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Gabriel Abraham Almond
American political scientist
Gabriel Abraham Almond, (born January 12, 1911, Rock Island, Illinois, U.S.—died December 25, 2002, Pacific Grove, California), American political scientist noted for his comparative studies of political systems and his analysis of political development.
Almond received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1938 and taught at Brooklyn College from 1939 to 1946, except during his service in the U.S. Office of War Information (1942–45). After teaching at Yale University (1947–51 and 1959–63) and at Princeton University (1951–59), he was appointed professor of political science at Stanford University in 1963, heading its department from 1964 to 1968. He served as president of the American Political Science Association (1965–66) and received its James Madison Award in 1981.
Almond was author or coauthor of numerous scholarly articles and books, including the groundbreaking The Civic Culture (1963). In this work, Almond and his coauthor, Sidney Verba, differentiated between political cultures in which citizens were active or inactive in civic affairs, explored the relationship between citizen participation and attitudes toward their political system, and maintained that a country's political institutions must coincide with its political culture for it to have a stable political system. Among Almond's other publications are The Struggle for Democracy in Germany (1949; written with others and edited by Almond), The American People and Foreign Policy (1950), The Appeals of Communism (1954), The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960; written with others and edited by Almond), Political Development (1970), and Plutocracy and Politics in New York City (1998). He also wrote, with others, Comparative Politics: System, Process, Policy (1978), The Civic Culture Revisited (1980), and Progress and Its Discontents (1982).
Political system, the set of formal legal institutions that constitute a "government" or a "state." This is the definition adopted by many studies of the legal or constitutional arrangements of advanced political orders. More broadly defined, however, the term comprehends actual as well as prescribed forms of political behaviour, not…
California Through Time
"There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California." That sense of peculiarity—that California is inherently different or strangely unique—lies at the heart of the comment above (attributed to Edward Abbey) and to Britannica's early coverage of…
Pacific Grove, resort and residential city, Monterey county, western California, U.S. It lies along Monterey Bay and adjoins the city of Monterey. Founded in 1875 by Methodists as a summer religious retreat, the city remains a centre for conferences of religious and other groups; alcohol was banned…
December 25, 2002 (aged 91)
Pacific Grove, California
"The Politics of the Developing Areas"
"The Civic Culture"
"The Civic Culture Revisited"
subjects of study