Page 102 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Unit 5: Political Socialisation

• The chief contribution of the family in forming the political personality of the individual Notes
derives from its role as the main source and locus for the satisfaction of all his basic and
innate requirements. Thus, the child tends to identify with his parents and to adopt their
outlook towards the political system. The father becomes the prototypical authority figure
and thereby initiates the child’s view of political authority.
• Then comes the school as a centre of primary education. Education has long been regarded
as a very important variable in the explanation of political behaviour, and there is much
evidence to suggest that it is a very important agent of political socialisation.
• What matters much in this direction is that, the problem of political socialisation arises after
the children emerge from the early influences of their family and primary schools into the
world of higher classes—also known as the ‘peer groups’ — and thus “may become subject
to other influences which may reinforce or conflict with early politicisation.”
• In this way, pedagogy finds its integration, with social sciences as the aim of both, as C.
Wright Mills in his work The Sociological Imagination says, “is to help cultivate and sustain
publics and individuals that are able to live with, and to act upon adequate definitions of
personal and social relations.”
• Youth movements do play an important part in the process of national integration particularly
in the developing countries. Let us also have a look at the role of the political parties that are
more diffuse because of their need to win wider support. The role of the government as a
whole must be looked into, particularly in countries like Germany and Austria where financial
support is given by the state to voluntary youth groups and organisations to encourage
political education.
• We should also examine the experiences that a man gathers during the course of his
employment. One gains a great deal of insight into human nature by the way in which the
employer behaves towards his employees. Brought up as a child in a family living on
democratic lines and given to cooperation by nature, a person may develop a strong sense of
resentment, even of violence, if he finds his employer behaving in a wrong manner.
• Finally, we come to the influence of direct contacts with the political system. It will not be
wrong to say that nothing can be as influential in shaping the attitudes and orientations of
the individuals as their direct contacts with the institutions and processes of the political
system under which they live and work.
• The study of political socialisation “seems to be one of the most promising approaches to the
uderstanding of political stability and development.” What has prompted the recent political
scientists, political sociologists and political psychologists, particularly of the United States,
is the desire for looking into the factors that have brought about transformations in the
political systems and that have been playing their sinister part in this direction, particularly
in the backward and developing countries of the world.
• What has motivated the scholars to render their contributions, in this regard, is their
enthusiastic search for developing tools whereby existing political systems may be saved
from their transformation into a form that is distinctly opposed to the domain of free and
open societies. The result is that the concept of political socialisation may be accused of being
conservative. As the entire concept of poltical development is an exercise for defending and
preserving the status quo, the concept of political socialisation on account of the very fact of
being a derivative of the same may be accused of in a similar vein.
• As such, the concept of political socialisation may not serve the purpose of those who subscribe
to the school of Marxism-Leninism, nor can it fully satisfy those who are in search of a real
alternative to the school of scientific socialism.
• A study of the political development of countries belonging to the Third World reveals that
the model of political socialisation, as given by many distinguished American writers, may
hardly apply to them in the midst of “too many armies, too much bureaucratic parasitism,
too much unequal distribution and not enough production, too much concentration on display

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 97