Culture & Democracy

There may be many ways in which culture can affect
political structure of one country or another, yet, arguably
the most important way that a country's culture affects
democracy is through political socialization. According to
Alexis de Tocqueville and his book "Democracy", he
defines culture as an ordered set of symbols, and in turn,
political culture as a set of values and orientations through
which one perceives and reacts to authority. The way that
this set of values and orientations is gained by each person,
is through the process of political socialization that begins
since early childhood and produces "visible" results as a
person becomes a mature individual.

While it is hard to draw a clear line of when political
socialization is a completed process, mainly due to varying
degrees of a each individual's education, it is safe,
however, to assume that a person is set in his ways close to
the end of his life's second decade. This assumption, by
virtue of being only an educated guess and thus a broad
generalization, but not a valid statistic of any kind, has its
drawbacks. One must also take into account the fact that
an average person's mind and experience continue to grow
and develop way beyond the age of twenty, thus giving a
possibility of weighing the advantages and disadvantages of
one's thinking on a particular issue and its alteration. This
holds true for most people, provided that they are
free-thinking individuals, whose thought process has not
been heavily influenced by unnecessary dogmas and
hindered by agents of political socialization early on in their
lives. This brings us to our next topic.

Parents, school and church are all important agents of
political socialization for anybody. Statistical studies have
been done and have long since become common
knowledge that a child of Democrats is likely to vote
Democrat, respectively, a child of Republicans is more
likely to vote Republican, although both of said... [continues]

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