Volume 3, Issue 2

According to Morris Fiorina, Americans are moderate, tolerant, and ambivalent in their political attitudes. This has always been true and it is, if anything, more true today than in the past. The culture war is almost entirely an elite phenomenon, driven by a small group of activists on the left and right who exert influence far out of proportion to their numbers. It is the elites and activists who are polarized, not the public. In this study we use data from the American National Election Studies and national exit polls to test five major claims made by Fiorina about the state of public opinion in the United States. This evidence indicates that while some of the claims of culture war proponents are overstated, there are deep divisions in America between Democrats and Republicans, between red state voters and blue state voters, and between religious voters and secular voters. These divisions are not confined to a small minority of elected officials and activists—they involve a large segment of the public and they are likely to increase in the future as a result of long-term trends affecting American society.

An analysis of county-level data from the 2004 election shows only slight increases in geographic polarization and political segregation. In addition, there is no evidence that strongly partisan counties became more so between 2000 and 2004.

Fiorina’s book is powerful enough to become canonical, and other texts concerning polarization may fall by the wayside. Fiorina’s book, however, comes with a lens which obscures certain phenomena that previous texts concerning polarization have thought to be important. In this article we describe this other literature, largely outside of the field of political science, and describe its foci. We argue for retaining the concerns of this previous literature which address questions about long-standing value differences, the source of these differences and how they are likely to be mediated through institutions in the public sphere.

I consider the extent to which Culture War? reached its intended audience—the general public—using systematic data on print media coverage in the United States. Most major newspapers and national magazines cited the book’s findings. Coverage appears to be higher in the Northeast and South than in the Midwest and West. Proportionally more publications in blue states than in red states covered the book. Print media coverage peaked around the November 2004 elections. Overall, the book reached its target audience.

What do we learn by examining the so-called “culture wars” in the context of local government? Local politics are both similar and different from the partisan skirmishes evidenced at the national levels. More importantly by considering how local politics differs from national politics in the culture war, we are reminded that resources of social capital and integrative leadership matter.

The concept of a "culture war" has occasioned almost as much conflict among scholars as it depicts within societies. Although it should be more of a variable than an absolute, this paper argues that the phrase over-reaches as a description of the U.S. during and since the 2004 Presidential election. Not only does the U.S. fail to fulfill a criterion of "widespread polarization," but it also falls mercifully short of the kind of "concerted violence" and the pursuit of "illegitimate government control" that the notion of a war requires. The paper ends on a comparative note with brief accounts of research visits to four societies where culture wars have been fully realized as a lamentable fact of daily life: Northern Ireland, Guatemala, Israel, and India. These sketches -- like the argument itself -- are drawn from the author's recent book, Crossing the Gods (2001).

Do conservatives suffer discrimination in academe? In “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty,” Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte argue that “conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats.” Using a survey of 1643 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities, they conclude that their results are “consistent with the hypothesis that political conservatism confers a disadvantage in the competition for political advancement.” In this response, we show that Rothman, Lichter, and Nevitte’s work is plagued by theoretical and methodological problems that render their conclusions unsustainable by the available evidence. Furthermore, we offer an alternative hypothesis theoretically consistent with their findings. Unfortunately, we were unable to subject our alternative hypothesis to empirical assessment (or even to replicate the initial results of Rothman, Lichter and Nevitte) since they have refused to make their data available to the scientific community.