"Political culture" is a way of explaining how a group of people (a society) thinks about government, social order, and political organization. If you’ve ever lived in another country, or even in another part of the United States, then you probably noticed that people in those other parts of the world (or the country) think differently about government, politics, or even what it means to be "socially responsible." In other words, they might have different expectations about what government is supposed to do than what you are used to. The concept of Political Culture as an area of academic study actually came to fruition in the 1960s, primarily in the sub-field of Comparative Politics (the study of political systems in countries other than the United States). I’ll make a very long story quite short: what Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba, and Arend Lijphart (the three Comparative Political Scientists most commonly recognized as the “founders” of Political Culture studies) were interested in understanding was this. Why were “democratic” political systems relatively successful and stable in places like the United States, Germany (after World War II), Great Britain, and Canada? But, by contrast, systems that we would still label as "democratic" had been less stable in places like Germany (between the two World Wars), Italy, and much of the developing world. A large part of the answer, they concluded, couldn’t be found just by looking at the political system (for example, the structure of the Constitution, the frequency of elections, the number of political parties, etc). In their view, you also had to look at the culture of the nation, and to understand whether that culture could support a political system where, for example, a political minority (or a racial, ethnic, or religious minority) would have its basic rights and freedoms acknowledged by the majority. For a recent example, think about the sectarian violence going on in Syria in recent years, or Iraq in the last decade. In both of those places, political parties and factions tend to be defined along religious or ethnic lines – those in the majority have not generally recognized the legitimacy of their traditional enemies. So, winning an election in a democratic system can be interpreted as justification for suppressing that minority’s point of view.
When I've talked about this in class, I use to use this sort of example all the time. Imagine that you are a life-long, committed Republican. You woke up the morning after the 2008 Presidential election, wondering what hit you, right? Was your solution to go find the nearest sawed-off AK-47 and start shooting up the State Capitol building? Was it go home and sulk, vowing “I’ll never vote again!”. My guess is that for most Republicans (and for most Democrats likewise after 2004, which was a similar shellacking for them), the most likely sentiment was that expressed by Chicago Cubs fans since 1908: “We’ll get ‘em next year!”. (For those of you who are not baseball bans, the Cubs [up until 2016] hadn’t won a World Series since 1908 – I guess I’ll eventually need to get a better joke now that the Cubs have ruined this one for me). To get serious for a moment, isn’t it part of our culture of political involvement that, when we lose, we vow to work harder in the next election, and to convince the electorate to vote for our party or our candidates? Likewise, when a candidate loses in our system, there’s an assumption of peaceful transition between the out-going officeholder and the incoming victor from the last election. All of these “assumptions” about how politics and government “works” in our system is what the Comparative Political Scientists (those who study other countries) call “Political Culture”, and it’s this idea that Daniel Elazar, a scholar of State Politics (and native of South St. Paul), borrowed to apply to internal cultural differences within the United States (Elazar essentially borrowed this idea of “Political Culture” from Almond, Verba, and Lijphart, and applied it to a different area of study: State Politics).
Now, as an aside, with the recent goings on involving the (delayed) transition from the Trump administration to Joe Biden as the President-elect, it's become very tempting, especially among political journalists, and even some Political Scientists, to worry about "broken norms" and "unprecedented delays". I'm not going to excuse President Trump's behavior, but Republican activists will certainly point out that many Democrats (including Hillary Clinton) spent much of the previous four years acting like Trump's 2016 victory wasn't "legitimate". One of my other areas that I teach is US History (my own interest in that discipline is the era just after the Founding, between the writing of the Constitution and the election of Andrew Jackson. That period (when political parties were first developing) is full of examples where the advocates of one party advocated using the power of government to "punish" their political enemies. For example, John Adams' (and the Federalists) use of the Alien and Sedition Act to arrest and convict Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson's supporters) for their opposition is well-known. Probably less well known is the Baltimore riots of 1812, where the Democratic-Republican mayor and police chief refused to protect a Federalist newspaper from mob violence, which led to the deaths of at least four people (including Robert E. Lee's father). And during the war with England (which caused those riots), former President Jefferson wrote (in a letter to his successor, James Madison) that Federalists in the Northern states (whom he suspected of having dual loyalties) should be hanged, and have their property seized.
So, we have (unfortunately) some precedent in this country for this type of behavior. Thankfully, it's usually the exception, not the rule. Political Scientists who study "partisan polarization" have found that we are currently in a "highly-polarized" period currently in our nation's history. The good news is that this will (someday, likely) pass. We'll talk more about polarization in the units on Political Parties and State Legislatures.
Essentially, Elazar asks two questions: (1) What’s the role, or purpose, of government?; and (2) What’s the expected role of the citizen? He then proceeds to identify, and describe, three "types" of Political Cultures, found in the United States: moralistic, individualistic, and traditionalist.
The “moralistic” political culture is said (according to Elazar) to be that found in Minnesota: we expect our neighbors to participate in public events, and to care about the quality of government and political leadership. We also expect that people get involved in politics because they see it as a moral obligation, not because they expect to get anything out of it (especially in terms of financial advantage or social prestige). I use this example: imagine an older couple (in their late 50s or early 60s) who live in a small town in northern
When trying to explain the “individualistic” political culture, I usually ask if anyone in the class has ever lived in a big city like
Another example: My mom lives in
The individualistic culture usually also features another common dynamic: the assumption that government is a “referee” that helps decide conflicts between two or more groups who are competing against each other (either for resources, or for policies that would favor their points of view). Thus, it’s not unusual in individualistic societies for people to vote based upon some sort of common identity that they share with a candidate (“I’ll vote for Smith because he’s Catholic”, or “I’ll vote for O’Leary because he’s Irish”), because they assume that that candidate, should he/she win the office, will then support the positions of the particular group.
When talking about “traditional” political cultures (this is probably the hardest one for native midwesterners to understand), I ask students to think about some of the new Americans coming into our area (people from
We can point to the Kennedys in Massachusetts, the Byrds in Virginia and West Virginia, and the Freylingheusens in New Jersey as examples of families who have dominated politics in their states for decades (in the latter two cases, you can find Byrds as Governors in Virginia going back to colonial times, as well as Freylingheusens in the New Jersey colonial Assembly). If you’ve ever been to the Hudson River Valley region of upstate New York, you’ve seen some of the family names that go all the way back to when the Dutch ran the colony: van Buren (the family produced a President), Roosevelt (two Presidents) and van Rensselaer (endowers of the largest private engineering college in the Northeast) are a few that most students of history would recognize, and the last two persisted well into the 20th century. Much of the political history of
Two points to conclude: First, none of this has to do with political party: as Elazar mentions, Utah is a good example of a moralistic state dominated by Republicans, and Minnesota is a good example of a moralistic state traditionally dominated by Democrats. I’d like to caution you about something: you might hear a political analyst in Minnesota say that because the Republican party has gained more power in a traditionally Democrat state, Minnesota has become “less moralistic”. What Elazar was saying in his original essay (his first work on this was done in 1972: the outside piece you read is a 1998 adaptation specifically for a textbook on Minnesota politics) is that the increase in social services spending in the 1970s was that society’s way of trying to implement the good society. It is not the only way of expressing that moralistic goal: in Utah, strict laws regulating access to alcohol and divorce are that particular culture’s way of trying to create their version of the good society. Moralism is more about the intent, or the motivation, of the majority, rather than the actual policies that that majority implements.
The same is true of the other two types (notice that I mentioned both Republican Long Island and Democratic Chicago as two good examples of the individualistic culture; the Kennedys and Byrds have traditionally been Democrats, and the Freylingheusens and Roosevelts have traditionally been Republicans [Franklin, the 32nd President, was the first Roosevelt in the history of the family who ran for public office as a Democrat].
Secondly, most places in America today can’t be solely classified as strictly one type: most places are a mixture of all three, although one type might be more prominent than the other two in many places. But think about this also: if political cultures in a particular place aren’t necessarily of a single “type”, doesn’t it also follow that they can change over time? Minnesota stands out (in Elazar’s view) because it’s historically been so predominantly “Moralistic”. However, that could change, right? One thing to think about would be WHY they change over time.
That last point leads to a whole other set of questions (which we won't explore in depth in this course). Is Elazar's way of defining this the ONLY way to do so? Even if Elazar is right, he wrote his original article about this concept (and defined each state as being dominated by one of the three types) in 1966. Perhaps things have changed in the last half century? Even Elazar, in the 1999 piece that I assigned as the core reading for this unit, acknowledges that demographic change, social mobility, and new political issues that weren't even thought about yet in the 1960s, have probably changed the cultural makeup of many places. Political Scientists have been arguing about whether Elazar is still relevant for at least the last thirty years. However, even his harshest critics acknowledge that there ARE cultural and political differences between the states; the issue is how to classify and define them.
That second link that I provided in this unit (a working paper by William Halton, from the University of Puget Sound) provides some examples of other ways to think about this. I don't necessarily expect you to read it (it's a little dense), but take a look at the various maps the Haltom provides. On the top of page 6, for example, he replicates a map from a 1972 article, which shows that even WITHIN states, there might be some localized cultures that don't fit Elazar's original model (his original classification is shown on the top of page 16). The map on page 13 even breaks this down further (by county). Haltom also discusses some alternative ways to think about this issue: by ethnicity (page 12), socioeconomically (page 15), or even as unique cultures that combine multiple factors ("sub-nations", as some commentators have called them; the maps on pages 18 and 19 are examples of that).
For the assignments in this unit, let's assume that Elazar's three-part classification is still valid, and that he's correct that Minnesota can still be classified largely as "moralistic". But, as you get further into the course (especially once you take on a state, and start writing "Case Study Notes" about that state), don't be surprised to see some authors questioning whether Elazar's classification is accurate for today's world.