Problems and Shortcomings

Abstract

The fatal attractiveness of the political culture approach is that it may be made to explain too much. It has been used to cover so many disparate phenomena that it is easily used as a residual factor.¹²⁹ The pressing need is to break the global concept of culture into its component parts and to make it a more parsimonious tool for explanation. We examine below three examples of stereotyped views of British, French and American political cultures. These have been singled out because in each case they represent abridgements and simplifications of a complex web of orientations and have often been advanced as sweeping explanations of diverse political behaviour.