The Civic Culture Transformed: From Allegiant to Assertive Citizens

Russell J. Dalton · Christian Welzel

12/2014 · Cambridge University Press

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This book re-evaluates Almond, Verba, and Pye's original ideas about the shape of a civic culture that supports democracy. Marshaling a massive amount of cross-national, longitudinal public opinion data from the World Values Survey Association, the authors demonstrate multiple manifestations of a deep shift in the mass attitudes and behaviors that undergird democracy. The chapters in this book show that in dozens of countries around the world, citizens have turned away from allegiance toward a decidedly 'assertive' posture to politics: they have become more distrustful of electoral politics, institutions, and representatives and are more ready to confront elites with demands from below. Most importantly, societies that have advanced the most in the transition from an allegiant to an assertive model of citizenship are better-performing democracies - in terms of both accountable and effective governance.

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Russell J. Dalton is a Professor of Political Science and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine. His recent publications include Citizen Politics, 6th edition (2013), The Apartisan American (2012) and Political Parties and Democratic Linkage (2011). Dalton has also edited or co-edited more than a dozen volumes, including Citizens, Context and Choice (2011), Party Politics in East Asia (2008) and Citizens, Democracy and Markets around the Pacific Rim (2006).

Christian Welzel is a Professor of Political Science and chair of political culture research at the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University. He is also a foreign consultant for the Laboratory of Comparative Social Research at the Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg, Russia. He is a former president of the World Values Survey Association. Welzel's recent books include Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation (Cambridge, 2013) and Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy (with Ronald Inglehart, Cambridge, 2005).