American State Cultures: Testing a New Measure and Theory

Lieske has recently developed a new measure of state culture that appears to be a much better predictor of state performance than other commonly used measures including per capita income, Sharkansky’s index of Elazar’s typology, and Hero’s index of racial and ethnic diversity. Here, we show why uni- and multi-dimensional reductions of Elazar’s and Lieske’s typologies and other measures do not predict and explain the variation in representative indicators of state performance nearly as well. To lay the groundwork for a more rigorous understanding of state culture, and to integrate it with the work of Hero on diversity and Putnam on social capital, we also develop and test an evolutionary theory that draws on Marger’s theory of ethnic competition and Vanhanen’s theory of ethnic nepotism.