Political Culture and Corruption Issues in State Politics: A New Measure of Corruption Issues and a Test of Relationships to Political Culture

To what extent does variation in political culture influence the number and types of corruption issues arising in U.S. states? Drawing upon Daniel Elazar’s enduring typology of American political subcultures and using a new news-based measure of corruption issues, we find that political culture remains a “sticky” deep determinant of the distribution of corruption issues across states. Unlike previous empirical studies we do not treat political culture as a set of consensus values, but rather emphasize tensions that can arise when multiple political cultures coexist in a state. Our findings are of interest not only with respect to the enduring role of culture itself, but also in terms of how it might help us understand the growing number of actions that are legal, yet still seen by many as corrupt.