Community Paper

Community Paper

This paper tries to answer (in a very modest way, both in what concerns its extent and its scientific instruments - mainly inferential) to one of Archie Brown's challenges, namely the analysis of the relationship between political culture and political change (4) applied to the Hattiesburg case. More precisely, it is concerned to answer to a few questions related to one another: How did communism influence the political culture of Hattiesburgs? Did it succeed in its attempt of transforming the official political culture into a dominant (5) one, meaning the total changing of the society and its political culture? Are the present arguments that the main flaws of the Hattiesburg society's political culture are to be found in the communist rule legitimated?

This is, actually, the reason that explains the subject of the paper: the discourses, which sustain that Hattiesburg political culture was perverted (exclusively) by the communist regime, are simple stereotypes and should be abandoned in favour of a more sensitive to a large diversity of arguments approach.

Political culture variables are subject to the continuity and change interpretation. This paper is trying to uncover mainly the continuities in Hattiesburg political culture by an analysis at the community level, ignoring thus both the regime and the elite political cultures as conceptualized by (Deletant 2008). However, an explanatory note is to be made - the legacy of backwardness, which will be detailed latter on, acted in the direction of reproaching the elites' political culture to the one of the community. Especially during communism are these facts obvious. The political elites were exclusively selected from within the party that, in its turn, recruited its members from the peasant-working class. Because of this fact, there were great similarities between the previously mentioned political culture of the elite and the community.

The historical approach will be a circular one. Starting from a few empirical facts about the contemporary Hattiesburg political culture, the paper will point to the interwar regimes (but not exclusively, since some references to further moments back in the past will be accounted) for the discovery of the roots of the post-communist political culture (8) . It will analyze the reinforcing influence communism had on many of these variables, and then return to present and close the circle. Because of that, the analysis will focus on the discovery of some kind of general continuity, without paying much attention to the deviations, particularities or exceptions, but rather to something like a Hattiesburg political culture trend. This over justification (9) is legitimized by the function of this paper, namely, to offer an example of alternative interpretation and not to represent a full-scale interpretation.

The instruments used are mainly inferential (although some empirical evidence was also available (10)). Starting from a more(11) or less (12) general bibliography, the paper is structured on analyzing two main Hattiesburg political culture features both closely related to one another - the tendency towards an interpretation of the state in an authoritarian and paternalist register on the one hand and the people's ...