<p><span style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">More than a half-century ago, Daniel Elazar advanced a typology of three types of American political culture by linking historical migrations and religious preferences of people to distinctive locations in the United States. The current study presents an alternative empirical measure of a political culture based on county-level Presidential election voting results and explores its potential to distinguish local education systems effectively closing the achievement gap between students economically disadvantaged and their more affluent peers. The results support the theoretical premise that today's American political culture, defined by county-level voters sharing a distinct political ideology, becomes expressed in local educational policies and practices and thereby, affects students' academic success. Implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed.</span><img src="/media/django-summernote/2022-11-16/8f8f7ad4-9e3a-43e3-bbf2-7a56b24de14f.png" style="width: 100%;"></p><p id="p0010" style="margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(46, 46, 46); font-family: NexusSerif, Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, Times, STIXGeneral, &quot;Cambria Math&quot;, &quot;Lucida Sans Unicode&quot;, &quot;Microsoft Sans Serif&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI Symbol&quot;, &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">More than a half-century ago, Daniel&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">advanced a typology of three types of American political culture by linking historical migrations and religious preferences of people to distinctive locations in the United States. These three political cultures were individualistic, moralistic, and traditionalistic. According to Elazar, the individualistic political culture extended the concept of the marketplace into the public sphere as the most effective mechanism to respond to diverse public demands. As a result, it limited the role of government in improving the economy to keep the marketplace available for private use. This businesslike conception of politics placed a premium on limiting community intervention in private activities and restricted government action to only those areas encouraging private initiative</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. The individualistic political culture regions consisted of the middle-Atlantic states, the Midwest, and the Mountain States. the&nbsp;</span></p><p id="p0015" style="margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(46, 46, 46); font-family: NexusSerif, Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, Times, STIXGeneral, &quot;Cambria Math&quot;, &quot;Lucida Sans Unicode&quot;, &quot;Microsoft Sans Serif&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI Symbol&quot;, &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">In the moralistic political culture, the government was viewed as isolated from typical influence and thereby served the common good, dying the virtues of the society and committed to the welfare of the citizens</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. In doing so, the main role of the government was to promote the public's welfare with an emphasis on equity, especially at the local level in areas of social issues, economics, and politics</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. The common citizen was regarded as the primary political actor and wide political participation was encouraged as a duty to perform</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. The moralistic political culture regions consisted of New England, the Great Lakes region, and the West Coast.</span></p><p id="p0020" style="margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(46, 46, 46); font-family: NexusSerif, Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, Times, STIXGeneral, &quot;Cambria Math&quot;, &quot;Lucida Sans Unicode&quot;, &quot;Microsoft Sans Serif&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI Symbol&quot;, &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">Based on the unique history of the South, the traditionalistic political culture was distinctly elitist where government activism took place to protect existing power structures and maintain the prevailing social order</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. To do so, mass democratic participation was discouraged, and bureaucracies held little indecent dent power. This resulted in limiting the government to maintaining traditional social patterns and minimally accommodating those patterns to changing times. Thus, elites primarily determined public policies and actions, and political participation was very narrow with restricted grassroots-level governance</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. The traditionalistic political culture regions were isolated mainly to the South and Southwest states of the US.</span></p><p id="p0025" style="margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(46, 46, 46); font-family: NexusSerif, Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, Times, STIXGeneral, &quot;Cambria Math&quot;, &quot;Lucida Sans Unicode&quot;, &quot;Microsoft Sans Serif&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI Symbol&quot;, &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;, serif; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">Due to the advent of large-scale data collections over the last two decades, the current study advances an alternative model of political culture more aligned with changes in Am1960s society and politics since the 1960s when Elazar first proposed his political culture typology.</span></p><section id="sec1" style="margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px; font-family: NexusSerif, Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, Times, STIXGeneral, &quot;Cambria Math&quot;, &quot;Lucida Sans Unicode&quot;, &quot;Microsoft Sans Serif&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI Symbol&quot;, &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;, serif; font-size: 18px;"><h2 id="sectitle0020" class="u-h3 u-margin-l-top u-margin-xs-bottom" style="color: rgb(80, 80, 80); margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px; margin-top: 32px !important; margin-bottom: 8px !important; font-size: 1.2rem !important; line-height: 1.333 !important;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;"><b>Background</b></span></h2><p id="p0030" style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">After its initial publication, Ira</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">&nbsp;closely examined Elazar's political culture theory and concluded the theoretical construct was suitable for exploring the variety of public policies and practices found in American state and local government. Soon after, a generation of new research began suggesting Elazar's regional political cultures resulted in consequences for political behavior and governance across the United States</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. Within the context of public education, for example, researchers found differences by Elazar's typology in terms of state rules over control of local schools,</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">&nbsp;curricular programs and types of student testing</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">, state per pupil spending</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">, support for school choice</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">, and setting teacher certification standards.</span></p><p id="p0035" style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">In these and other studies at the time, researchers demonstrated Elazar's typology was useful in understanding the specific policy mechanisms stakeholders employed to pursue select education policies</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. The findings also added to the durability of Elazar's landmark insights because—despite the apparent efficacy of Elazar's typology in research—it also drew criticism. Mainly, he did not base the proposed political culture theory on any rigorous statistical procedures or empirical data, but rather on ideas from personal impressionistic observations.</span></p><p id="p0040" style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">Even so, Elazar's typology may now be questionable for other reasons. Culture is not static but evolves as participants encounter others from diverse 1960ses</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. Since the 1960s—when Elazar first presented his theory—America has become increasingly private, mobile, Hispanic, fundamentalist Protestant, racial/ethnic integrated, and worldwide way of information on the worldwide net</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. This implies Elazar's political culture typology—based on historical migrations and religious preferences of people linked to distinctive regions in the United States—may be less applicable in today's American society due to these changes in social capital, media and communication, mobility, immigration, and religion.</span></p><section id="sec1.1" style="margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px;"><h3 id="sectitle0025" class="u-h4 u-margin-m-top u-margin-xs-bottom" style="color: rgb(80, 80, 80); margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px; margin-top: 24px !important; margin-bottom: 8px !important; font-size: 1rem !important; line-height: 1.4 !important;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;"><b>Current study</b></span></h3><p id="p0045" style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">Rather than using Elazar's topology for the reasons given, the current study presents s an alternative empirical measure of a political culture based on county-level Presidential election voting results and explores its potential to distinguish local education systems effectively closing the achievement gap between students who economically disadvantaged, and their more affluent peers.</span></p><p id="p0050" style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">Imagine political culture on a continuum representing the dominant ideologies of the two major American political parties—Democrats and Republicans (hereinafter referred to as “GOP”, an abbreviation for “Grand Old Party”). While political culture refers to the sred political beliefs common across society about how government should function and its guiding principles,&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">&nbsp;describe political ideology is a set of beliefs among members in a group about the proper order of society, and how to achieve the expected social order. In other words, political culture is something we share, while political ideology is something we use to define ourselves and make political decisions.</span></p><p id="p0055" style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">In the current study, I define political culture within the context of political ideology because among the most important narratives to emerge within American politics in the last twenty years is partisan-ideological sorting—a process whereby ideology increasingly aligns with political identoward Conservatives have gravitated towards the GOP, liberals towards the Democratic Party, resulting in political parties where partisans are now more ideologically aligned with each other than in prior decades.</span></p><p id="p0060" style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">American political ideology varies on a left-to-right continuum, liberal-to-conservative, respectively</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. My political culture continuum also varies on the left-to-right continuum, based on county-level Presidential election voting results for Democrats and GOP candidates. People's thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors are strongly influenced by the ideological groups they identify with</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. Likewise, the theoretical premise proposed in the current study is that today's American political culture, defined by county-level voters sharing a distinct political ideology, becomes expressed in local educational policies and practices and thereby, affects students' academic success.</span></p><p id="p0065" style="margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px;"><a name="bbib33" href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590291122001218#bib33" class="workspace-trigger" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;"><font color="#000000">Valant and Newark's 2016</font></span></a><font color="#0c7dbb">&nbsp;</font><span style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">research findings indicated Americans are more concerned about and supportive of initiatives for closing poor-wealthy achievement gaps than race- or ethnicity-based gaps, i.e., Black-White or Hispanic-White, res, respectively. Thus, for the current study, the achievement of and between students economically disadvantaged and their more affluent peers are the outcomes of the main effects for analysis. The next sections outline the method and results from the analysis, followed by a discussion of the findings and conclusions.</span></p><p id="p0065" style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px;"><br></p><h2 id="sectitle0030" class="u-h3 u-margin-l-top u-margin-xs-bottom" style="color: rgb(80, 80, 80); margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: NexusSerif, Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, Times, STIXGeneral, &quot;Cambria Math&quot;, &quot;Lucida Sans Unicode&quot;, &quot;Microsoft Sans Serif&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI Symbol&quot;, &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;, serif; margin-top: 32px !important; margin-bottom: 8px !important; font-size: 1.2rem !important; line-height: 1.333 !important;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;"><b>&nbsp;Method</b></span></h2><p id="p0065" style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 0px;"></p><section id="sec2.2" style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px;"></section><p style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46);"></p><section id="sec2.1" style="color: rgb(46, 46, 46); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px; display: block; font-family: NexusSerif, Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, Times, STIXGeneral, &quot;Cambria Math&quot;, &quot;Lucida Sans Unicode&quot;, &quot;Microsoft Sans Serif&quot;, &quot;Segoe UI Symbol&quot;, &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;"><h3 id="sectitle0035" class="u-h4 u-margin-m-top u-margin-xs-bottom" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(80, 80, 80); margin-top: 24px !important; margin-bottom: 8px !important; font-size: 1rem !important; line-height: 1.4 !important;"><b><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">Data sources</span></b></h3><p id="p0070" style="font-weight: 400; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 16px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">A primary data source for the current study was the County Presidential Election Returns 2000–2020 file available from </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">&nbsp;MIT</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. The data file record layout included the following per election year: the county's name, state, candidate name and party affiliation (e.g., Democrat), and the certified number of votes cast in the county for the candidate. Thus, each county per election year consisted of multiple records, one per candidate.</span></p><p id="p0075" style="font-weight: 400; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 16px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">The Stanford Education Data Archive 4.0 (SEDA) was another primary data source for the current study</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. Maintained by Stanford University's Center for Education Policy Analysis, the SEDA provided achievement measures in math and reading language arts (RLA) from 2009 to 2018 for students in grades 3 through 8 for almost all schools in the United States</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. The school data came from the annual tests administered by each state and commonly reported as numbers of students in each school or district meeting various performance levels on a state's standardized tests. SEDA researchers converted these frequencies to means and standard deviations for the scores in each school or district using a Heteroskedastic Ordered Probit model</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. They then linked the means and standard deviations from the model to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to standardize the average achievement estimates on a common scale within each grade–year–subject. Their scaling implies all the estimates produced were in standard deviation units relative to the NAEP national average</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">. Thus, a positive estimate defined an achievement score above the national average while a negative estimate defined an achievement score below the national average.</span></p><p id="p0080" style="font-weight: 400; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 16px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">Another SEDA data file I used in the current study consisted of covariate measures aggregated at the county level. The data included the percentage of schools in rural, town, suburban, and urban city settings, the percentage of students economically disadvantaged, and the percentage of students on free and reduced lunch. Based on American Community Survey data, SEDA researchers also provided a county-level measure of social-economic status (SES) constructed from median family income, the proportion of adults with a bachelor's degree or higher, the proportion of adults unemployed, the household poverty rate, the proportion of households receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and the proportion of households with children headed by a single mother</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px;">.</span></p></section></section></section>