Political Culture: A Concept Crossed by Two Approaches

Abstract

Political culture is a widely used concept in political science from the 60’s to the present. The classic definition inaugurated by Almond and Verba at the end of that decade has dominated the discipline, as well as their political uses in empirical political analysis regarding values, attitudes and knowledge. Within this framework, quantitative studies have prevailed. As for anthropology, despite its attention to the concept of culture and the existence of a subdiscipline called political anthropology, only in recent decades the concept has started to be discussed, proposing new lines of research for the study of the construction of meaning about politics and generally using qualitative approaches. The aim of this article is to review the theoretical concept of political culture in an effort to emphasize its structural principles to integrate new contributions coming from both disciplines.