Almond and Verba (1963) define three ideal types of political culture - parochial, subject and participant -

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Almond and Verba (1963) define three ideal types of political culture - parochial, subject and participant - and argue that democracy is most stable under conditions of a predominant participant political culture mediated by elements of parochial and subject culture. Discuss this statement and illustrate your argument with reference to one or two democratic countries.

"The political culture of a nation is the particular distribution of patterns of orientation towards political objects among the members of the nation." (Almond and Verba, 1963)

The three types of political culture I am going to talk about are parochial, subject and participant. I will give a brief explanation of them with the help of "The Civic Culture" by Almond and Verba.

We can distinguish between these different political cultures by exploring certain characteristics of the individuals in different societies. In an extreme or pure parochial political culture, individuals have no real concept of their political system in general terms, its history, size, location, power, "constitutional" characteristics, and information like this. Individuals do not have very much knowledge of the structures and roles, various political elites, and the policy proposals that are involved in the upward flow of policy making. Individuals