Idaho
Elections 1994-1996:
The
Role of Political Culture in the
Making
of the Most Republican State
Sean
K. Anderson
Political
Science Department
Idaho
State University
Prepared
for presentation at the annual meeting of the
Southwestern
Social Sciences Association held at New Orleans,
March
26 - 29, 1997
1. Why Has Idaho Become Increasingly More
Republican?
Idaho has long been one of the most
Republican states in the Union. In
recent years it has become even more so and, with the possible emergence of a
national electoral realignment favoring continued Republican dominance in the
United States Congress, Idahoan members of Congress are emerging as prominent
national leaders within the Republican Party as well. Following the elections of 1994 and 1996 one
could even claim that Idaho has become a dominant party system, or in effect, a
one party state. This study will concern
itself primarily with trying to explain why Idaho has become, in effect, the most
Republican state in the Union.
The Republican Party in Idaho has enjoyed
more popular support than the Democratic Party at least since the New Deal
period.[1] Nonetheless its politics maintained at least
the appearance of having a competitive two-party system. While Republican majorities dominated both
chambers of the State Legislature, Idahoan voters still tended to split their
tickets, electing Democrats to be their Governors. Idaho's congressional delegation also
included long-term Democratic incumbents, such as Frank Church, who attained
national prominence during his service in the U.S. Senate. In the most recent elections even this small
degree of bipartisan accommodation by Idaho's voters has ended. In the November 1994 elections Idahoans elected
Phil Batt, a Republican who had earlier run unsuccessfully against Democratic
gubernatorial incumbents. In the same
election voters of Idaho's First Congressional District turned out the
Democratic incumbent, Larry LaRocco, in favor of the inexperienced and
controversial Republican, Helen Chenoweth.
In November 1996 both Republican incumbents of the U.S. House of
Representatives, Representatives Helen Chenoweth and Michael Crapo, were
re-elected while Senator Larry Craig easily won re-election against an
aggressive and well-financed campaign by a Democratic challenger.
In the results of the votes for state
offices the message was even more clear:
Of the 70 seats in the State House of Representatives currently only 12
are held by Democrats. Of the 35 Senate
seats only 5 are held by Democrats. The
only elected Democrat still serving in the state executive is the State
Controller, J.D. Williams. Although
there was no gubernatorial race in 1996 Governor Phil Batt received what most
observers of Idaho's politics regarded as a massive vote of confidence. Shortly after his inauguration Governor Batt
concluded a very controversial settlement with the Department of Energy
regarding the removal of its nuclear waste from the Idaho Nuclear Engineering
Laboratory in eastern Idaho. Many
environmentalists claimed he had surrendered too much to the federal
authorities in exchange for too little.
Democratic opponents seized the opportunity to launch a State Initiative
for the 1996 ballot to rescind this executive agreement. This measure, known as Proposition No. 3, was
defeated by 62.5 percent of those who voted on it. Since about 72.5 percent of eligible voters
in Idaho participated in the 1996 general election and voted on this
Proposition this was seen as a sign of wide popular support for Governor Batt
and as a rebuff to his Democratic critics.
Currently about seven out of every eight County Commissioners and
Sheriffs in Idaho were elected on the Republican ticket in the 1996 election.
All of these events have caused even many
Idahoan Democrats to question whether their party has much of a future in state
politics. The remainder of this paper
attempts to explain the emergence of an apparent Republican hegemony in Idaho
politics.
2. Methods: Selection of Data and Models
The dependent variables selected for
study were the percentages of votes for Republican candidates in the two 1996
U.S. House of Representatives races; in the 1996 Senate race; and in the 1994
races for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and State Secretary of State. While the percentages of votes for Republican
candidates in the U.S. Presidential and the Idahoan state legislative races
could also be examined this study has focused primarily on the aforesaid
dependent variables because, on the one hand the Governor, Lieutenant Governor,
and State Secretary of State are the most prominent elected executive officials
within Idaho, while on the other hand the members of Idaho's congressional
delegation are the most immediate personal links of the voters to their
national government. If independent
variables could not explain support for voter preferences in these races it is
unlikely that they could explain voter preferences in those other races.
While this study sought to explain
Idahoan support for the Republican Party in a re-examination of the state's
political culture it also sought to determine what other socio-economic
demographic variables contributed to support for the Republicans. To produce a parsimonious model incorporating
the most significant socio-economic characteristics of the state, a principle
components factor analysis was used to identify 21 variables out of a larger
subset selected from the County and City Data Book, 1992[2]
to describe socio-economic variation among Idaho's 44 counties.[3] Variables were iteratively eliminated in a
step-wise procedure from the estimated factors until the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin
measure of sampling adequacy was maximized at 80.2 percent. The results of the final varimax rotation are
shown on the following page in Table 1.
The loadings on Factor 1 can be
interpreted as indicators of general economic growth in the state and so the
loadings variable for this Factor was renamed "Economic Growth" to be
used in subsequent regression analyses.
As Factor 2 appeared to represent aspects of urbanization its loadings
variable generated from the Idaho counties data was renamed
"Urbanization." Factor 3 had
measures of educational attainment, high personal socio-economic status and a
high negative loading on a mortality statistics. These attributes of wisdom, wealth, and
health seemed to crystallize the essence of personal success and so the
loadings variable generated was renamed "Personal Prosperity." Finding variables to operationalize
accurately Idaho's political culture is much more problematic. Daniel J. Elazar had designated Idaho's
political culture as 'moralistic' according to his three-fold classification
scheme.[4] However, other scholars have rejected this as
inaccurate: Robert H. Blank concluded following
a careful study of Idaho's history, content analyses of writings of its
founding statesmen, and studies of more recent survey data that the state's
political culture would be better described as predominantly 'individualistic.'[5] To resolve the question of how best to
characterize and measure Idaho's political culture, this study used the
approach first used by Charles A. Johnson of using raw county-level religious
denominational membership statistics to create surrogate measures for the
political culture of each state.[6] This use of denominational markers to
identify the political culture of the individual states was subsequently
refined and improved by David R. Morgan and Sheilah S. Watson,[7]
and which was also adapted to the study of the impact of political culture on
political behavior at the county-level by David R. Morgan and Sean K. Anderson.[8] County-level data on the denominational
affiliations of residents as percentages of total county population were taken
from the most recent church census data conducted under the auspices of the
National Council of the Churches of Christ.[9]
---------------------------------------------------------------
Table 1: Results of Factor
Analysis of Socio-Economic Measures
Factor 1 Factor
2 Factor 3
Bank Demand Deposits
.91308 .29080 .22428
Service Industry Employment
.90896 .21428 .28463
Non-Family Households
.90745 .30038 .22065
Valued Added in Products
.88376 .32130 .12562
Local Government Employment
.87178 .28121 .26319
Bank Savings Deposits
.84337 .25243 .06095
Service Industry Income
.83517 .17119 .31006
Farms of More Than 500 Acres ‑.19910 ‑.77636 .20372
Retail Sales Employment
.13593 .76804 .19991
Farms of Less Than 50 Acres
.48062 .70133 ‑.14230
Medical Services
.27687 .69006 ‑.09524
Farm Earnings ‑.17193 ‑.66556 ‑.27639
Crime Rates/100,000
.28925 .62682 .26460
People Moving Within State
.18258 .60425 .17195
Financial Services and Banking
.47868 .54372 .44858
High School Education
.14397 ‑.16438 .84653
College Degree Holder
.23372 .03821 .81154
Income More Than $50,000/yr
.41349 .15357 .79976
Income Less Than $25,000/yr ‑.32159 .06972 ‑.75005
Population Growth 1980-1990
.06354 .29798 .63044
Death rates/1,000
.00850 ‑.34249 ‑.58648
Variance explained 47.9% 14.5% 9.5%
Total variance explained 71.9%
---------------------------------------------------------------
The rationale for using denominational
measures as proxies is that the three main political cultures were developed
during times when the three groups that produced them adhered to three different
groupings of denominations. Since
political culture and religious culture are transferred by identical methods of
socialization between generations this suggests that religious affiliation can
serve as an indirect way of marking a related political culture.
Unfortunately Elazar's identifications of
religious denominations with political cultures were not always on the
mark. To mention just one example which,
until now, has received little notice from researchers employing his
categories, Elazar mentioned that the Methodist and Anglican (Episcopal)
churches were dominant religious affiliations among the southern colonies yet
he listed them as markers of the individualistic culture rather than the 'traditionalistic'
culture that he linked with the south.
Researchers have used the authoritative work by Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A
Religious History of the American People, to correct misidentifications by
Elazar or else to supply identifications where Elazar provided none.10
This corrective measure, however, cannot be used in cases where new
denominational labels have appeared following the publication of Ahlstrom's
work in 1972 which are therefore mentioned neither in his works nor those of
Elazar.
If the only problem were these small
splinter denominations whose members seldom amount to as much as one percent of
the total adherents of a county, one could safely ignore them altogether. It would be altogether a more serious
obstacle to an accurate analysis of political culture if a purported
identification were to misclassify a much larger percentage of the total
adherents of a county or even a state.
In fact it appears that Elazar misclassified a very prominent U.S.
religious denomination, namely the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
who are more commonly referred to as 'Mormons' and who are hereafter referred
to in the remainder of this study as the 'LDS.'
Elazar classified the LDS as a marker of
the moralistic culture. If in fact the
LDS should instead be classified as traditionalistic or as individualistic,
which could square Elazar's classification with Robert H. Blank's conclusions
regarding Idaho, this would have another important consequence for the study of
American political culture: it would reduce
most of the study of political culture between the states to two dimensions of
traditionalism and individualism.
Researchers have independently established that using Elazar's scheme of
classification as it now stands yields only two predominantly moralistic
states, namely Idaho and Utah.11 This is so only because the dominant
religious denomination in each state is the LDS (currently 55 percent in Idaho
and 90 percent in Utah) which Elazar designated as being moralistic. Since the other non-LDS denominations
designated as moralistic are numerically insignificant and widely dispersed
researchers of political culture could safely ignore them and simplify
measurement and analysis of American political culture to a two-dimensional
spectrum spanning the distance between pure traditionalism and pure
individualism.
Unfortunately careful theory and
empirical measurements both rule out any such simple solution to the correct
identification of the LDS within the category of American political
cultures. The theoretical problem goes
back to Elazar's original reasons for concluding that three political cultures
were created in the pre-colonial period which, since then, have merely been
transferred and intermixed by the streams of migration from the eastern
seaboard into the rest of the territories of the United States.12
During the period of the Stuart dynasty spanning most of the seventeenth
century Puritan parliamentarians and royalist chevaliers came to represent the
most opposite political and religious viewpoints within England. The moralistic political culture resulted
from Puritan attempts to create their own political and religious ideal in New
England. The Carolinas were settled by
people of almost exactly opposite religious and political temperament, namely,
former chevaliers and cronies of the Stuarts who believed in privilege and
status, and who so created what Elazar came to call the traditionalist
culture. The individualistic culture was
created by later non-English immigrants to the port cities of entry who had to
struggle in a competitive urban environment for scarce jobs and
opportunities. From this competitive and
self-interested environment came the individualistic outlook that perceives
politics as a marketplace for social goods and services. Once the members of each group, or rather
their descendants, began to immigrate westward they brought not only their
carts and cattle but also their religious denominations and their political
attitudes with themselves. In short that
is the theory of the streams of political culture that Elazar used to identify
the cultures of the various states.
Both Joseph Smith, founder of the LDS
community, and Brigham Young, Smith's successor as leader of the LDS, were born
in Vermont although Smith himself grew up in New York. Many of Smith's original followers hailed
from either New York or other areas that Elazar identified with the moralistic
culture. Presumably then when the LDS
migrated to the Rocky Mountain Basin they brought along their moralistic heritage
with them. There are two flaws with this
analysis, however. First the migration
of the LDS to what is now Idaho and Utah was not comparable to the other
streams of migration. Instead it was an
actual exodus planned by Joseph Smith and carried out by his successor Brigham
Young, to deliver the LDS from the persecution of anti-Mormons and to establish
their own vision of 'Zion' in the territory outside of the control of the
United States. In short it was much more
comparable to the Puritans' decision to abandon England and create their own political
and religious order in New England than it was to much more haphazard streams
of immigration that occurred elsewhere in the West. In fact it may be argued that the LDS
experiment itself generated a new political culture distinct from the other three
identified by Elazar.13
The second flaw is in Elazar identifying
the streams of migration to Utah and Idaho as originating solely in New England
which is contradicted by ample historical evidence. Among other things, Joseph Smith ordered his
followers to maintain detailed personal journals which have become a rich
source of historical knowledge about the early LDS community and the lives of
its members. The journals of many of the
missionaries sent out by Joseph Smith revealed that they proselytized
extensively in the upper and lower reaches of the Ohio and Mississippi
valleys. Following the murder of Joseph
Smith and the exodus to Utah, Brigham Young directed the LDS missionaries to
win converts among the skilled artisans and craftsmen of the mill towns and
industrial centers of England who were then urged to immigrate to Utah. In short from the converts won in the regions
of Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky came many LDS with a traditionalist
background. The conditions of English
industrial centers were no less harsh or demanding than those found in the U.S.
port cities of entry which also could produce attitudes and values similar to
those of the individualistic culture. In
short there is no reason for identifying the political culture of the LDS with
just one of the three cultures Elazar proposed.
In fact if the LDS succeeded in creating a new society they also likely
produced their own political culture distinct from any of the three identified
by Elazar.
Analysis of the empirical data regarding
denominational affiliations in Idaho confirm the existence of a fourth LDS
political culture. Given the reasons to
doubt identification of the LDS with the moralistic culture when the county
denominational data were summed together into their respective political
cultural categories, the LDS figures were not added to any of them but left out
and summed separately. Then the four
variables (the LDS measure and the other three sums) were factor-analyzed to
reveal the correlation matrix obtaining between them. The results are seen below on Table 2 on the
following page. A factor loading
variable incorporating all significant effects of political culture represented
in all of these variables was created by the factor analysis and designated 'ID
Political Culture.' Its loading matrix
is also presented on the following page in Table 2.
Note that all of the variables created
using Elazar's identifications have positive correlation coefficients with each
other. Since the LDS sum instead has
negative correlations with all of these variables there is no reason to
consider adding the LDS sum to any of these others because none of these others
appears to be measuring the same aspect of political culture implicit in the
LDS variable.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Table 2: Results of Factor
Analysis of Idaho Denomination Sums
Correlation Matrix:
Moralistic
Traditionalist Individualistic LDS
Moralistic 1.00000
Traditionalistic .14054 1.00000
Individualistic .53572 .37317 1.00000
LDS ‑.48126 ‑.63700 ‑.60266 1.00000
Factor Matrix: ID Political
Culture
LDS ‑.89315
Individualistic .82165
Traditionalistic .68752
Moralistic .68396
---------------------------------------------------------------
One could handle the existence of a
fourth LDS culture in one of two ways.
First one could use all four variables in regressions to explain the
dependent variables and evaluate the models produced. Second one could use principle component
analysis to produce political cultural factors that would be used instead of
the original sums of denominational data.
Both approaches were used and the results compared and evaluated.
On the following page, Table 3 shows the
results of using the first approach:
Those variables that have significance within the 5 percent level of
confidence are marked with an asterisk.
Those variables that have significance within a 1 percent level of
confidence have been marked with double asterisks. While the LDS variable proved significant in
explaining the contribution of political culture to votes in the U.S. Senate
and House of Representatives races in 1996 none of the other political culture variables
were significant.
The regression coefficients for each
independent variable have been standardized so that the relative effect of each
variable can be more easily seen. The
District No. 1 Dummy variable reflects the difference in votes for Republican
candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives races depending on the
District. The unstandardized coefficient
for the District No. 1 Dummy variable was roughly -12.2 reflecting in part the
average difference in the votes for each candidate, Helen Chenoweth receiving
on about 50 percent of the votes in District 1 compared with an average vote of
68 percent for Mike Crapo in District 2.
However the LDS variable proves to be insignificant in the races for the
state executive offices.
On page 8 Table 4. shows what results
were obtained by using the ID Political Culture variable derived from the
factor analysis summarized in Table 2.
Note that all the variables that are significant fall within a 1 percent
confidence interval. Note also that the
ID Political Culture variable does prove to be significant in the Lieutenant
Governor race of 1994.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Table 3: Results of Using Four Denominational Scores to
Represent Political Culture
Dependent Variables
-----------------------------
Y1 Y2 Y3
-----------------------------------------
Independent Variables r T-value
r T-Value r
T-Value
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Economic Growth -.05 .6660
-.06 .4581 .04 .7841
Urbanization -.05
.1248 -.18 .0648 -.29 .0642
Personal Prosperity
-.43 .0008** -.21 .0273* -.40 .0106*
Moralistic Culture
-.12 .3775 -.14 .1954
-.24 .1739
Individualistic Culture
-.11 .5017 -.01 .9024
.12 .5295
Traditionalistic Culture
.06 .2569 -.01 .9546
.19 .3031
LDS-Specific Culture
.50 .0078** .41 .0086**
.02 .9329
District No. 1 Dummy
-.40 .0027**
Adjusted R2 .47
.68 .18
Y4 Y5
---------------------------------------------
r T-value
r T-Value
---------------------------------------------
Economic Growth .04
.7450 .00 .9973
Urbanization .02 .9106
-.13-----.4196
Personal Prosperity
-.44 .0041** -.43
.0081**
Moralistic Culture
-.11 .5124 -.30
.1017
Individualistic Culture
-.25 .1992 -.03-----.8652
Traditionalistic Culture
.25 .1789 .08 .6754
LDS-Specific Culture
.37 .0977 .03-----.8825
Adjusted R2 .23
.12
Dependent Variables:
Y1 = Republican
Vote for U.S. Senator (1996)
Y2 = Republican
Vote for U.S. House Representatives (1996)
Y3 = Republican
Vote for Governor (1994)
Y4 = Republican
Vote for Lieutenant Governor
Y5 = Republican
Vote for State Secretary of State
---------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------
Table 4: Results of Using A Single Factor Score to
Represent Political Culture
Dependent Variables
-----------------------------
Y1 Y2 Y3
-----------------------------------------
Independent Variables r T-value
r T-Value r
T-Value
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Economic Growth -.04 .6874
-.06 .4510 .03 .8597
Urbanization -.16 .1679
-.15 .0979 -.22 .1499
Personal Prosperity
-.47 .0002** -.26 .0060** -.42
.0066**
ID Political Culture
-.60 .0000** -.47 .0003** -.22
.8681
District Dummy
-.47 .0001**
________ ________ ________
Adjusted R2 .47
.68 .16
Y4 Y5
---------------------------------------------
r T-value
r T-Value
---------------------------------------------
Economic Growth .03
.8454 -.02 .9102
Urbanization .06 .6976
-.07-.6595
Personal Prosperity
-.45 .0035** -.44 .0060**
ID Political Culture
-.45 .0063** -.23-.1627
________ ________
Adjusted R2 .19
.12
Dependent
Variables:
Y1 = Republican
Vote for U.S. Senator (1996)
Y2 = Republican
Vote for U.S. House Representatives (1996)
Y3 = Republican
Vote for Governor (1994)
Y4 = Republican
Vote for Lieutenant Governor
Y5 = Republican
Vote for State Secretary of State
---------------------------------------------------------------
A word about the interpretation of the
coefficients and their signs is in order.
In the first sets of regressions in Table 3 the LDS coefficient signs
are positive. This is intuitively
obvious because the LDS political culture is interpreted as being one
supportive of the Republicans. In the
regressions in Table 4 the ID Political Culture coefficient signs, however, are
negative. This is because the LDS
component of this factor loading, which is the largest single loading, happens
to be negative. A high positive measure
of the LDS political culture in any county would thus be translated into a
strong negative measure in this factor loading variable. In other words the effect of the LDS cultural
component is really positive in both sets of regressions.
The much more consistent pattern of
correlations and much better T-significance statistics reveal that the models
in Table 4., using the ID Political Culture variable follow the better
approach. The insignificance of the coefficients
generated by the models in Table 3 do allow us to conclude that the non-LDS
variables in fact contribute little to the effectiveness of the ID Political
Culture variable which appears to be due largely to the effects of the LDS
culture.
3. Analysis of Findings:
The regressions in Table 4 lead to
several conclusions. First the ID
Political Culture variable is significant not only in the regressions using the
national office election races but also in the Lieutenant Governor's race. This suggests that the existence of this
political culture is more apt to be reflected in votes cast for national
government officials than for state officials.
The cases of the races for Governor and Lieutenant Governor also shows
that the LDS-component of the ID Political Culture variable does not simply
reflect a sectarian preference by LDS members to vote for candidates of their
own denomination but rather reveals their tendency to distinguish between
candidates on the basis of their respective ideologies and policy
preferences. In the Governor's race Phil
Batt, the Republican candidate, was not an LDS member while his Democratic
opponent, Larry Echohawk, was an LDS member, yet this conferred no apparent
electoral advantage to Echohawk in this race.
In this race Echohawk tried to portray himself as a 'moderate' Democrat
and openly distanced himself from the Clinton administration, a tactic that may
have cost him Democratic support while winning little support from Republican
voters. In the Lieutenant Governor's
race neither candidate was an LDS member but the Democratic candidate, John
Peavey, a former member of the State Senate, had a reputation of being a
strongly liberal Democrat.14 The significance of the ID Political Culture
in the Lieutenant Governor's race contrasted with its lack of significance in
the Governor's race may also reflect the tendency of voters to react to their
political culture in races in which there is a more marked ideological contrast
between candidates.
Although the Latter-day Saints make up only
fifty-five percent of the population of Idaho they have assumed such a
disproportionate influence over state politics that this political culture has
become a tacit point of conformity among elected and appointed officials within
the state government. One of the
complaints often heard among Idahoan Democrats is that all Idahoans seem so
uniformly conservative that Idahoan Democrats speaking with Democrats of other
states are easily be mistaken by them for Republicans. With respect to national
politics, however, there is no automatic agreement between the values held by
most Idahoans and the values espoused by politicians and parties outside of
this state. In that arena competitors do
not all subscribe to the same vision of the public good and therefore Idahoan
political culture exerts more influence in the choice between opposing parties
and candidates. Therefore it is in such
races that political culture comes more into play in affecting how Idahoans
vote.
A second conclusion is that the Personal
Prosperity variable is the one socio-economic variable that was significant in
every one of the regression models. This
suggests that the more Idahoan voters feel they are doing well personally the
more likely they would be to vote against the Republicans. The converse of this is more easy to
understand, however: If Idahoans feel they are not doing better this translates
into votes against the Democrats.
Because a large number of Idahoans derive their incomes from ranching,
farming, mining, or logging, many of them believe that restrictive
environmental regulations imposed under Democratic-controlled Congresses and
Presidential administrations are the sources of their own financial
troubles. Another interpretation which
is consistent with the foregoing is that those Idahoans who have higher levels
of education are more likely to be those who tend to have more liberal
political attitudes than most Idahoans and therefore are more likely to vote
Democratic. It should be noted here that
the components of the Personal Prosperity factor loading variable are related
to the values of individual achievement, personal independence, and that hard
work Robert H. Blank identified as the main themes of his analysis of
individualism as the predominant political culture in Idaho.15
Conclusion:
From the present short study several
conclusions follow.
First, the method suggested by Daniel
Elazar to operationalize political culture within the United States can be
further developed and applied to help explain some of the variation in state
elections to both national and state offices.
Another conclusion, however, is that the
three-fold model proposed by Elazar should not be applied mechanically and
without critical reflection. The same
considerations that led Elazar to propose the existence of three political
cultures in the United States could be extended to discover new variations on
that original model.
This study also shows that a distinctive
political culture exists in the inter-mountain western United States that is
the product of the unique LDS pioneering and community-building efforts in the
Great Basin region. This political
culture is distinct from the original three proposed by Elazar although it
resembles each of them in some limited respects: The LDS value system, that stresses the
importance of family, church, community and the obligation for members to serve
in each sphere according to one's gifts, resembles the moralistic culture of
New England. Within the world of the LDS
community there are also hierarchies of authority linking each young
"elder" and church member to the General Authorities of the church as
well as the division between those who live up to the church's rigorous
standards of personal conduct and those who have failed and fallen by the
wayside. In this respect it resembles
the traditionalistic culture of caste and honor of the antebellum south. However rank, respect, and authority within
the LDS community are not arbitrary ascriptive values but based on personal
effort and achievement since "free agency" rather than predestination
defines one's station and condition. In
this respect the LDS ethic strongly resembles individualism.
This study also reveals the importance of
a socio-economic variable identified as "Personal Prosperity" which
was seen to be significant in explaining support or opposition to Republican
candidates in all of the races for national and state offices examined in this
research.
Overall this study has demonstrated the
importance of the dimension of political culture in understanding the
ascendence of Republican hegemony in Idaho.
It suggests that more study of the exact nature and components of this
political culture will lead to a even better understanding of this phenomenon.
Endnotes
[1]. Robert H. Blank, Regional Diversity of Political Values: Idaho Political Culture, Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1978, pp. 55-57.
[2]. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, County and City Data Book 1994: A Statistical Abstract Supplement, Washington, D.C.,: U.S. Government Printing Office, August 1994.
[3]. This study follows the method of Richard I. Hoffenben's "Socioeconomic Dimensions of the American States," Midwest Journal of Political Science, 12 (August 1968): 401-418, as well as the approach used by David R. Morgan and Sean K. Anderson, "Assessing the Effects of Political Culture: Religious Affiliation and County Political Behavior," Social Science Journal, 28(2): 163-174.
[4]. Daniel J. Elazar, Cities of the Prairie, New York: Basic Books, 1979, pp. 475-476.
[5]. Robert H. Blank, ibid., pp. 171-172.
[6]. Charles A. Johnson, "Political Culture in American States: Elazar's Formulation Examined," American Journal of Political Science, 20(3): 491-509
[7]. David R. Morgan and Sheilah S. Watson, "Political Culture, Political System Characteristics, and Public Policies Among the American States," Publius, 21(Spring 1991): 35-37.
[8]. David R. Morgan and Sean K. Anderson, "Assessing the Effects of Political Culture: Religious Affiliation and County Political Behavior," Social Science Journal, 28 (Spring 1991): 163-174.
[9]. Martin B. Bradley, Norman M. Green, Jr., Dale E. Jones, Mac Lynn, and Lou McNeil, Churches and Church Membership in the United States 1990: An Enumeration by Region, State and County Based on Data Gathered for 133 Church Groupings, Atlanta, Georgia: Glenmary Research Center, 1992.
10. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972. David. R. Morgan and Sheilah S. Watson, "Political Culture, Political System Characteristics, and Public Policies Among the American States," Publius 21(2): 35.
11. Morgan and Watson, pp. 40,42.
12. Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States, New York: Crowell, 1970.
13. Elazar, ibid., pp. 118-119.
14. Randy Stapilus, 1996: The Idaho Political Almanac, Fourth Edition, Boise: Ridenbaugh Press, 1996, p. 50.
15. Robert H. Blank, ibid., pp. 171-172.