What citizens do politically is not just a matter of their social and economic circumstances, it is also a matter of the particular outlooks they have about politics and the specific values they may seek to express. The importance of these personal perspectives is recognised in the idea of a national political culture which embodies, in principle, the totality of the citizenry's collective feelings about the political system and each individual's place within it (see, for example, Rosenbaum 1975; Kavanagh 1972c). Almond and Verba's classic study (1963) was perhaps the first to give empirical grounding, on a cross-national basis at least, to the view that the individual civic outlooks which compose the political culture are an important influence. In this chapter, we cannot hope to cover the whole remit of political culture. What we do propose is to focus principally on two major elements – political efficacy and cynicism – and their impact on the level and nature of participation.

Political efficacy

The potential relevance of political efficacy to participation can be seen in the way it was originally formulated – ‘the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process, i.e. that it is worthwhile to perform one's civic duties. It is the feeling that political and social change is possible, and that the individual citizen can play a part in bringing about this change’ (Campbell, Gurin and Miller 1954).