Cultural and Cross-Cultural Political Psychology: Toward the Development of a New Subfield Stanley Renshon City University of New York John Duckitt University of Auckland The relationships between political and psychological process are the defining core of political psychology. Yet each alone, and both collectively, are embedded in numerous cultural contexts. If we simply, and provisionally, define culture as the range of shared understandings and expectations that are embedded in individ- ual psychology, societal institutions, and the public practices, its relevance for the concerns of political psychology would seem to be reasonably self evident. Yet, paradoxically in the past three decades, its importance appears to have been paralleled by its neglect. While relatively little contemporary theory or research in political psychology examines culture explicitly, this wasn’t always the case. Early studies in the field were strongly influenced by cultural anthropology and more specifically the “culture and personality” work associated with Margaret Mead (1939), Ruth Benedict (1946), and others. 1 Those pioneers used relatively small, homogeneous and slowly evolving societies to chart the links among culture, socialization, and personality on one hand, and the continuity of societal conventions (embedded in political, economic, religious, and social institutions) on the other. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the kinds of societies Mead and others studied, the links appeared solid. However, these societies were the exception and not the rule, and those who studied large, heterogeneous, and rapidly changing societies were certainly justified in asking what useful implications this genre held for them. Moreover, members of the early cultural-and-personality school often wrote as if culture were personality writ large, and viewed the latter through the powerful Political Psychology, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1997 233 0162-895X © 1997 International Society of Political Psychology Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK. 1 One can gain some perspective on the development of the field and its persistence by examining Inkeles and Levinson (1954, 1968–1969), and more recently, Inkeles (1990–1991).