POLS 2000 Lecture 3: 3
5 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Kim 1
-Constructivism
-Human beings construct the reality around them
-Constructing own realities (decisions made) through language and communication
-Four major problems
-It’s new
-Early excitement exaggerated importance
-It’s not THAT new
-People aren’t studying it as much
-Political culture
-Understand what it is.
-Shared social context from which people make political choices
-Understand its limits as an explanatory factor.
-Culture can affect a nation’s approach to policy choices
-Politicians can use a nation’s culture as a powerful tool to achieve political
ends
-Culture poses a particular problem as countries struggle over the question of
how to deal with cultural ownership
-Political scientists don’t have answer for how to factor culture into study of
politics
-Consider political socialization processes.
-Political socialization
-Process by which the group teaches the shared context to the
members of the society
-Agents of political socialization
-Those from whom the group learns the political culture
-What is culture?
-Set of values that a group shares
-Including beliefs, actions, practices, expectations
-Question of the day:
-Does culture matter when trying to explain politics?
-Culture as explanation
-Problems
-Does saying that inhabitants of a particular place share a certain belief really tell us
anything about why they believe that?
-How can we explain when vastly different things happen in similar cultures or when
similar things occur in vastly different cultures?
-Political scientists ignore political culture
-Or, consider it to be the most important explanation of all
-In reality, it probably matters, but it’s not deterministic.
-Ideally, all people would share enough culture to communicate clearly and agree on things
-Reality is that there are too many culture gaps
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Document Summary
Constructing own realities (decisions made) through language and communication. Shared social context from which people make political choices. Culture can affect a nation"s approach to policy choices. Politicians can use a nation"s culture as a powerful tool to achieve political ends. Culture poses a particular problem as countries struggle over the question of how to deal with cultural ownership. Political scientists don"t have answer for how to factor culture into study of politics. Process by which the group teaches the shared context to the members of the society. Those from whom the group learns the political culture. Or, consider it to be the most important explanation of all. In reality, it probably matters, but it"s not deterministic. Ideally, all people would share enough culture to communicate clearly and agree on things. Reality is that there are too many culture gaps. Political culture is the shared social context from which people make political choices.
