[5] Strong civic cultures are distinguished by robust support for achieving political homeostasis: the optimal mediated balance between multiple contradictory forces such as in the tension between respect for individual rights and concern for the public good, or that between governmental effectiveness and responsiveness to the interests of citizens.

[9] Seymour Lipset wrote in The Democratic Century that Almond and Verba, "did argue persuasively that the extent of civic culture could be predicted by structural and historical factors" but that there was also "strong evidence that some aspects of the civic culture were powerfully associated with education levels, across national borders".

[11] Critics also expressed skepticism over the accuracy of depicting a culture based upon individual interviews and that the approach was "ethnocentric and more prescriptive than objective and empirical".

[12] Verba agrees that there is much to the criticism of putting cultures into the same mould, paying too little attention to context and institutional structures in other countries.

[13] In a retrospective in 2015, Verba offered some additional criticisms of his work, the most important of which was its mistaken optimism about education’s impact on civic culture.