(Hindu); or class/occupation – Labour, Peasant. Indeed, if we look
behind the official name of political parties, we find that they
frequently are mainly or exclusively supported by one such sectional
group. For instance, the Republican Party of India was formerly
called the Scheduled Castes Federation (i.e. the ‘untouchables’),
whilst the former grandly titled Nigerian National Democratic Party
was in fact confined to a faction of the Yoruba peoples of western
Nigeria. Conversely, some parties like the Congress Party of India
and the Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico seek to unite
virtually everyone in the state in the cause of nationalism.
Many studies of voting behaviour reinforce this picture of voters
identifying with political parties (however abstractly described)
largely as an expression of national, ethnic/racial, religious or class
loyalties. Parties are seen as fighting for the interests of ‘our’ group,
so that ‘we’ benefit from their success.
On the psychological level such behaviour is unsurprising. Human
beings are clearly social animals loyal to the ‘in’-group and suspicious
of, or hostile to, ‘out’-groups (see Sherif et al., 1951 for a classic study
of boys at a summer camp). The problem, as Tajfel and Turner (1979)
point out, is that in building a positive sense of ‘social identity’ in-
groups often resort to ‘stereotyping’ out-groups. That is, all members
of the out-group are perceived as having a standard set of (inferior)
qualities to one’s own. But as students of politics we may wish to
consider why the pattern of such loyalties varies from place to place.
The functionalist concepts of ‘political socialisation’ and ‘political
culture’ may help to describe and explain these differences, but the
explanation they offer is only a partial one as we shall see.Political socialisation and political culture
The short answer as to why people identify themselves in different
ways is to point to the political experiences that have moulded
them – to the processes of ‘political socialisation’ (see Box 5.1). In
short, they have learnt who they are. The term ‘socialisation’ does
seem preferable to the perhaps more familiar term ‘education’
because it stresses the broader and more informal influences at work.
In particular, home and friends have been demonstrated to be much
more important influences than school or college education. The mass
media are also an important source of political information and104 PROCESSES