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A systematic concern with political culture has its heritage in the Enlightenment and 19th-century sociology, if not ancient times, but came to the fore in political science with the post-Second World War behavioural revolution and the emergence of new states whose formal institutions were similar to Western models but whose politics did not follow the Western pattern. The mainstream political science version of political culture was associated with structure-functionalism and modernization theory; a premise was that technological change could help generate modernizing mentalities, while traditional mentalities could inhibit modernizing technical change. Modernization theory went out of fashion in the late 1960s for a variety of ideological, intellectual and empirical reasons, and the political cultural approach fell from favour along with it. More recently, it seems, scholars have returned to an interest in culture, and some even place culture at the heart of emerging political cleavages.

It is both a truth and a truism that Chinese politics cannot be understood without reference to Chinese culture (a truth and truism that would apply to any other society as well). But within the academic discipline of political science political culture has lost status over the past generation as not conducive to the development of empirical political theory. The usual candidate for replacement is rational choice theory. But properly understood, political culture is compatible with rational choice, inasmuch as there is no single standard of rationality, but, rather, it will vary from society to society and era to era. Considerations of the cultural background are necessary to provide content to rational choice theory, since without consideration of culture context rational choice threatens to reduce to a set of colorless banalities.Western studies of China have traditionally focused on Chinese culture (whence the term Sinology-implying that the study of China constituted a science or discipline in its own right). This approach became incorporated into the self-conscious movement toward a scientific method in political science, cresting in the generation following World War II, in the concept of political culture. Sinology assumes that China is sufficiently different from the "west" that it cannot be understood in terms used in the west. The concept of political culture is more universalistic, the product of an ambition to extend the scientific study of politics to the new political systems taking shape in the wake of decolonization. Political culture was especially a feature of modernization theory, a movement reflecting an intellectual interest in how societies change and develop but also more or less explicitly some of the political concerns of Cold War America ([67], 33-34).

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