ABSTRACT

One of the central purposes of the Cities of the Prairie study is to map and monitor sources, manifestations, and effects of subcultural variations in the local political arena. The first study identified significant relationships between political culture, ethnicity, and religion and between those three factors and three geohistorical factors: sectionalism, migration, and the frontier. The emergence of the study of political culture represented an attempt to come to grips with the modalities one finds within enduring political communities, which seem to have their roots in the very character, or social psychology, of the members of those communities. American political subcultures arose out of very real sociocultural differences among the peoples who came to the United States over the years, differences that date back to the very beginnings of settlement in British North America and to the Old World before that. The moralistic political culture emphasizes conception of the commonwealth as the basis for democratic government.