Entering the Field: Political Culture
Full course description
Political culture is widely deployed as an analytical concept by scholars from different disciplines, ranging from political science to philosophy, sociology, history, and cultural studies. Quite what is meant by it, however, is often assumed to be self-evident rather than in need of explanation. In practice, scholars often understand the concept in divergent and sometimes contradictory ways. This course is intended as an introduction into the study of modern political culture. It takes as its point of departure the ways in which the humanities have integrated and modified the concept since the gradual inclusion of culture as a main analytical category in empirical work on ‘the political’. As such, it explores some of the major ways of thinking and writing about political culture by analysing how scholars have hitherto addressed the symbolic, discursive, and performative elements of politics. It focuses on an analysis of fundamental problems of modern political culture, zooming in on the themes of representation, equality, mobilisation, engagement, violence, stability, protest, solidarity, individuality, identity, and populism. These subjects are explored through case studies drawn from the 19th to 21st centuries, the implications of which are directly related to key political problems and societal debates of our own age.
Course objectives
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
• Demonstrate advanced knowledge of the divergent theoretical understandings and uses of the concept of political culture across different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences
• Analyse, compare, and interpret the most influential scholarly literature on key expressions of modern political culture and summarise major scholarly debates in the field
• Understand, differentiate, and critically assess how scholars have studied political culture in practice to explore specific case studies with empirical methods
• Identify, retrieve, synthesise, and critically appraise scholarly secondary sources to build evidence-based arguments; and to use ethical rules related to scholarly work, including the proper use of referencing
• Understand key scholarly methodologies that are used to study modern political culture
• Participate in academic debates on modern political culture within an international PBL classroom, with an awareness for the requirements of interdisciplinary and intercultural communication
Recommended reading
Paul Lichterman and Daniel Cefai, ‘The Idea of Political Culture’, in: R. Goodin and C. Tilly (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, pp. 392-414.
Stephen Welch, The Theory of Political Culture (Oxford, 2013).
Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals (Cambridge, MA, 2013).
Clive Seale (ed.), Researching Society and Culture (4th ed., London, 2017).