美國政治學者奧蒙（Gabriel Almond）和佛巴（Sidney Verba）所著《公民文化》一書，至今仍是政治學中最受歡迎的指定教材之一，儘管此書的批評眾多，時間證明其學術地位是後來的著作所無法超越的。本文指出，《公民文化》在學界所持續受到的重視不但反映其原創性價值，同時也展現其將政治文化作為一自變數在解釋上的巧妙之處；弔詭的是，雖然針對此書有數不盡的批評出現，但一直都沒有能與之競逐的典範產生。這現象證明了此一領域在過去四十多年間研究與創新的貧乏。關鍵問題除了形成文化變數過程中所遇到的方法論難題，同時也與學者試圖以權宜性方法來處理文化變數有關。在回顧政治文化研究中兩個重要的辯論後，本文主張，政治文化作為自變數是一套內化於大眾心中，被理解為一般常識的隱然邏輯關係。最後本文將使用巴基斯坦和摩洛哥的民意調查資料進行實證經驗研究，說明如何將政治文化形成一個有用的自變數。

For the past four decades, Almond and Verba's pioneering work, The Civic Culture, has remained one of the most popular books in political science, despite many criticisms. Indeed, the continuing popularity of The Civic Culture in the academic community is evidence of its groundbreaking quality and subtlety in treating culture as an independent variable. However, the number of criticisms and the lack of alternative paradigms paradoxically reflect the poverty of originality and progress in this field. The key question not only lies in the methodological problem of variable formation, but also originates from the expedient treatment of culture as a residual category. In this article, I examine two major debates in political culture studies and argue that culture should be treated as an implicit logic internalized in people' s mind as common knowledge. Finally, this article will demonstrate how to formulate political culture as a useful independent variable by using survey data from Pakistan and Morocco.