A KEY FOR ANALYZING ELITE POLITICAL CULTURE: FOCUSING ON BEHAVIORS

Abstract

When one looks at definitions of the concept of political culture, firstly proposed by Almond and later developed in cooperation with Verba in a modern sense, the concept seems to be as determiner of orientations and attitudes of individuals towards politics. In accordance with this dominant subjectivist conceptualization in the field, most of the works focused on mass political culture by employing survey method. Regarding ‘’elite’’ political culture upon which there were very limited works, it was conceptualized by Putnam for the first time and elite was taken as professional politicians. At that point, Pye’s proposition that to work on elite political culture, distinct from the mass, one must focus on ideologies instead of employing survey methods should be underscored. Putnam, too, focused on elite’s ideological affinities by applying interview method in order to reach basic characteristics of elite political culture. In sum; it is clear that employing interview method instead of survey may provide “ideal political culture” rather than “real political culture”. To override these shortcomings, inserting verbal behaviors of the elites in the parliaments into conceptualization seemed to be much more consistent.