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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes Besides, we may also refer to the role of ‘symbols’ as an important means of developing political
orientations. Events such as May Day parades, general elections, street demonstrations, coronation,
inauguration of Presidency, birth anniversaries of Marx, Lenin and Gandhi, observance of national
rejoicing days, etc. lay stress on historical continuity as well on unity of the people. A young child
not only sees such events, he also develops an affective and evaluative orientation towards the
regime. Positive judgements of the incumbents of these roles precede actual knowledge among
children, for instance, about party affiliations and actual authority of the American President and
political neutrality as well as titular headship of the British monarch.
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. “No matter how positive the view of political system which has been included by
family and school, when a citizen is ignored by his party, cheated by his police, starved in the
bread line, and finally conscripted into the army, his views on the political realm are likely to be
altered. Direct formal and informal relationships with specific elite in the political system are
inevitably a powerful force in shaping orientations of individuals to the system.”
Critical Appraisal

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. As a matter of fact, 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. The Marxists openly declare that the philosophers have so far
interpreted the world, the problem is how to change it. For this reason, they reject any concept of
an ‘open’ society like that of political socialisation as another ingenuous gift of the bourgeois
mind. What is peculiarly noticeable is that the entire approach of the political psychologists has
failed to satisfy the scholars of the free world, though they have never rejected it like their
counterparts subscribing to the school of Marxism-Leninism. The new generation of American
political scientists has found many faults with the pattern variables and their empirical specifications
not only in regard to their application to the developing countries of the Third World but to their
own countries so terribly caught up in the problems like those of inflation, unemployment and
war all assuming threatening postures to the survival of their own political systems.
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 of projects and
neglect of infrastructure, too much articulation of conflicts, between communities, in short, too much
politics for the elites and not enough authentic participation for the masses. For anything but in the
very long run, the Western model began to be regarded as unattainable, especially given the absolute
character of the values and goals of many Third World leaders.” As the two American critics comment:
“The investigators rarely ask hard political questions about who benefits, who controls, and who
attempts to control the processes they study. That children have a benevolent image of the political
world is vastly a myth. But it is dead certain that the political socialisation theorists do.”

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