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Question 1

A central argument of Almond and Verba's The Civic Culture is that...

a) only people with profound cultural knowledge should be allowed to vote.

b) for states to remain stable, governments need to reflect and share many of the basic values of society.

c) democracy can only work well in America.

d) people are only interested in political developments within their own communities.

Question 2

Who wrote a pioneering 19^th century work on comparative political cultures?

a) Samuel Huntington.

b) Leonardo da Vinci

c) Alexis de Tocqueville

d) Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba

Question 3

Why did studies of political culture became more fashionable in the 1960s?

a) It complemented a more general trend towards 'behavioural' studies.

b) It followed other works which promoted a rethinking of modern democracy.

c) It could be used to show that liberal democracies were superior to their Communist rivals.

d) All of the above.

Question 4

A major challenge to the concept of political culture is that...

a) it ignores the controversial topic of nationalism.

b) it originated in the 1960s, and things have changed a lot since then.

c) few nations can be said to exhibit homogenous cultures.

d) it can only be applied to Western democratic states.

Question 5

What did Robert Puttnam's study of Northern Italy reveal?

a) an alienated population which despised authority of all kinds.

b) a long-established tradition of civic engagement.

c) that the political culture of the North was identical to that of the South.

d) all of the above.

Question 6

A major difficulty with Almond and Verba's work on the UK is that...

a) it paid insufficient attention to serious difficulties in Northern Ireland.

b) it devoted too much attention to calls for devolution in parts of Britain.

c) it alleged that Britain was seething with revolutionary fervour.

d) it argued that British people were far too deferential.

Question 7

Why does the Tanzanian state register high levels of public satisfaction?

a) The economy has been managed so well.

b) The ruling party is associated with liberation from colonial rule.

c) Historic tribal divisions are actively encouraged by the government.

d) All of the inhabitants are too frightened to say what they really think.

Question 8

One impact of globalization has been to...

a) undermine the power of political elites across the world.

b) deter political leaders from trying to manipulate the media.

c) raise new difficulties for those who try to identify sharply contrasting national political cultures.

d) eradicate economic inequalities within and between states.

Question 9

Why have some commentators argued that countries like Singapore are slow to develop democracy?

a) Asian traditions are supposedly less individualistic than Western ones.

b) Confucianism teaches that democracy is a mortal sin.

c) Standards of living are much lower than in the West.

d) All of the above.

Question 10

Why has the idea of state welfare largely been less popular in the US than in Western Europe?

a) Organized labour has always exerted much more political influence in the US.

b) Economic inequality has always been much less severe in the US.

c) All European countries have been in the grip of doctrinaire socialism since World War II.

d) Many US citizens regard their country as a land of opportunity for all and think that the poor are responsible for their own problems.

Oxford University Press, Online Resource Centre, Chapter 13.

Chapter 13

Instructions