Political Culture and Democracy: Analyzing Cross-Level Linkages

Abstract

Mitchell Seligson raises a classic and still controversial issue in comparative politics: what role does political culture play in sustaining stable democratic institutions?' He examines this question in light of one of the central methodological problems in cross-national research: the linkage between individual and aggregate relationships. Seligson starts with the axiom that cross-national correlations that do not also appear at the individual level within each nation are spurious, citing a passage to this effect by Przeworski and Teune.2 Although this axiom has been widely accepted, it is groundless, as this article will demonstrate. Basing his argument on it, Seligson attempts to invalidate Inglehart's findings that there are strong aggregate level correlations between political culture and stable democracy. Seligson argues that the aggregate level findings are spurious because he does not find individual level correlations between these political culture indicators and support for democracy. Ironically, Seligson's conclusions exemplify precisely the sort of cross-level fallacy that Robinson warned against.3 The central point of the ecological fallacy is that strong aggregate level relationships are not necessarily reproduced at the individual level. When Robinson was writing, districts with large percentages of AfricanAmericans (then located mainly in the South) generally elected segregationist candidates, but, as Robinson demonstrated, this relationship was not reproduced at the individual level: Blacks did not vote for segregationist candidates. The aggregate level relationship was not somehow spurious; no one questions the fact that districts with large numbers of African-Americans really did elect the worst sort of segregationists, in a pattern of repression that endured for decades. Seligson turns the argument the wrong way around, claiming that an aggregate-level finding must be reproduced at the individual level. If it is not, it is somehow spurious. This claim is groundless, as Robinson demonstrated more than fifty years ago, and as more recent evidence will confirm.