Cultural Analysis

Volume 1, Politics, Public Law, and Administration

Aaron Wildavsky, Paul Roazen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351524612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As a result of a lifetime of incomparably wide-ranging investigations, Aaron Wildavsky concluded that politics in the United States and elsewhere was a patterned activity, exhibiting recurring regularities. Political values, beliefs, and institutions were neither endlessly varied, nor haphazardly organized. They tended to exhibit a limited range of variation, and were organized in discoverable, predictable ways. In Cultural Analysis, the fourth collection of his essays posthumously published by Transaction, Wildavsky argues that American politics, public law, and public administration are the contested terrain of rival, inescapable political cultures.Analysts of American politics distinguish liberals from conservatives and Democrats from Republicans, but do not explain how these categories of political allegiance develop, maintain themselves, or change. Wildavsky offers a cultural-functional explanation for ideological and partisan coherence and realignment. Wildavsky also felt that these dualisms did not adequately capture the ideological and partisan variation he observed on the political landscape. Like others, he detected another recurring strain of political allegiance: that of classical liberalism or libertarianism. People of this political stripe valued freedom more than equality (the primary political value of contemporary liberals), and also more than order, the primary political value of conservatives.The value of Wildavsky's reconceptualization of the ideological and social foundations of political conflict, compromise, and coalition is assessed here by Wildavsky's former colleagues and students at the University of California, Berkeley: Dennis Coyle, Richard Ellis, Robert Kagan, Austin Ranney, and Brendon Swedlow.

Part 1

American Politics: Abolitionists, Political Parties, Industrial Policy, and Bill Clinton

Introduction to Part 1

Austin Ranney

Aaron Wildavsky devoted much of the last part of his prodigious scholarly career to developing and applying a new framework for the study of (mainly American) political institutions and behavior, a framework that he called “cultural theory.” Unlike the authors of some other analytic frameworks—for example, David Easton’s much-discussed and little-used “political system” taxonomy—Wildavsky’s lifelong commitment to empirical research in such fields as budgeting, implementation, bureaucracy, and presidential politics, led him not only to explicate his framework but also to test its utility for the analysis of a variety of real-world political phenomena.

By what measure can we decide to what extent his framework is useful? Wildavsky’s answer in chapter 1 is quite explicit: “Instead of considering a single American culture, I propose that analyzing American political life in terms of conflicts among at least three political cultures—hierarchical, individualistic, and egalitarian—will prove more satisfactory. This approach will generate fewer surprises and provide explanations that better fit the phenomena” (emphasis added).

In the five chapters that follow this introduction, Wildavsky applied his political-cultures framework to the analysis of such widely different American phenomena as the nature of the prevailing public philosophy, the causes of the Civil War, the current state of the parties, changes in industrial policies since the Jacksonian era, and Bill Clinton’s presidency. On the basis of those chapters what can we say about the relevance and utility of the framework?

Chapter 1 focuses mainly on Samuel Huntington’s thesis, advanced in American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (1981) that the American Creed—a body of fundamental values and beliefs about political institutions and behavior held by most Americans throughout history—embraces such powerful but incompatible ideals as liberalism, individualism, democracy, and equality, and hence is basically anti-government and anti-authority. Wildavsky finds Huntington’s case “powerfully argued” but fundamentally wrong because it holds that there is a single American political culture composed of contradictory ideals. He comments:

‘The essence of the [American] creed,’ Huntington informs us, ‘is opposition to power and to constituted authority.’ How, then, is it possible to explain why the very same people who urge American national government to undertake ever-larger measures to reduce inequalities also oppose larger defense budgets? Why do those who favor ever-larger preparedness in defense urge ever-smaller intervention in the economy? To go back into American history, why did those who opposed economic development by the national government favor the same thing by state governments, if it was government authority per se they opposed?

The multiple political-cultures approach to understanding the American Creed certainly leaves less to be explained by such slippery categories as “paradox” and “inconsistency” than Huntington’s single-creed approach, and it does seem to generate “fewer surprises and provide explanations that better fit the phenomena.”

In their article “A Cultural Analysis of the Role of Abolitionists in the Coming of the Civil War,” reprinted here as chapter 2, Wildavsky and his collaborator Richard Ellis make a stronger case for the utility of the political cultures approach by applying it to an analysis of the causes for the worst breakdown in history of America’s political system. They begin by outlining two explanations offered by American historians. One, dubbed the “progressive paradigm,” is lead by Charles Beard, who explained the war as an inevitable clash between Southern planters and Northern capitalists fighting for control of the national government to advance their material interests—cheap labor for Southern cotton-growers and protective tariffs and railroad land grants for Northern industrialists. Claims by the contestants that they were struggling over philosophical issues of freedom and home rule Beard portrayed as mere rationalizations of the underlying economic motives.

Other historians, notably Eugene Genovese and Barrington Moore, contended that the agrarian-aristocratic political culture of the South was sharply different from the individualistic capitalism of the North. Each fought to preserve its way of life, and the result was civil war.

Ellis and Wildavsky say that each explanation has something to offer, but neither can account for the conflict between those Northerners who wanted immediate and total abolition of slavery everywhere and those who were willing to settle for merely banning slavery in the territories and new states. They contend that cultural theory “allows us to transcend the progressive and consensus frameworks by distinguishing three cultures—egalitarian collectivism (abolitionist), hierarchy (Southern slaveholder), and competitive individualism (Northern entrepreneur, including farmers).”

Ellis and Wildavsky contend that “the influence of abolitionism is to be found not in converting the North but in galvanizing the South, which in turn led the North to rally around its individualist principles.” They note that from the origins of the Republic to the 1850s, radical abolitionists in the North consistently argued that slavery was inherently evil, principally because it was the most extreme form of inequality among people living in America. The abolitionists also spoke against other forms of inequality as well, such as the inequalities between men and women, husbands and wives, and parents and children. However, the political culture of most Northerners was one that idealized freedom of competition among free men and rejected the equal distribution of rewards from that competition. They believed that competitive capitalism would produce more wealth and more freedom than the slaveholders’ hierarchy. Hence, while most of them opposed the extension of slavery outside the South, they showed little enthusiasm for exterminating it in the South.

In the 1850s, however, Southern slaveholders became so incensed by the Manichaean rhetoric of the abolitionists that they came to defend slavery not as a necessary evil but as a system of social relations fully in accord with such other divinely ordained inequalities as these between men and women and between parents and children. They argued that Southern-style slavery was morally better than Northern-style wage slavery because it incorporated the slaveholders’ concern for the slaves’ welfare, whereas the Northern bosses felt no obligation to improve the lives of Northern workers. The Southern rhetorical escalation increasingly convinced Northern individualists that Southern slavery had become a dangerous menace to competitive individualism. Ellis and Wildavsky point out that this development was epitomized by Abraham Lincoln’s shift from praise of Henry Clay as the Great Compromiser in the 1830s and 1840s to the conviction, expressed in his “house divided” speech in 1858, that the Union could not survive as part slave and part free and therefore must be made wholly free.

In my opinion this sortie into American political history makes a strong a case for the utility of the political cultures framework. Even more than chapter 1’s dissection of the “American Creed” it seems to me to “generate fewer surprises” and “provide explanations that better fit the phenomena” than the explanations offered by Beard, Genovese, and Moore.

In chapter 3, Wildavsky reviews three books on the current state of American political parties and joins the debate about whether those parties are realigning or de-aligning. He notes the wide agreement among political scientists that for twenty years both parties have been losing support among voters and that they are playing an ever-declining role in choosing the nation’s leaders and making its policies. Wildavsky points out that, while this may be true of (to use V.O. Key’s familiar usage) the parties-in-the-electorate, it certainly is not true of the party activists. In the 1930s and 1940s, he says, the main difference between Democratic and Republican activists and platforms was over the size and scope of the welfare state. “Consequently, “he says, “people who opposed each other on welfare issues might well support one another on different matters, thus necessitating a certain respect for those they might need to form coalitions in the future.” He then cites studies by Linda Powell, David Rohde, Warren Miller and Kent Jennings of the changing political attitudes of delegates to Democratic and Republican national committees from 1972 to 1988. They show, Wildavsky says, that “nowadays the parties are divided almost entirely over issues organized around questions of equality, at least as interpreted by Democratic activists. Instead of differing only on one major issue, the parties systematically split on a whole series.” The Democratic Party is now dominated by radical egalitarians, who are dedicated to narrowing and eventually eliminating all inequalities of condition among the races and the genders. They do not, however, favor all forms of government action: they approve of government regulation of business designed to ensure affirmative action in hiring and strict limitations on environmental pollution, but they strongly oppose government restriction of women’s rights to abortion and of every citizen’s freedom to choose a gay or lesbian life style.

Wildavsky observed that Republican activists are now ideologically more heterogeneous than their Democratic counterparts, most of whom are egalitarians. Republicans are divided into two main groups: social conservatives, who favor government action to prevent abortion, restore prayer to the schools, and keep gays and lesbians out of the armed forces and the faculties of public schools; and economic conservatives, who favor minimum government regulation of business but sometimes demur on social issues like prayer and abortion.

Wildavsky concludes, “I claim that the realignment everyone is looking for has indeed occurred, but not in the place they were looking for it, the mass electorate, at least not yet, but rather within the activists of each party, and that this accounts for the difficulties that both parties have in convincing voters to adopt their views.”

Chapter 4 offers a broad view of changes in American industrial policy from the dispute over the Bank of the United States in Jacksonian times to the present. Wildavsky used the political cultures framework to interpret the changes, but, because he hardly mentions other interpretations arising from other frameworks, this chapter is less concerned with testing his framework against its rivals than is the case in any of the other chapters. He does make one important conceptual point, however. He notes the widespread misuse of the terms “liberal” and “conservative” to mean, respectively, pro-change and anti-change. He points out: “Conservatives are conservative when there are hierarchical relations they deem worth conserving, not otherwise. Thus they oppose industrial policies restricting the right of business to close down or to move, thereby diminishing differences between labor and management, or granting judges or administrators the right to determine salaries in the once-private sector, that is, comparable worth.” By the same token, liberals oppose changing such established policies as affirmative action, food stamps, and progressive income taxes.

In chapter 5, which evidently was written in the early months of 1993, Wildavsky used his cultural theory framework to predict the kinds of troubles Bill Clinton’s presidency was likely to encounter. Making predictions about future events on the basis of a theory about what will control those events is, of course, one of the best and most demanding methods we have for testing the theory’s validity. Many political scientists shy away from making predictions, perhaps because they lack the necessary confidence in their explanatory theories. Not Aaron Wildavsky.

Clinton’s main problems, he predicted, would come from trying to lead a largely egalitarian Democratic Party. When Clinton seeks legislation to achieve anything other than advancing equality of condition for all ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations, his party’s members in the Congress will not only oppose him but will denounce him for abandoning the party’s ideals. Moreover, “because egalitarians are basically concerned with a single value, equality of condition, they regard compromise as tantamount to corruption. Accusations that President Clinton is selling out the cause will be common…Clinton can expect to be accused of being a political chameleon: an oreo (black on the outside, white on the inside), a radish (radical on the outside, conservative on the inside), or a banana (Asian on the outside, Caucasian on the inside).”

Wildavsky, like most political scientists, did not expect the Republicans to win back control of both houses of Congress in 1994. He did see the Republicans as divided between mainly soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editor’s Introduction
• Part 1: American Politics: Abolitionists, Political Parties, Industrial Policy, and Bill Clinton
• Part 2: The Legal Sphere: Egalitarian Changes in Tort Law, Civil Liberties, and Nomination Criteria
• Part 3: Studying Organizations: Bureaucracy, Responsibility, Leadership, and Information Bias
• Part 4: Conclusion: In the University
• Bibliography
• Index