8
Western societies remain in flux as they go through seemingly endless “transitions” during
which the variation-producing effects of culture are expected to get progressively weaker
compared to the homogenizing effects of the “best” practices or the “right” set of rules and
incentives. The result is that mainstream comparative politics and political economy have
simply failed to aggregate and utilize the insights produced by scholars who have examined at
close range just how specific aspects of culture survive in new environments, influencing the
coherence, efficacy, and dynamics of newly established institutions.
11
Another part of the problem, however, is the confusion and ambiguity surrounding the
very concept of “culture” itself. Gerring and Barresi have recently noted some sixty definitions
of the term with substantial variation in terms of how broad or specific these are.
12
Because of
the difficulty of observing and measuring the largely hidden mental constructs that constitute
“culture,” others have sought to reduce these constructs to “information” about others’
expectations that can help rational actors make strategic calculations as they navigate their
institutional surroundings.
13
However, while there have been real problems with defining culture
and employing it in excessively static and deterministic, as Eckstein has noted, culture remains a
“foundation concept” for the social sciences and can be deployed to make sense of both
continuity and change: “... changes in culture are perfectly consistent with culturalist postulates
if they occur as adaptations to altered structures and situations and if the function of change is to
keep culture patterns in existence and consonant.”
14
In short, given the difficulties and
limitations inherent in any social scientific analysis, a sweeping rejection of anything that counts
as “culture” is unnecessary, arbitrary, and intellectually short-sighted.
In a problem-driven approach, culture can be viewed not as a single, all-determining
“independent variable,” but rather as an analytic category that encompasses the entire range of
mental constructs -- attitudes, beliefs, norms, values, or habits -- that can possibly be held in
11
Much of the scholarship produced by area specialists during the 1960s-70s drew attention to the persistence or
mutation of traditional cultural features in modernizing settings, but the broader significance of this for theories of
social change was masked by the language of modernization. One classic study is Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne
Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1967).
12
John Gerring and Paul Barresi, “Putting Ordinary Language to Work: A Min-Max Strategy of Concept Formation
in the Social Sciences,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 15, 2 (April 2003): 201-232.
13
E.g. Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. p. 82;
14
Harry Eckstein, "A Culturalist Theory of Political Change," American Political Science Review, 82, 3 (September
1988): 789-804, see esp. pp. 793-4; see also Eckstein, “Culture as a Foundation Concept for the Social Sciences,”
Journal of Theoretical Politics 8 (1996): 471-97
Convention