Looking for Political Subcultures: a Critique of the Rummage-Sale Approach

Abstract

IN AN ARTICLE published recently in this journal, Timothy D. Schiltz and R. Lee Rainey attempt assess the accuracy of Daniel Elazar's propositions regarding the geographic distributions of political subcultures in the United States.' They conclude, with a remarkable string of qualifications, that there is little evidence to support Elazar's geography of political culture as an accurate depiction of current reality in American politics. They come to this conclusion on the basis of a secondary analysis of survey research conducted in thirteen states in 1968 by the Comparative State Elections Project. They are to be commended for recognizing the potential utility of that dataset for the purpose as it is the one cross-sectional survey covering a large portion of the United States that at the same time has reliable within-state samples. On the other hand, their reexamination of that data to test hypotheses which played no part in the construction of the questionnaire exhibits the usual pitfalls of secondary analysis. Indeed, Schiltz and Rainey note that there were no measures which directly touched upon several of the elements of Elazar's formulation.2 In the arguments that follow, however, it will be shown that while this is indeed a critical problem, there are a number of other shortcomings in their analysis. These shortcomings include: (1) failure to address the fundamental ambigities of several questions used in the survey; (2) inadequate formulation of hypotheses to be tested, i.e., they put many words into Elazar's mouth; (3) statistical analyses and presentations that leave much to be desired; and (4) a rummage-sale approach to the study of political culture demonstrating an altogether inadequate conceptualization of the research problem at hand. Perhaps these charges sound harsh but an important problem is at hand here. Indeed, Schiltz and Rainey point to the importance of Elazar's theory because of the potential effects that subcultures may have in producing variations in state policies. Interestingly enough, other than a casual mention of Sharkansky's provocative study based upon what is now called the Elazar-Sharkansky Political Culture Scale,3 they choose to ignore other