Political Culture and State Public Policy: The Missing Link

NOTE : The data used in this paper were made available by the Inter-University Corsortium for Political and Social Research. The data for the American National Election Study, 1978, were originally collected by the Center for Political Studies of the Institute for Social Research, the University of Michigan, under a grant from the National Science Foundation. Neither the original collectors of the data nor the Consortium bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here. N RECENT YEARS, Daniel Elazar’s tripartite classification of political cultures has emerged as one of the leading predictors of the interstate variance in public policy outputs (Elazar, 1972; Sharkansky, 1969; Ritt, 1974; Johnson, 1976; Citizens Conference on State Legislatures 1971; Sigelman, Lowery, and Smith, 1981; Sigelman, 1976; Dean, 1980; Stonecash, 1981). However, despite all the attention that has been lavished on political culture, very few attempts have been made to clarify the exact nature of the linkage between political culture and state public policy. As a result, our understanding of this key link in the policy chain has not advanced in proportion to the number of state-level policy studies which employ political culture as an explanatory variable. Why do moralistic, individualistic, and traditionalistic cultures differ from one another in the policies their governments pursue? Proponents of the concept of political culture suggest that the religious-social-political orientations of America’s earliest settlers (Smith, 1975; Warner, 1975; Sydnor, 1975) combined with geographically well-defined intracontinental migration patterns (Matthews, 1975; Abernathy, 1975; Ward, 1975; Zelinsky, 1975) to generate three distinctive American political cultures. According to Elazar (1972: 100-101), each culture conveys a different