Narrowing the Epistemic Gap

The greater difficulty, the crux of the issue of whether political culture is "observable," is how to make negligible the epistemic gap between behavior and orientations (that is, meanings, dispositions, attitudes, mind-

stuff. The solution proposed here is, of course, applicable, mutatis mutandis, in all inquiries that pose the subjectivity problem.

To begin: One must never pretend that subjective orientations have been directly revealed by any technique of observation or by any set of such techniques. There simply is no way around the point that orientations are always imputed to behavior. This, however, is not (yet) a concession to the narrow behaviorists, for the simple reason that imputations may be valid. The issue we have come to can therefore be restated in a form clearly more conducive to solution: How can subjective orientations be validly imputed to behavior? In regard to this, we already have discussed the principal fallacy to be avoided if a plausible answer is to be found. It is the statement of circular explanations: the mere translation of objective observation into a cultural language. Such statements, as I have said, trivialize problems: the explanatory statements simply restate explananda ; they add nothing to them; and they allow us to deceive ourselves into thinking that we have said something when we have said nothing.

The trivialization of theories by translation and circularity is unavoidable if a particular orientation to action is imputed to any particular activity. We simply cannot say, for instance, that a person participates because he is participant. Political orientations must be regarded as dispositions that underlie, thus organize and pattern, sets of perceptions and activities: the larger and more diverse the sets the better for theory. This is inherent in the very conception of "orientations to action" anyhow. They are, as I wrote in an earlier paper, "general dispositions of actors to act in certain ways in sets of situations. [They] pattern actions. . . . Orientations are not 'attitudes': the latter are specific, the former general dispositions. Attitudes themselves derive from and express orientations; though attitudes may, through their patterning, help us find orientations."^[34] (For attitudes here one can, of course, substitute actions or behavior.) If, for example, we say that "X is tolerant," we say that X does not object (or, better, is oblivious) to sets of traits of people or of their behavior widely disapproved in a collectivity. The set might include Jews or Catholics, blacks or Asians, illegal immigrants or guest-workers, homosexuals or eccentrics, self-absorbed or stupid people, and the like; it is unlikely to cover all people or behaviors (say, child abusers: everyone draws a line somewhere), but the statement describes a general pattern of matters directly observable, or else it says nothing.

If orientations are so regarded, then statements about them or sets of them (cultures or subcultures) are statements of "regularity": they are lawlike statements or, more simply, theories. They are never descriptions, not even "thick" ones—though I do not mean to deride the clues to cultural theory that acute observation of a particular activity (say, a Balinese cockfight) may provide.

This, by the way, is rather an old view, dating to the origins of contemporary social science, although recent theorists of culture, and others who stress "meaning" in social inquiry, seem unaware of that fact. Weber, the apostle of verstehende Soziologie , for example, wrote, in his posthumous magnum opus:

Every interpretation aims at self-evidence or immediate plausibility. But an interpretation which makes the meaning of a piece of behavior as selfevidently obvious as you like cannot claim just on that account to be the causally valid interpretation as well. In itself it is nothing more than a particularly plausible hypothesis.^[35]

Weber's point was restated by Morris Ginsburg in 1956:

It appears to be a basic assumption of verstehende Soziologie  . . . that what we know within our minds is somehow more intelligible than what is outwardly observed. But this is to confuse the familiar with the intelligible. There is no inner sense establishing connexions between inner facts by direct intuition. Such connexions are in fact empirical generalizations , of no greater validity than the similar generalizations relating to outward facts.^[36]

This has a crucial implication, which Weber also pointed out. If one is to have confidence in the validity of statements about orientations, then they must be treated like any other hypothetical assertion. At the outset, statements about culture may simply be summaries of observations: verbal summaries or the scientific-looking ones we find in regression tables, frequency curves, histograms, smoothed ogives, and so on. Political culturists usually stop at that point—if they get to it. But theory, to be considered valid, must be tested; and statements about cultures, or anything else, cannot be tested by the data from which they were derived in the first place—even if the nature of a frequency distribution, or our intense immersion in a culture as participant observers, may justify the intuitive surmise that tests will validate or invalidate, so that they might not be worth the cost of being carried out.

If one cannot test theoretical statements by data used to formulate them, it follows that one must posit, by logically deduced prediction, as yet unobserved data that should turn up, given certain "initial (or determining) conditions,"^[37] if our assertions about orientations or cultural sets of them are to be considered valid. (Weber mistakenly thought that the validity of imputed meanings can only be determined by psychological tests—which are still a way of getting directly at the subjective.) Such predictive tests, positing unknowns, can be carried out in two ways.

First, one may predict behavior in situations either that have not yet occurred or, if they have, to which the responses are still uncertain. I will give a real-life example (that happened to turn out well) from a work of

mine that, as mentioned above, was criticized by an eminent authority for using "anecdotal material."^[38]

In my study of Norwegian authority-culture, I argued that Norwegians are consensualists in decision making. More specifically, it appeared that they follow this decision rule: agree widely (unanimously, if possible); if wide agreement is not possible, then appear to be in wide agreement; if that also is not possible, then drop the subject. This is a statement about subjective cognitions—"actions widely agreed upon are likely to be right actions"; about affect—Norwegians "feel" uncomfortable with small majorities; and about evaluation—Norwegians value wide agreement, and processes of forming consensus thereby become their decision processes. Thus, the statement contains all the elements into which Almond and Verba break down orientations.^[39]

The statement is a (low-level) theoretical generalization, based on a large and eclectic variety of mostly raw observations, from the behavior of small neighborhood and club committees to transactions of parliamentary business. Admittedly, the generalization was illustrated by what may accurately be described as "anecdotes." In an essay replying to this point, among others,^[40] I pleaded guilty to anecdotalism but also pointed out that the generalization was based on much else; that empirical generalizations should be based on the best obtainable data; but that despite their basis, what really counted in the end was how such generalizations stood up to appropriate testing by the accurate prediction of unknowns.

As it happened, a "natural" occasion for such prediction had arisen about the time that this debate was going on. In 1965, a general election brought to power what Norwegians called a bourgeois coalition, after thirty years of social-democratic (Labor party) rule. This coalition consisted of a very odd assortment of parties that had in common perhaps only opposition to the Labor party's long dominance. The coalition combined urban, and urbane, business interests with an agrarian party (in a country in which the rural-urban split looms large); nonreligious, if not downright antireligious, parties joined a Christian fundamentalist party; and a small party, chiefly of white-collar intellectual liberals, was added to the odd alignment. The common wisdom in political science is that such coalitions cannot last. They defy the now common rule that coalitions must minimize "preference disagreement," or "policy distance," merely to form.^[41] The common wisdom in Norway, academic and general, was the same. However, the common notions ignored the decision rule I have summarized. That rule led to a quite different expectation, stated in my paper of 1967:^[42] the coalition would endure by simply avoiding divisive issues (like religion or urban and rural interests likely to clash); it would work smoothly by concentrating on the least divisive issues (such as almost universally desired

tax reforms); it would do little or nothing to change the Labor party's welfare-state legislation (Labor still had about 40 percent of the parliamentary seats—hardly a negligible minority); and it would break down if absolutely forced by circumstances to deal with a deeply divisive issue (for example, an issue that involved what Norwegians call "cosmopolitanism": close connections with the continent, divisions about which originated, no doubt, in the long colonial domination of Norway by Denmark). As it happened, all these predictions turned out to be correct. They thus validated—failed to falsify, despite defying both plausible theory and sheer good sense—the cultural generalization. The coalition lasted, although it did little besides tax reform, until the question of joining the EEC came up as an unavoidable issue; it then disintegrated.

The case was, in one way, lucky. Something happened in Norway at just the right time to allow a "natural experiment." That probably is only rarely the case. Usually, one may surmise, similar tests do not yet exist; they must be awaited; and they may simply not turn up, anyway not for a long time—quite as in the natural sciences.

Because that is so, a second way of testing whether cultural "meaning" has been validly deciphered may be desired over the first. One may carry out such tests by predicting responses to stimuli controlled by inquirers—not least, by doing survey research into as-yet-unknown responses by logically predicting the findings that should turn up if one's conceptions about a culture are valid. If in fact one has conceptions of culture, however arrived at—multitrait-multimethod "triangulation" is still best—then it should not be difficult to devise questions or other stimuli to test the conceptions. This is the best use, in my view, to which survey research intended to get at orientations can be put, both epistemologically and practically. Models of political culture can be built in all sons of ways, less expensive in funds, time, personnel, and so on, than typical survey researches. Questions can be few if carefully devised for testing (especially if not used in attitudinal fishing expeditions), and samples may be small if thoughtfully selected for a carefully defined purpose. Unfortunately, neither survey research nor other modes of inquiry into culture have ever been so used. Their findings have been treated as definitive results, not as steps toward such results. But survey research, and other techniques, could be so used, at low cost and with potentially high payoffs.

Perhaps one other step that is desirable, even if not absolutely necessary, still is missing. What, in effect, we have, if all the above is done, is simply a tested hypothesis, essentially like any other. To narrow the epistemic gap between meaning and observation, it would still be useful to establish more firmly that a regularity exists because of subjective orientations rather than other factors. One can do this in at least three related ways: by multivariate

analysis intended to establish the relative strengths of direct contextual factors (e.g., SES) as against factors associated with processes of socialization; by comparing the strength of synchronic and diachronic factors in mature subjects (because orientations are supposedly instilled chiefly by experiences early in life and upon my argument are highly resistant to change);^[43] and by observations that might, or might not, establish that adult behavior is relatively stable despite changes in its context: something already done, by summarizing much psychological research, in Herbert Hyman's seminal work on political socialization.