In this article the authors examine political culture as a legitimate constituent of a political system in which the actors within an existing stable structure are able to initiate and effi ciently realize changes needed to maintain adaptive capacity — thus making political culture an important factor in political stability. The importance of cultural elements in relation to this status is connected to examples of political behavior and different orientations expressed within the community that are able to either facilitate or hinder the achievement of stability.
The article discusses the validity of the terms “stability” and “stabilization” in relation to authoritarian and totalitarian systems. Certain factors mitigate against such validity: the suppression of political participation, the “imposed consensus”, the falsifi cation of preferences, the presence of an imposed ideology associated with the prospect of its own “hypernormalization,” etc. Particular attention is paid to different scenarios of interaction between a political system and political culture, using specifi c historical examples.