The Analysis On Almond's 'Civic Competence' Thoughts

In Almond's opinion, civic competence means the capable citizens have political influence to make government officials meet their reasonable requirements during the policy formulation and decision-making process. The individual produce civic competence on the basis of the civil culture. Civic competence make people turn to the subject to a real citizen, it also created a number of good citizens in political life.Civic competence and the subjects' competence coexist in the civic culture, balance and tension are both in the two. Civic competence is the political ability, the subjects competence is administrative ability. A high degree of political ability can improve the level of administrative ability, but the political ability of a country cannot exceed the requirements of the "balance" of democracy. If only emphasis on the development of political ability in the reality, it may restrict the development of administrative ability and affect the development of democratic stability.The main contents of civic competence include subjective sense of civic competence,local and national citizens' competence and citizen's cooperation competence.Almond divides the sense of civic competence into "subjective sense of civic competence " and "objective sense of civic competence". The subjective sense of civic competence means the citizen trust their action sense about local or national law which they think it is unjust.The objective sense of civic competence is the actual behavior used to influence the government. Therefore, subjective sense of civic competence make greater influence in the operation of democratic politics than objective sense of civic competence.Those who think they can influence local governments are "Local Highly Capable" and the indispensable condition of these people is "Local Civic Competence".Those who think they can influence the central governments are "National Highly Capable" and theindispensable condition of these people is "National Civic Competence". Local Highly Capable is more widely distributed than National Highly Capable, it is closely related to the chances of political participation which can acquire at the local government. Citizen's cooperation competence is the foundation of citizen's competence and an effective democracy requires a high capacity for civic competence, which is built on the citizen's cooperation competence.The civic competence is the dependent variable, the constituent member and the political socialization are two independent variables. Different organizational member's identity have different influence on civic competence.The organization member's identity with a political orientation can make greater political influence than nonpolitical stance identity. At the same time, the influence of the active members of an organization on the political ability is greater than that of the negative members. In general, the path of political socialization will also affect civic competence. Individuals who have had the opportunity to participate in the family, school, and work are more likely to think they have the power to influence the government than a person who does not take part in those activities.Almond's citizenship theory is not only of academic value, but also of practical value. Though this theory has been proposed for half a century, the essence of the concept is very important to the governance of modern state. It is also make great sense to accomplish modernization of national governance capacity in China.