ABSTRACT
True to the tradition established by Almond and Verba of using surveys to capture, understand, and explain political culture, this chapter discusses the design process and analysis of results from the attitude survey I created for members of Tunisian civil society organisations (CSOs). Each organisation was bound to be different in its working habits and in its understandings and approaches to civil society activism but this research aimed to provide a broad understanding of the ‘discourse’ aspect of their political culture plus accounts of their ‘practice’.
The key focus of the research was to understand and assess the extent to which their political culture meets the six criteria of civil political culture; Freedom, Equality, Pluralism, Tolerance, Trust, and Transparency. If the Tunisian CSO members’ attitudes, values, and beliefs, in addition to the organisational cultures of the surveyed Tunisia CSOs, exhibit civil political culture, it demonstrates that civil society is playing a democratising role, performing a democratic function in the democratic transition. In particular, civil society with a civil political culture can help to facilitate a democracy learning process required to assist a democratic transition.
