ABSTRACT
For contemporary comparative political science, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations has become a classic text in the study of political culture and democracy. Through its use of empirical methods, The Civic Culture specifies those cultural qualities necessary for the development of a stable democracy, including political equality and participation, trust, and cooperation. Ronald Inglehart, a major figure in the current efforts to re-establish political culture as a significant field in political science, suggests that the primary contribution made by Almond and Verba consists in their ‘providing a well-developed theory of political culture based on cross-national empirical data . . . and moving away from the realm of literary impressions to that of testable propositions’ (1988: 1204). In support of Inglehart’s claim, The Civic Culture did, in fact, present one of the first largescale attempts to employ quantifiable data in the examination of the relationship between certain cultural forms and democratic stability.
