Politics across Cultures: A Comparative Study of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People

Abstract

This paper attempts a deconstruction of the practice of politics across cultures, using Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People. The study analyses the connection between political culture in a democratic climate and political actors' operation of the democratic system. It examines the presence of several narrative parallels that connect the novels and particularly the character of the two narrators and the politicians whose stories seem representative of the general trends in the selected novels. However, the study also discovers that the few peculiarities that distinguish the two political cultures and the politicians in the novels are part of larger socio-political constructs. Hence, while the contexts in the novels share certain variables of political corruption, voter susceptibility, and democratic excesses, also highlighted are peculiarities of contexts like consistent strivings to ameliorate the democratic process 'in America' and a general inclination towards sycophancy which, among other things, impairs and undermines democratic objectives 'in Nigeria'. Keywords: political culture; democracy; fiction; American politics; Nigerian politics.