Political Culture, Labor Movement Power, Religion, and Public Policy in Canada and the United States: Vive la Différence?

Abstract

rightly--considered similar cases. Yet in some important respects, the two societies diverged markedly in recent years. This is obvious in high profile public policy areas such as the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gasses and legislation legalizing gay marriage. But no less important--because, I shall argue, as it helps to explain the public policy divergence-is the growing difference in the level of organization and in the level and character of religiosity in the two countries. In the mid-1950s, about the same share of Canadians and Americans (35 percent) were members; at the same time, about 60 percent of Canadians and 50 percent of Americans told pollsters that they went to church each Sunday. By the dawn of the 21st century, U.S. union had fallen to about 12 percent, less than half the Canadian level (about 35 percent), while regular churchgoing in Canada had fallen to 22 percent, about half of the U.S. level (42 percent) (Adams, 50). What explains these divergences? To what degree do differences in national political cultures contribute to these divergent trends? These are among the central concerns of the three books under review. All three argue (or assume) that differences in national political cultures explain differences in the level and character of civil society organization, and in public policy. All three books rely mainly on large-scale national surveys to map the contours of these cultures, and to argue for connections between culture, organization, and policy. However, our authors disagree on what aspects of national cultures are most important, on how large differences in these areas are, and on whether these differences are growing or shrinking over time! Lipset and Meltz assert that the core political values of each country are fundamentally different and that this difference has not changed over the last quarter century, or indeed, for the past two centuries. Inglehart et al. argue that Canadian and American political values were not very different in 1981 and had become even more similar by 1990. Adams holds that there were major differences in national cultures in 1992, and that some of these had grown substantially by 2000. In this review, I argue that national culture arguments contribute little to an explanation of diverging density and religiosity in these two countries. We are better off, I think, looking at differences in the goals and the power of different factions within the labor movements and the religious communities of each country. These differences explain diverging levels of membership, political power, and political goals in labor and religious organizations in the two countries. Such an analysis suggests that the two trends are causally related as well-that is, it is no coincidence that levels of density are much lower, while levels of religiosity are much higher, in the United States than in Canada.