Klasická koncepce politické kultury v díle Gabriela A. Almonda
Classical Concept of Political Culture in the Work of Gabriel A. Almond

Summary/Abstract: The present study analyzes what is considered to be a classical formulation of the concept of political culture in the writings of Gabriel A. Almond published in 1950s and 1960s. The author argues that the conceptualization of political culture as proposed by Almond in the most important of these studies, the 1963 book The Civic Culture, co-authored with Sidney Verba, offers an approach to political culture, to which both political scientists and participants in political discourses should return in order to avoid some of the conceptual confusions that go hand in hand with the insufficiently reflected use of this term. The analysis of various formulations of the concept of political culture in Almonďs work starts with his seminal1956 article Comparative Political Systems. The author argues that this first ever attempt at a rigorous definition of political culture in political science literature clearly recognizes the importance of the basic element of the later classical definition, the Parsonsian concept of an orientation to action, but, at the same time, it is still indebted to a theoretical perspective where the concept of roles, and therefore of structure is dominant. Unlike the 1956 definition, the classical conception of political culture that Almond and Verba worked out in their pioneering study The Civic Culture is analytical in that any concrete political culture can be decomposed into its constituent parts, which makes it possible for the political scientist to compare political systems according to the presence and absence in them of various of these components. Almond and Verba's standard conceptualization of political culture, including the key concepts of systemically mixed political cultures and that of congruence between culture and political structure, is analyzed and critically assessed in a detailed way in order to make it accessible to the Czech readership. Following Stephen Welch, the core of the explanatory potential of political culture concept in Almond and Verba is identified in the theoretical assumption of "cultural lag", according to which culture is a conglomerate of subjective elements acquired in the process of socialization that is endowed with a tendency to persist even when external environment undergoes deep changes. The author reviews seven distinct lines of criticism of The Civic Culture that have been formulated in the literature on the subject both from a theoretical and an empirical point of view. He also critically discusses the distinction between system, process and policy culture introduced by Almond and Powell. He concludes that Almond's conceptualizations of political culture offer not only an authoritative, albeit not undisputed, substantive definition and a hitherto unsurpassed typology, but also a viable research perspective (that of the role of political culture in sustaining stable democracy) and an awareness of the limitations of the concept as an explanatory device.

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