Political culture of individualism and collectivism

The dissertation is based on the premise that culture affects individuals' political attitude and behavior via internalized cultural values and as "human-made" environments under which they think and act. It specifies culture as individualism and collectivism, which have been widely studied as the central organizing dimensions of culture. The constructs have also been advanced as crucial to the scientific study of culture.;The analysis draws on the limits and achievements of two theoretical frameworks: political culture and culture-oriented psychology. The political culture approach has been proposed to provide a unifying theoretical framework that bridges the gap between micro- and macro-level analysis. Existing empirical political culture literature, however, shows that the aggregate level analysis has been the dominant approach to the study of political culture. The alternative, culture oriented psychology has provided the ways to analyze how culture affects an individual's psychology but the effort to identify the cultural effects on political attitude and behavior has been largely absent.;Thus, the empirical analysis of this dissertation attempts to identify the cultural effects of individualism and collectivism on the individual's political attitude and behavior while disentangling the individual and national level effects based on multilevel modeling. It uses the five waves (1981-2007) of the World Values Survey for thirty OECD member countries and attempts to establish a stronger case for the external validity of the findings.;The analysis finds that in general individualism and collectivism matter both for the elements of civic culture/social capital and for political responsibility attribution. The significant cultural effects show up either at one level or at both: Individualism affects trust, tolerance, membership, and political participation positively while collectivism affects these civic culture/social capital variables negatively. In contrast, individualism affects national pride and political interest negatively while collectivism affects them positively. Individualistic cultures as well as collectivism at both levels affect subjective well-being positively. Furthermore, it finds that individualism enhances consideration of personal responsibility while collectivism facilitates consideration of government responsibility for maintaining basic personal welfare.;The dissertation concludes with discussion of the substantive implications of the empirical findings as well as future avenues of inquiry.