Democracy Upside Down

Book excerpt: Cultural hegemony theory is a branch of political sociology that concerns the way in which political sociology is transmitted. Democracy Upside Down weaves together, for the first time, the central arguments and the most important threads of empirical work on the theory of cultural hegemony in the U.S. Whereas most research on political socialization concludes that it is unclear exactly where the most cogent influences on political learning lie, this volume focuses upon the top-down process of political learning: the extent to which elites can impose their ideology on masses by domination of various sources of political ideas. In addition, liberalism-or the ideology of elites according to hegemony theory-and the socializing agents through which it can be imposed is discussed.