INTRODUCTION

This chapter argues that culture is important to the study of politics because it provides a framework for organizing people's daily worlds, locating the self and others in them, making sense of the actions and interpreting the motives of others, for grounding an analysis of interests, for linking identities to political action, and for predisposing people and groups toward some actions and away from others. Culture does these things by organizing meanings and meaning-making, defining social and political identity, structuring collective actions, and imposing a normative order on politics and social life.

To examine how culture operates, we must approach it through the formal and informal verbal and nonverbal narratives about the social and political worlds that people who are part of a culture share. However, before I discuss culture as a useful, and underused, perspective in comparative politics, three caveats are in order. First, to be useful, culture cannot be defined so broadly as to include all behaviors, values, and institutions lest it lose any distinctiveness and explanatory power. Second, cultures are not formal units with delimited clear borders and membership cards; nor are they fully integrated internally or always internally consistent. Rather, their boundaries, integration, and consistency are regularly subject to contestation. Third, the effects of culture on collective action and political life are generally indirect, and to fully appreciate the role of culture in political life, it is necessary to inquire how culture interacts with, shapes, and is shaped by interests and institutions.