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The Renaissance of Political Culture Or the Renaissance of the Ecological Fallacy? Author(S): Mitchell A

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The Renaissance of Political Culture Or the Renaissance of the Ecological Fallacy? Author(S): Mitchell A The Renaissance of Political Culture or the Renaissance of the Ecological Fallacy? Author(s): Mitchell A. Seligson Source: Comparative Politics, Vol. 34, No. 3, (Apr., 2002), pp. 273-292 Published by: Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New York Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4146954 Accessed: 15/07/2008 12:10 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=phd. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org The Renaissance of Political Cultureor the Renaissance of the Ecological Fallacy? MitchellA. Seligson "If within-system regressions do not differ from zero in all systems, but the total regression does differ from zero, the ecological correlation is spurious."I Adam Przeworskiand Henry Teune in this quotation from their seminal study of compara- tive methodology alert readersto the risk of committing the classical ecological fal- lacy, first described by Robinson, when attempting to overcome one of the great challenges in comparativeresearch, bridging the gap between micro and macro lev- els of analysis. As is well known, Robinson demonstratedthat patterns found at the (macro) level of the system may contradict the true patterns found at the (micro) within-system level.2 Advances made by Gary King toward solving the ecological inference problem work well when individual-level data are absent or difficult or costly to obtain, as long as one develops a data base of many, relatively homoge- neous ecological units.3 But in recent years researchers who have rich individual- level data bases have been aggregatingtheir data at the national level. Not everyone is persuaded of the validity of their comparisons, however. For example, serious questions have been raised about Ronald Inglehart's"postmaterialist values."4 The purposeof this articleis to recall Przeworskiand Teune'swarning against a par- ticularform of the ecological fallacy,the individualisticfallacy. The individualisticfalla- cy is the error"of incorrectlyimputing to the higherorder unit the aggregationof values of individuals."5This articlewill reexaminethe conclusions drawnby what may be the most importanteffort since GabrielAlmond and Sidney Verba'sThe Civic Cultureto bridge the micro-macrogap in comparativepolitics. In an impressivelybroad and influ- ential body of research,Ronald Inglehart makes an explicit link between an aggregation of micro-level attitudes,denominated as political culture,and the macro-levelvariable of regime type.6Specifically, Inglehart attempts to show that a particularform of politi- cal culture,civic culture,is stronglylinked to the emergenceand stabilityof democracy. He finds a direct causal connectionbetween what he calls the civic culture syndrome, on the one hand,and democracy,on the other. The cornerstone of Inglehart'sapproach rests upon the variable of interpersonal trust. This variable is also central to Robert Putnam's explanation of democracy in Italy in Making Democracy Work.7The logic of The Civic Culture was straightfor- ward: no trust, no secondary associations, no genuine political participation,and no democracy.In other words, individuals in a society must trust each other in order to form and join civil society organizations.In the aggregate, then, societies undergird- 273 ComparativePolitics April 2002 ed by this individual level of high trust and the consequent constructionof a strong civil society ought eventually to emerge as stable democracies. Inglehartelaborates further on this thesis by including a measure of support for revolutionarychange. This variable is, in effect, the low or negative end of the system affect variablethat was an important component of Almond and Verba's conception of civic culture.8 Inglehartadds to their notion of civic culture yet a third variable, life satisfaction.9 Those who are more satisfied with their lives are thought to be more likely to sup- port democraticrule over the long run. Inglehartfinds that these three variables-interpersonal trust, supportfor revolu- tionary change, and life satisfaction-form a "broadsyndrome of related attitudes... [that] show impressive stability over time." "Life satisfaction, political satisfaction, interpersonaltrust, and support for the existing social order all tend to go together. They constitute a syndrome of positive attitudes toward the world one lives in."10 Hence there are two key elements of Inglehart'sthesis: the interconnectednessof these three attitudesand their link with democracy. The empiricaldata presentedby Inglehartsuggest that a syndromehas indeedbeen uncovered."1In a LISRELmodel estimatedacross countriesas the unit of analysis,the coefficients between the individual items and the index of civic culture constructed from them are +.60 for interpersonaltrust, +.79 for life satisfaction,and -.81 for support for revolutionarychange. Thus, Inglehartseems to have satisfied the first componentof his thesis: that a syndromeof interconnectedvariables has been found. In Inglehart's LISREL model that tests the second element, he finds a direct coefficient of .74 between civic culture (measuredin 1981-1986) and years of continuousdemocracy, 1900-1986. He concludes that "political culture is a crucial link between economic developmentand democracy;... over half of the variancein the persistenceof democ- raticinstitutions can be attributedto the effects of political culturealone."12 Inglehart'sfindings notwithstanding,aggregating survey data to produce a single datapoint carriesgreat risk. Scholarshave long known that means can seriouslydistort the underlyingdistributions of data sets, yet Inglehart'swork relies upon nationalmeans to characterizethe cultureof each countryin his data base. Moreover,while a national culturecan providea contextualenvironment that can boost or suppresscertain attitudes and behaviors,Inglehart himself repeatedlyemphasizes that individualattitudes are cru- cial. For example, in discussing the importanceof trust on the renaissanceof political culture,he states:"A sense of trustis also requiredfor the functioningof the democratic rules of the game: one must view the opposition as a loyal opposition, who will not imprisonor execute you if you surrenderpolitical power but can be relied upon to gov- ern within the laws and to surrenderpolitical power reciprocallyif your side wins the next election."13He continues,emphasizing the importanceof individualvalues: A long-term commitmentto democratic institutionsamong the public is also required,in orderto sus- tain democracy when conditions are dire. Even when democracy has no reply to the question, What 274 MitchellA. Seligson have you done for me lately?,it may be sustainedby diffusefeelings that it is an inherentlygood thing.These feelings in turnmay reflect economic and other successes that one experiencedlong ago or learnedabout second-hand as partof one'searly socialization.14 More recently,Inglehart approvingly cites Axelrod'sgame theoreticwork on cooper- ation, which suggests that social norms directly influence individual cooperativeand noncooperativebehavior.15 Social norms,then, may well interactwith individualvalues. Inglehart'sfindings supportthat effect. Within most societies, more highly educated individualshave higher interpersonaltrust than those with less education,and among the advanced industrial societies the gap in trust between low and high education widens considerably.16I am unaware,however, of any political culture research that arguesthat individualattitudes are irrelevantor that they systematicallyproduce behav- iors regularlyat variancewith those attitudes.After all, it is individualswho vote, partic- ipate, and even rebel. While they do so in partbased on nationalnorms, their own val- ues are presumed to matter directly for their own behavior. Hence, on the basis of Inglehart'sfinding of a link betweentrust and democracy,one would not predictfor any countrythat people with lower levels of trustwould be more supportiveof democracy, while those with higher levels of trustwould be less supportive,although it is possible to imagine conditionsunder which thatreversal might occur.If that reversalwere wide- spread,however, one would not expect to find macro-level associations linking high trust to democracy.In fact, one would normallypredict a positive micro-association, even if a weak one, between trust and supportfor democracy,producing congruence betweenmicro- and macro-levelassociations. If half of the populationof a nation expresseshigh interpersonaltrust and the other half low
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