Democracy needs a system of political parties as one of its fundamental components, but without a change in their concepts and practices, these become a factor in the erosion of the democratic system itself.

Many parties act as if they were an end in themselves, instead of being vehicles by which the citizens achieve political representation. They tend to exercise power, establishing their organic preeminence over any other political institution, including the organs of government. They express themselves as entities with structures that are exclusionary, bureaucratic, pyramidal and deaf to the democratic aspirations of the people.

This concept reaches not only throughout these parties, but to individuals who act opportunistically as a political patronage base, even though deep down they also disdain the politicians' distortions.

At the present time it's necessary to deepen the empowering capacity of the democratic political culture, educating in human rights and values, in a situation in which the deepening of exclusion and poverty, environmental degradation, the possibilities of economic growth and of better opportunities for democratic participation simultaneously and contradictorily coincide.

The political leaderships and the citizenry must break with obsolete political practices and methods, and the mistaken idea that democratic processes have been created to put power and democratic institutions into the hands of strongmen, parties and exclusive elites, so that such people may serve themselves.

This is now a political dividing line, given that other countries have seen the collapse of partisan structures when the parties haven't known how to read the signs of the times.

Political culture links micro politics with macro politics, and thus creates a bridge between the conduct of individuals and the behavior of systems. The relevant attitudes of individuals need not be explicitly political, but might be located between non-political attitudes and non-political affiliations in civil society. At a certain point politics becomes understood as the ambit related to the organization of power --- the ambit of the bonding decisions in a society or group --- from which the political culture of meanings, values, concepts and attitudes is projected onto the specifically political ambit.

Almond and Verba posit political culture as "the attitudes toward the political system and its diverse parts, and attitudes toward the individual's role in the system… in reference to the individual's knowledge about the system, his or her feelings about it, and evaluative judgment of it." Political culture defines itself in four directions: a) the whole of the subjective political orientations in a national population, or in a subculture of it; b) its components are fundamentally psychological and individualized (cognitive, affective, evaluative) political orientations and commitments with political values; c) the content of political culture is the result of socialization, education, exposure to the communications media from the time of childhood, as well as experiences with governmental, social and economic performance in the adult stage; and d) political culture affects governmental performance and structure (it falls within it, but doesn't determine it.)

Democratic political culture, as a collection of values, attitudes and variable preferences influenced by substantive changes in society, plays a crucial role in democracy, comprising a series of values, attitudes and beliefs that establish norms and limits of conduct for citizens and political leaders, legitimize political institutions and set the context within which the thoughts and feelings of the majority of the population are found.

Democratic governability can be achieved as a result of the political capacity of the diverse sectors to build representative, legitimate and participative political institutions as the means to national and local agreements, accords and commitments. This process is articulated in and closely linked to a process of decentralization of power, and of construction and reconstruction of identity, to make a relationship between civil society --- "…a public space that has normative, regulative, independent and autonomous functions in the face of the economy and the state to express its own mission… " (Michael Walser) --- and political society.

We must enable the capacities of democratic political culture, unfolding a process that allows the construction of new political relationships, the democratization of the parties, the promotion of authentic values and the participation and associative capacity of the population to make the needed changes. Perhaps we never had a better time.

(Raúl Leis is a sociologist and playwright and heads the Panamanian Center for Social Studies and Action, CEASPA)

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