culture" is superior to "civil culture" since the word "civic" doesn't really add anything other than reference to common courtesy (or "civil" in the sense of being courteous or polite), and "political" is an adjective with much more depth, at least to the field of political science which has developed an interpretation of "political culture" as a way of understanding the socio-political foundations of legal systems in how lawyers conduct their daily lives and inform their practice (Barry et al. 1988).  True civic culture is much more than that, however, even though it does not comprise a theory but a set of variables which can be used to construct theories.  There is no consensus on what groups form a civic culture.

    An interesting contribution to the civic culture literature has come from a field of anthropology called psychoanthropology (aka psychological anthropology) which emerged in the 1930s when some anthropologists (e.g., Benedict 1934, 1946; Kardiner 1945; Linton 1945) adopted the Freudian perspective (Freud 1929) which held that nations went to war because of unconscious motivations and a libido complex over family authority.  Although most of the contributions in this vein follow a "configurationalist" approach (culture as a personality, which in turn creates modal personality copies of itself), the most significant contribution has been the concept of "national character" (Kluckhohn 1944) based on value orientations (fixed beliefs or strong feelings) to the following five concerns:

    Sociologists tend to treat civic culture as synonymous with community or citizenship (e.g., Putnam 2001; Bhargava & Reifeld 2005).  Sociologists have long been critical of any one thing (e.g., folk or civil religion) being the basis for associational life as well as individualism in general (Bellah 1967; 1985).  Putnam's (2001) remarkable book, Bowling Alone, shows with charts and graphs the decline in "civic engagement" in America since the early 1960s by measuring "social capital" which is the value of people dealing with people (in church groups, the PTA, neighborhood taverns, weekly card games, bowling leagues, or what-have-you).  Over the past 35 years, attendance in such groups is down by more than 50%, and Putnam (2001) says this represents a decline in social trust and social ties with implications for the "social fabric" (how people are connected with one another).  Bhargava & Reifeld (2005) examined more than America and found a similar decline in European societies based on fragmentation of citizenship claims due to confusion over identity with wave after wave of postmodernism and multiculturalism.  Two terms frequently used (and misused) deserve special attention, as follows:

• civic engagement -- Written on extensively by Skocpol (1999; 2004), the term is usually taken to mean individual and collective action designed to identify and address issues of public concern. Engagement usually means a greater than trivial level of intensity (e.g. more than a few hours per month), and is not exactly the same thing as service learning or volunteerism although a number of university centers exist on the basis of similarity. Ketter et al. (2002) have come up with 19 measures of the concept across 3 categories, as listed below.

• social capital -- A composite definition would be the aggregate of resources, actual or virtual, which derive from more or less durable networks of acquaintances, friends, colleagues, contacts, and "connections" which facilitate certain cooperative action for the collective whole based on shared norms of information, trust, and reciprocity. According to Coleman (1990), social capital is less than socio-structural, but makes up the shared bonds which motivate people to join causes and groups. Putnam (2001) distinguishes between bonding and bridging capital (i.e., church groups versus community groups), and Halpern (2004) says it is most important to distinguish the concept of "human capital" as definitely not being the same thing as social capital.                 

    The field of criminology has made infrequent inroads into the concept of civic culture, but it has made some significant contributions, generally asserting that strong local institutions and organizations (including small businesses, schools, voluntary associations, churches, and the like) help a community to withstand extra-local pressures and solve local problems more easily and efficiently (Tolbert et al. 1998).  Social capital has been shown to reduce homicide rates, interestingly enough in areas where there is high Elks club membership (Rosenfeld et al. 2001).  Social capital has also been shown to ameliorate poverty and human disorder in both Britain and America (Sampson et al. 2005).  And further, social capital has been demonstrated to cut down on violent crime particularly in rural areas (Weisheit et al. 2006; Lee 2008).  Home ownership and residential stability usually result in the formation of a subculture upon which a civic community is built.  Small businesses (i.e., local capitalism) also tend to produce more of a climate of well-being than big, globally oriented capitalism.  Serious crime is uniformly lower where small manufacturing is more prevalent.  A "civic spirit" also seems to pervade small farming communities, and whether or not such characteristics can be replicated in urban settings is one of criminology's quests.                  

    Historians tend to emphasize civic virtue (common courtesy, manners, morals, etiquette, etc.) in their discussions of civic culture (Hale 1995; Anderson 1996; Carter 1998).  There are many organizations around the world with the word "civic" in their name, and they all advocate civic virtues like tolerance, optimism, self-restraint, self-reliance, and reason.  The virtue approach is somewhat consonant with the old meaning of civic culture, as "a culture based on communication and persuasion, a culture of consensus and diversity, a culture of tradition and modernity, a culture that permits change but moderates it" (Almond & Verba 1963:8).  However, virtues are as different from attitudes as beliefs are from ideologies.  Virtues invite hypocrisy like ideologies invite argument.  Nonetheless, the common theme hit on by all the different disciplines is that civil culture is mostly a good thing for ethical reasons, and for practical purposes, it includes a tendency to take pride in one's government and expect good treatment from it.  Such positive characteristics may explain why the field of public management embraces the concept, and holds that civil society can be encouraged by bureaucracies in their relationships with politicians and publics (Fukuyama 1996).  The following is a list of civic virtues that researchers have found to be essential or vital:

    Tolerance is a trait of moral character as well as a moral ideal.  It demands real virtue to cooperate with someone whom you strongly disagree with.  Tolerance is also controversial once one gets beyond the simple John Locke-Thomas Jefferson notion of it as separation of church and state.  Sometimes the intolerant must be tolerated, but only so far as they do not endanger those who are tolerant.  Forbearance has its limits, and far too often tolerance itself contains hidden discriminations.  Terms like pluralism and diversity have more vitality, but then again, there are probably limits. 

    Autonomy basically means the ability to rule oneself, or at least separate part of one's identities (and loyalties) from the context of being a member of a nation-state.  We are all cosmopolitans as well as citizens.  The capacity to govern oneself derives from the ability to freely and authentically consent to be governed by a political power we regard as legitimate.  This consent can be withdrawn if that political power makes it impossible for any portion of its citizenry to give their consent.  In such cases, the government is illegitimate and no one is autonomous.             

CIVIC CULTURE AS ALTERNATIVE FUTURE

    Civic culture has traditionally been used as a variable for comparison of political systems.  In fact, it may be the most important variable having the strongest impact in the direction of democratic political development.  However, problems have plagued use of the concept as a comparative tool.  Almond & Verba (1963) thought that only the United States and Great Britain possessed a true civic culture, but Inglehart (1997) has found that several other nations possess it or at least a tendency toward it due to changes in religious beliefs, work motivation, political conflict, attitudes toward children and families, and attitudes toward divorce, abortion, and homosexuality.  Stark & Finke (2000) have also discovered that better treatment of women is a hallmark of civic culture.  Clearly, a number of "hot button" issues (womens rights, gay rights, etc.) are raised once one sorts out the components of civic culture.  This insight has not been lost by those who try to use the concept to advance their own agenda, such as feminists, secularists, and neo-institutionalists, each of whom use it to advocate an alternative future.

    Feminism of the Simon de Beauvoir variety (visionary liberationist) has long been interested in civic culture as a way to escape inauthenticity and the trap of consumerism.  However, the feminist project has been delayed by the fact that most of civic culture is male-dominated, Jones (1990) having pointed this out as a "masculine" domination of the modes of discourse, codes, and rituals that make up civic culture.  There are no woman-friendly civic cultures.  To overcome this, much modern feminism has embraced postmodernism (e.g., Bridges 1994), which argues for inventing a new vocabulary to obtain the desired civic heartfeltness along with the necessary communitarianism to enhance solidarity.  The result is that modern feminism comes off sounding like Christian fundamentalism advocating communnal living along with Judeo-Christian agape.

    Secularization is a thesis which holds that in every country where people rely less and less on religiosity for their values and beliefs, a happier, more prosperous, and secure country has developed.  Sociologists have been advocating the secularization thesis for years (Mills 1959; Berger 1967), but history has shown it to be falsified with a vengeance.  In the United States, for example, levels of religiosity have NOT been declining and there has been no stopping rates of development.  It may be that only certain religions matter, or it may be, as "neo-secularizationists" argue (e.g., Chaves 1994), that religion's authority is strong on some issues and weak on others (like birth control).  Either way, the concept is quite controversial, and there are plenty of other ways to look at civic culture without bringing religion into the picture.  In fact, most researchers (e.g., Lee 2008) have found wide variations in the relationship between religious participation and civic participation.  This doesn't mean that religious involvement is not unimportant; it just means that participation in non-religious civic organizations is just as important.

    Neo-institutionalism (March & Olsen 1984) holds that civic culture is important as a contextualizing variable which tempers the tendency of traditional science to focus on the formal, structural aspects of political systems.  A democratic and developed polity (expressing a civic culture) will have lots of bureaucratic agencies, commissions, committees, and legal venues for managing conflict.  These institutions will have norms and symbols, and further, perhaps unique patterns of historical development, which produce optimal rates of efficacy in serving the public interest.  Some neo-institutionalists (e.g., Heper 1987) argue that what they are describing is nothing more than the degree of "stateness" expressed by a political system.  Others (Peters 2001) have said civic culture is nothing more than a commitment to reform, and few governments have remained untouched by the waves of reform that have swept through the public sector over the past several decades.  Peters (2001) has identified four (4) types of governments (market, participative, flexible, and deregulated) based on their commitment to specific types of reforms, as adapted below:

    A market-oriented government is essentially based around ideas variously called supply-side economics, Reaganomics, Thatcherism, "voodoo economics" or "trickle-down theory."  The basic argument is that lower taxes and slimmer government will stimulate growth, enterprise, harder work and higher levels of saving and investment.  Many countries have tried to implement this kind of government by cutting taxes and reducing heavy-handed government intervention.  According to a 2008 study of twenty nations by the UK Centre for Policy Studies called Big, Not Better (pdf), the world's ten nations with slim governments (defined as revenue and expenditure levels below 40% of GDP) include Australia, Canada, Estonia, Hong Kong, Ireland, South Korea, Latvia, Singapore, the Slovak Republic and the United States.  Over the past twenty years, these nations have experienced increased discretionary income, lowered youth unemployment, increased life expectancy, and faster economic growth.  By contrast, the world's nations with big governments (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom) tended to overspend on social benefits such as unemployment and disability benefits, housing allowances, free school meals, and state pensions, resulting in a widened gap between rich and poor because only the rich saved and invested and the poor came to depend upon government transfers (handouts).  Clearly market-oriented government reforms help create incentives for a civic culture based on the virtues of hard work, saving and getting ahead.

    A participative-oriented government is designed to encourage more citizen participation by broadening the range of people who have access to opportunities for political decision-making.  Some scholars (e.g., Chambers and Kymlicka 2002) argue that this kind of reform extends the domain of civil society and that only strong governmental opportunities for participation create strong, liberal democracies that empower the poor.  Traditional (representative) government tends to limit citizen participation to voting, leaving the actual governance to politicians, but participative government tries to reach out to disenfranchised citizens by making them consultants to help organize citizens into teams or task forces.  Further consultants come from the ranks of enthusiastic citizens (this EU Think Paper identifying four types of "citizen-consultants") who have taken up consulting jobs with the government over a pet department or pet issue of theirs.  Ultimately, participative government aims to make every citizen a civil servant capable of earning enough "passive income" (from consulting) to do more inspirational (charitable) work full-time.  

    Flexible government is a popular reform, and is known by many names such as: wikigovernment, digital democracy, or e-Government.  In the United States, e-government was driven primarily by legislation ordering the top 500 forms used by citizens to be placed online by the year 2000.  In other countries, e-government has taken place without the need for authorizing legislation.  Although no one knows precisely what e-government is supposed to entirely consist of, or what a future "digital citizen" would be like, scholars argue that weblogs (blogs), wikis, and other "new media" on the Internet have greatly enhanced the representation of those who have been traditionally under-represented (Shane 2004).  Nonetheless, concerns over a "digital divide" remain since some poor people have no computers or access to the Internet, and on a larger scale, a "global digital divide" exists which is addressed, in part, by grassroots programs such as One Laptop per Child at www.laptop.org.

    Deregulated (or grassroots) government is based on the idea of shifting as much power and authority as possible to the lowest geographical level of organization.  In many ways, its ideas are communalist or anarchist in nature, allowing self-appointed leaders to emerge from groups where people live or work together.  The contributions of women are especially welcome under this kind of reform, and generally, there is an attempt at outreach to the poor, the homeless, and/or the disenfranchised.  Although no nation-state has fully embraced this model, a rather large example of it in action would be the mass movement group called Abahlali baseMjondolo (shack dwellers) in South Africa.

THE PROMISE AND ELUSIVENESS OF CIVIC CULTURE

    Civic culture can exist in a variety of forms.  Since there is no consensus on exactly which groups or associational linkages make the best networks for accomplishing the collective good, variety is to be expected.  However, what is known is this -- the existence or non-existence of a civic culture has implications for how close a society is to the ideal of a pluralist liberal democracy (Lee 2008).  Forget politics, forget economics -- what really matters are the non-political, selfless interests and attitudes which make up civic culture.  In a post-conflict or post-disaster situation, the existence of civic culture would mitigate the negative aftermath.  In a rogue state, the existence of a civic culture would eliminate terrorism.  In any state, civic culture would reduce crime.  This is to say that civic culture works, and it holds the promise of world peace. 

    Unfortunately, no one knows how to export, import, or create a civic culture from scratch.  It seems it must emerge freely and authentically in each and every country on its own, taking into account local traditions, kinship and family systems, as well as the valued importance of property and property relations.  So-called "neighborliness" factors appear to be important foundations as well as the all-important role of individuals who try and make a difference.  The "individual" factor is not characterized by leadership, at least in the sense that leadership is often understood to mean the seeking of status or power.  Instead, as Tongeren et al. (2005) point out, the "individuals" who make a difference are "ordinary" people who often stay out of the spotlight.  In many ways, such individuals are kind of like "teachers" or any underpaid, unrecognized occupational group in society.  Their value is certainly not measured in the usual ways, and it may very well be that we will never fully understand how to accomplish the building of civil society until we learn to properly recognize and reward such individuals.        

     Some societies strive to overcome their problems by force (e.g., by outlawing begging), but this is a state-oriented solution doomed to failure.  Governments are more likely to give up on people problems long before "concerned" people give up.  A civic-oriented solution would be to use nongovernmental programs such as charities or businesses or religious associations.  Private, not public, enterprise may be the key to sustainable development in the underdeveloped world.  It is well known, for example, that private colleges and schools tend to flourish in countries other than the U.S. whereas private colleges in the U.S. generally do poorly compared to public universities.  Regarding private enterprise, many novel and interesting small business ventures have taken hold in Africa (Fick 2002), and although some of these plans and projects may seem odd to Western observers, there is a need to get past seeing Third World entrepreneurship as "unusual" or quaint.  When public-private cooperation is needed (as it often is), a useful principle is to avoid conflicts of interest, and a useful practice is the small business incubator.  In situations where the public sector is overinvolved with the private sector (not an uncommon occurrence), a useful device is the office of ombudsman, which has flourished in societies other than the U.S., and is illustrative of the ways in which civic culture avoids the extremes of self-policing and formal policing.  Civic culture truly represents a "middle way" toward peace and prosperity.  It is a new, yet old, way, and it is deserving of more attention and respect, in whatever form it presents itself.

INTERNET RESOURCES
Center for Civic Engagement
Center for Democracy and Citizenship
Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement
Character Education and Civic Engagement
Civic Engagement Center
CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation
CIVITAS: For Responsible Citizenship
Definitions of Social Capital
Digital Government for Developing Countries
e-Gov Around the World
e-Gov Monitor
Gabriel Almond: The Civic Culture Concept (pdf)
Global Service Institute Network
Journal for Civic Commitment
PACT: Strengthening Civil Society
Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept
Social Capital Gateway
The Civic and Political Health of a Nation
The Secularization Debate (pdf)
ThirdWorldTraveler.com
Wikipedia Entry on Civil Society
World Values Survey

PRINTED RESOURCES
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