A Critique of Ira Sharkansky's "The Utility of Elazar's Political Culture"

Abstract

Ira Sharkansky's recent research note in this journal explores the utility of Daniel Elazer's notion of political culture.1 Professor Sharkansky empirically tests the validity of Elazar's general perceptions by creating an interval scale and assigning a culture score to each state. Then he tests the impact of political culture as measured by the interval scale on twenty-three dependent variables. He concludes that the analysis demonstrates that political culture as measured by this interval scale shows important relationships with several traits of state politics and public service . . . independent of both the socioeconomic characteristics of personal income and urbanism and other features of each state's regional history and traditions.2 Careful inspection of the reported findings indicates, however, that his latter conclusion is open to question.3 The interval scale does not maintain the expected relationships through the test for regionalism. Only one of the variables in either regional demarcation used to test for regionalism maintains an important relationship with the cultural scale.4