Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper reports the results of an analysis of identity politics and political culture based on a comparative study of thirty community sample survey datasets obtained from the Roper Social Capital Benchmark Survey. Although our inquiry was primarily driven by a substantive interest in learning about identity politics in various local settings, an important secondary purpose was to explore the potential of the Roper survey as a resource for comparative urban research. Our binary logit analysis of the national sample survey data showed that each identity variable we studied – gender, race, class and religion – had a statistically significant relationship with one or more of our dependent variables (political participation, ideology, and opinion about immigrants). In our independent replications of that same analysis on data for the community samples, however, the findings in many cases deviated markedly from our results for the national sample. We concluded that “place matters” and should be taken into account in generalizing from national surveys to local communities. To investigate why place matters, we constructed a New Political Culture (NPC) index based on such community characteristics as the extent of social diversity, nontraditional families and gender roles, and acceptance of gays and lesbians. Our predictions that the NPC index scores would be positively correlated with a community’s levels of liberalism, electoral and political protest activity and pro-immigrant opinion, and negatively correlated with conservatism, were strongly confirmed. We also found that variations in local political culture helped to explain some but not all of the observed differences in the patterns of relationships between identity variables and political outcomes. Despite the limitations of the Roper community samples and of our methods and measures, we think our study contributes some interesting and intriguing findings about the relationships between local culture, group identities, and political outcomes in U.S. urban communities. We also believe our study demonstrates the potential of the Social Capital Benchmark Survey as a rich resource for comparative urban research.