ABSTRACT

This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part explores “one face of the individual consequences of political change” through the use of attitudinal survey data. It presents an additional perspective to the examination of the relationship between politics and the social order by exploring behavior in the political realm in terms of an ecological dimension of the social order. Although the Third World remains overwhelmingly rural, it nonetheless contains more than one-third of the urban population of the globe. The urban explosion in le Tiers Monde is expected to continue, and with this explosion come the strains of change and transformation. Although the political culture approach implies that the realm of the political is to some degree distinguishable from the general culture, it also evokes a series of relationships which move from the psychological basis of a social order to the spillover of that order into the political arena.