Is There a Culture War? Conflicting Value Structures in American Public
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American Political Science Review Vol. 108, No. 4 November 2014 doi:10.1017/S0003055414000380 c American Political Science Association 2014 Is There a Culture War? Conflicting Value Structures in American Public Opinion WILLIAM G. JACOBY Michigan State University his article examines the “culture war” hypothesis by focusing on American citizens’ choices among a set of core values. A geometric model is developed to represent differences in the ways T that individuals rank-order seven important values: freedom, equality, economic security, social order, morality, individualism, and patriotism. The model is fitted to data on value choices from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. The empirical results show that there is an enormous amount of heterogeneity among individual value choices; the model estimates contradict any notion that there is a consensus on fundamental principles within the mass public. Further, the differences break down along political lines, providing strong evidence that there is a culture war generating fundamental divisions within twenty-first century American society. ulture is a multifaceted concept. But, one ap- many conflicting preferences about fundamental prin- proach that has achieved some prominence in ciples like freedom, equality, and the like. Furthermore, C political science defines “culture” as the set of the variability breaks down along social and political values that are salient within a given society. Building lines. These findings have important implications for upon this idea, a heterogeneous nation like the United understanding the nature of conflict and disagreements States could easily generate a variety of distinct and within the contemporary American political system. different value orientations within its population. If The remainder of the article is organized as fol- these differing value structures imply mutually exclu- lows: The next section introduces the basic concepts sive social arrangements and societal goals, they could addressed in this study and considers why existing produce the kinds of fundamental disagreements that research may leave some important questions unan- have been characterized as “culture wars” in recent swered. The two sections after that develop the geo- scholarly and popular commentary. This article pro- metric model used to represent individual value choices vides an empirical investigation of these ideas, using and describe the data that are used in the analysis. The some unique data obtained from the 2006 Cooperative three sections after that present the empirical analysis Congressional Election Study. by estimating the geometric model of American politi- The analysis below will use individual value choices cal culture, examining the religious and political foun- as the raw material to create a structural model of the dations of variability in value choices, and assessing the predominant value preferences that exist within the sources and magnitude of value conflict. Finally, the American mass public. The model, itself, is a geometric concluding section considers this study’s implications representation with features that are fairly intuitive and for scholarly understandings of values-based cultural easy to interpret. And, the elements of the model are disagreements and emphasizes the clearly political na- amenable to systematic analysis using a set of statistical ture of the culture war that does seem to exist in twenty- tools that are designed for use with angular data. first century America. The results from the empirical analysis provide strong evidence for the culture wars hypothesis. Amer- icans’ value choices are highly heterogeneous, with BACKGROUND William G. Jacoby is Professor, Department of Political Science, Culture is critically important to an understanding of Michigan State University ([email protected]). public opinion because it provides the context within Special thanks go to Saundra K. Schneider. This project could which political beliefs and attitudes exist (Bennett not have been completed without her assistance and support. I also 1980). In effect, culture delimits the “boundaries” of appreciate very much the excellent comments and suggestions that I legitimate opinions within a society (Wildavsky 1987). received from Paul Abramson, Joseph Bafumi, David Hill, Christo- pher Larimer, Paul Quirk, Kyle Saunders, the anonymous APSR While such statements emphasize the importance of referees, and the members of the MSU Political Science Research culture, they beg the question of what culture really is. Group: Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo, Seo Youn Choi, David Ciuk, Do- minique Lewis, Robert Lupton, Niccole Pamphilis, Kurt Pyle, and Daniel Thaler. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Culture, Values, and Politics 2011 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Associa- tion, the University of Georgia Department of Political Science, the In fact, there are several theoretical perspectives on Center for Political Studies Interdisciplinary Workshop on Politics and Policy (University of Michigan), the Michigan State University culture that exist within the political science literature. Political Science Friday Seminar Series, the 2012 Annual Meetings The classic description of American culture is liber- of the Midwest Political Science Association, the University of Ok- alism tempered by democracy, as originally described lahoma Department of Political Science, the 2012 Elections, Pub- in detail by Tocqueville and extolled by more recent lic Opinion, and Parties Conference, and the University of North Carolina American Politics Research Group. Replication data and theorists such as Hartz (1955) and Katznelson (1996). materials for this study are available online at http://thedata.harvard. Critics, however, charge that the emphasis on liberal edu/dvn/dv/JacobyData. democracy masks a variety of cultural challenges that 754 American Political Science Review Vol. 108, No. 4 have arisen throughout American history, generally Culture War? from groups that do not enjoy the full benefits of liberal society. So, for example, Rogers Smith argues that “the Despite the potential for conflict based upon values, distinctive feature of American political culture has the traditional view is that the United States is charac- not been its liberal, republican, or ‘ascriptive Ameri- terized by a general consensus on fundamental orien- canist’ elements but, rather, (a) more complex pattern tations (Dahl 1989; Devine 1972; McClosky and Zaller of apparently inconsistent combinations of traditions 1984). Recently, however, the existence of this soci- ...(1993, 558).” etal consensus has been called into question. Various From an empirical perspective, Almond and Verba’s commentators have suggested that a “culture war” early (1963), but still influential, comparative work exists, in which “...Americans are taking sides in a emphasizes societal orientations toward political con- civil war between incompatible views of the Ameri- tenders and the institutions of power within a polity. can way of life (Baker 2005, p. 65).” Sociologist James Culture, itself, emerges from the particular combina- Hunter provided one of the first systematic statements tion of individual orientations (which Almond and of the culture wars hypothesis: “The divisions of po- Verba classified as participant, subject, and parochial) litical consequence today are ...the result of differing that exists in a given society. Inglehart (1997) argues worldviews. ... (The conflict revolves) around our most that cultures vary according to the degree to which ba- fundamental and cherished assumptions about how to sic human needs are met. Societies can be arrayed along order our lives—our own lives and our lives together a continuum that ranges from those in which attempts in this society (1991, p. 42).” Thus, Hunter succinctly to address basic human needs dominate everyday life to points out that the culture war is disagreement about cultures in which higher levels of socioeconomic well- basic value orientations and also that it has immediate being enable citizens to focus on post-material values political consequences. of self-fulfillment. Still another distinctive view of cul- The idea of a culture war definitely has had great res- ture is provided in the work of Douglas and Wildavsky onance in American electoral politics over the past two (1982), who argue that societies inevitably experience decades. In his famous speech to the 1992 Republican two distinct dimensions of social organization, which National Convention, Patrick Buchanan stated: they call “group” and “grid.” The former involves the degree to which people view themselves as individuals There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a or members of a collective social entity, and the latter cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as focuses on the degree to which people are autonomous the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. decision-makers or limited by externally imposed con- straints (e.g., Ripberger, Jenkins-Smith, and Herron While more recent candidates have not used the spe- 2011). cific term as freely, they have focused directly on many The preceding theories all provide distinctive views of the themes associated with cultural conflict, such of culture, and each has generated a voluminous lit- as abortion, contraception, gay rights, global warming, erature. But, a common thread across these different and traditional lifestyles. As evidence of this, the 2012 lines