As his summer vacation moves into its last month, my eldest son has picked up and put down some of his summer reading. (At lease he's being told to read books – see this excellent Chronicle of Higher Ed article by Carlin Romano about the reluctance of university teachers to set their students anything as challenging as a whole text.)

I picked up one which has been languishing near the TV set for some weeks, the 1989 re-issue of Almond and Verba's classic The Civic Culture. It's one I first read (in an earlier edition of course) around 1980, and it's been interesting to revisit it, as at least two features of the landscape of national democracies seem to have changed so dramatically that they have a bearing on the authors' arguments.

A brief recap of what they said: their argument, based on comparative data for five countries (US, UK, Germany, Italy andMexico), is that stable democracy depends on a diffuse national civic culture which allows most citizens to be apathetic about formal politics. Many critics of the book took this to be a celebration of apathy, but this is an over-simplification as it also noted the importance of political activity and formal structures, and of sufficient participation by the majority of citizens, including all minority groups. A consequence is that programmes of democratization for 'emerging' countries that focus only on the formal institutions such as elections and political parties will be incomplete. What's more, they note that this civic culture emerges gradually and can absorb social change, as long as not too many challenges occur at the same time. What I've recalled from a speedy re-reading is that effective democracy is a rather delicate balance of engagement and placidity, depending for its stability on a set of shared national attitudes.

They conclude, commenting on the problems of building new democracies: “What seems to be called for is the simultaneous development of a sense of national identity, subject and participant competence, social trust and civic co-operativeness.”

(I should add that Almond and Verba also updated their original study with data up to 1980 and a discussion of the arguments and debates their original text had prompted. That's The Civic Culture Revisited. My student son hasn't brought it home.)

Although Almond and Verba spend much of the book discussing the building of democracy, it does raise the question of the stability of existing democracies, even such solid ones as we enjoy in the UK and US. The years since 1989 have stretched the national civic fabric with one challenge after another. With globalization (and the restructuring of work that's brought about), and the increase in the number of immigrants from different political and civic cultures, and the advent of the internet and its social and cultural impacts, and the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between the media and politics (witness the vile scandal-mongering about William Hague by a particularly nasty blogger), there has been a concatenation of challenges to existing civic culture.

There has been a huge amount written about social capital and trust in the economics literature, which spills over into debates about the links between social capital, institutions and culture. The specific question raised in my mind by this book is whether the 'optimal' degree of apathy has changed given the changes in the broader culture and in media and communications? Does the mix of engagement and apathy need to alter over time and if so how? Maybe political scientists out there can enlighten me.