Recruitment refers to the ways by which citizens become active participants in the political system. It refers to the largely unconscious process by which families, schools, communities, political parties and other agents of socialization inculcate the culture's dominant political values. Without understanding these elements of a society, it is difficult, if not impossible, to make an adequate assessment and comparison between two political systems.īy political socialization, Almond and Powell mean the process by which a culture passes down civic values, beliefs, and habits of mind to succeeding generations. These system functions include political socialization, recruitment, and communication. This change acknowledges the crucial role played by political culture in determining the unique characteristics of a political system. Gabriel Almond and his colleague Bingham Powell, in modifying and expanding the theory of structural functionalism, have added an important set of system functions to their model in recent years. For this reason, all political systems require efficient feedback mechanisms. They exist in a dynamic relationship to other political systems and must continuously adapt to changing conditions in the larger socio-political context. While this model neatly accounts for what happens within a political system, systems are never entirely self-contained. As he described it, interest groups serve to articulate political issues parties then aggregate and express them in a coherent and meaningful way government in turn enacts public policies to address them and bureaucracies finally regulate and adjudicate them. Two countries may share many of the same political institutions, but what distinguishes the two systems are the ways in which these institutions function.įor Almond, a fuller understanding emerges only when one begins to examine how institutions act within the political process. This information is not sufficient, however, to make a meaningful comparison between two political systems. Gabriel Almond introduced a valuable perhaps even indispenable approach to comparing political systems, but it didn't pay sufficient attention to the important role of civil society in shaping political affairs.Īt its most basic level, the model of structural functionalism posits that a political system is made up of institutions (structures), such as interest groups, political parties, the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, and a bureaucratic machinery.
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