Gabriel Almond was a political scientist and professor who made significant contributions to the field of comparative politics. Born in 1908 in New York City, Almond received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and his PhD from the University of Chicago. He began his academic career at the University of Chicago before moving on to teach at Yale University and eventually Stanford University, where he spent the majority of his career.
One of Almond's most well-known contributions to the field of comparative politics is his concept of the "civic culture." This theory, which he developed in collaboration with Sidney Verba, suggests that the success of a democratic political system depends on the culture of its citizens. According to Almond and Verba, a strong civic culture is characterized by a high level of political participation and a shared commitment to democratic values. In contrast, a weak civic culture is one in which there is low political participation and a lack of commitment to democratic values.
In addition to his work on the civic culture, Almond also made important contributions to the study of political development. He argued that political development is a process of modernization that involves the transformation of traditional societies into modern, industrialized ones. This process involves the development of new political institutions and the emergence of new social groups, such as the middle class.
Throughout his career, Almond was highly influential in the field of comparative politics and his work continues to be widely cited and studied by scholars today. He received numerous awards and accolades for his contributions to the field, including the American Political Science Association's James Madison Award for distinguished contributions to political science.
In conclusion, Gabriel Almond was a prominent political scientist and professor who made significant contributions to the field of comparative politics. His work on the civic culture and political development has had a lasting impact on the study of democratic systems and the process of modernization.
Gabriel Almond (January 12, 1911 — December 25, 2002), American educator, politician, scientist, author
In this age of globalisation his model has a clear and overriding importance. Britain emerged as the ideal of civic culture. Some critics object to the use of terms borrowed from other disciplines but only this method has enhanced the acceptability and reliability of political science. He was a professor at Stanford University from 1963 until 1976 and was head of the political science department from 1964 to 1968. Just because of the fact that all the political functions are performed by means of communications political communication is the crucial boundary-maintenance function. The Political culture study combines topics in areas such as Media studies, Ethnology, Political science of religion, Political communication and Political socialization.
Former chair, Department of Political Science, Stanford University. The articulation of interest by such groups is quite prominent in all political systems. In the same way the legislative wing of the government has been found to act like a court of law. Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available. There are also stages in the process of assimilation. And the article was about one of the most important substantive issues of that Depression era: how government provides assistance to its needy citizens.
This study, based on an extensive program of interviewing former American, British, French, and Italian Communists, provides many answers to these questions and gives a convincing insight into the motivations, tensions, and loyalties of Party members. He was skeptical of monocausal approaches and the premature closure of economic models of explanation. In fact, power is concentrated in the executive and bureaucracy. Crisis, Choice, and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development. It is also socialisation.
They are the forces which shape and change the inputs some of them come from within the system itself. The Civic Culture spawned much additional research, some written to replicate it, some to present alternative positions, and some that went beyond it. Returning to academia in 1947 after working for the United States War Department in Washington, D. Various demands and claims are to be aggregated into a consolidated form and after that the political system takes action. While he successfully defended the dissertation and received the degree in 1938, the work was not published until 60 years later, under the title Plutocracy and Politics in New York City 1998.
But the import of the two terms in political system is unlikely to be same and the entire analysis appears to be confused. One category is political democracy. Hence the ambiguity overcasts the definition of Almond. The reason for this enervating postponement was that when in 1944 Almond included a number of chapters on the psychological aspects of wealth, Professor Merriam refused to recommend its publication, concerned about offending some of the major New York donors to the University of Chicago. World War II saw him serving as chief of the Office of War Information 1942-1945 , where he analyzed propaganda and worked on the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, the purpose of which was to analyze the psychological effects of carpet bombing. He was a pioneer of the behaviouralist approach in the subject and in the 1960s and 1970s the most renowned researcher on comparative politics, political development, and political culture. Governments are inclined to control communication.
An Evaluation : Structural functionalism strongly advocated and minutely elaborated by Gabriel Almond suffers from a number of shortcomings some of which are: 1. Demands provide the raw material or information, which the system must process and the energy which the system needs. The project took a very broad view of what is one of the more important religious and political phenomena of our day, funda- mentalist religion. The characteristics are: 1 There are simple and complex political systems in different parts of the globe. He also wrote, with others, Comparative Politics: System, Process, Policy 1978 , The Civic Culture Revisited 1980 , and Progress and Its Discontents 1982.
In developed political systems of the West schools, churches, political parties and other voluntary organisations generally play the leading role in socialising the people. Numerous factors operate behind the interaction among the system. Totalitarian oligarchic systems are found in some countries. This is essential at least for two purposes. Modernising oligarchies are characterised by powerful bureaucracy. This classic text is a comparative political study, based on extensive survey data that defined and analysed the Greek concept of civic virtuelture: the political and social attitudes that are crucial to the success of modern democracy in Western nations.
A society will be called independent if it enjoys power to take decision. But this overlapping should not be over-emphasised. Almond spends much of his time researching Politics, Social science, Political culture, Democracy and Political economy. . If the groups demand in indirect or ambiguous ways and do not demand specific solution and do not place clear formulations it may be called latent interest articulation. It would have been better if he had clarified his stand. In the concept structural functionalism the students must know both the structures and the functions.
The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. In the fields of sociology and structural functionalism the contribution of Parsons is still gratefully remembered by the students of sociology and political science. Gabriel Almond and many others have made thorough study about the output functions of various political systems and he has concluded that the output functions or the governmental functions are not uniform in all political systems. Executive and the bureaucracy are controlled by elites. He was one of the few who came from within this discipline rather than from other social sciences, such as sociology. This study of plutocracy and politics in New York City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries poses the following central questions: What have been the consequences of the relatively rapid democratization in America for activities and attitudes of the wealthy classes and what transformations have occurred in the political and social attitudes of the wealthier classes as a result of the increasing lower-class pressures? There may be differences between the systems and structures but all the systems perform almost same political functions.
Rational actor theory was his prime example of the latter. It pioneered the study of political development in the new states, applying modern scientific theory and methods. Roughly speaking, out of about one lakh needs, desires, expectations, plans and projects of the people, including social groups and political parties, about one thousand become their demands. In democratic countries the right to form association and through it to process is an important right and workers and professional groups taking this opportunity agitate for realisation of demands. ADVERTISEMENTS: Basic Concepts Defined : We have already analysed in details the general systems theory as propounded by David Easton which is also called Easton model.
