The efficacy of today's American political culture in closing the achievement gap

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.

More than a half-century ago, Daniel 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. The individualistic political culture regions consisted of the middle-Atlantic states, the Midwest, and the Mountain States. the 

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. 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. The common citizen was regarded as the primary political actor and wide political participation was encouraged as a duty to perform. The moralistic political culture regions consisted of New England, the Great Lakes region, and the West Coast.

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. 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. The traditionalistic political culture regions were isolated mainly to the South and Southwest states of the US.

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.