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A political culture reflects the political values and beliefs of a people. It explains how people feel about their government—their expectations of what powers it should have over their lives, the services it should provide, and their ability to influence its actions. Apolitical culture is developed by historical experience over generations through agents of socialization such as family, religion, peer group, and education. It is characterized by the level of ethnic, social, and religious diversity it tolerates; by the level of citizen participation it allows; by the societal role it assigns to the state; and by citizens’ perception of their status within the political system. A people’s political behavior is shaped by its political culture within which it is formed. The Spanish conquest and settlement of Texas provided the first European influence on Texas culture. Some elements of the ranchero culture and the Catholic religion continue to this day and represent the enduring Spanish influence on our culture. The immigration of Anglo-Saxon southerners in the early 1800s brought Texas the plantation and slave-owning culture. This culture became dominant following the Texas Revolution. Although it was modified to an extent by the Civil War, it remained the dominant Texas culture. However, ethnic/racial diversification, migration, and urbanization have gradually eroded the dominance of the traditional southern Anglo culture over time, with this erosion especially notable over the last 40 years. During the past four decades Texas has not only become one of the most diverse multicultural states in the country, but also it has become one of the most urbanized; two-thirds of the population now resides in one of four major metropolitan regions (Austin, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio), and Texans living in rural areas today account for only a tenth of the population. We begin by exploring the state’s dominant political culture and ideology and how they influence partisanship and public policy. Then we look at other aspects of the state’s political culture and examine the subtle variations in the state from one region to another. We then review the battles for gender, ethnic/racial, and sexual orientation equality and the impact of these civil rights struggles and their outcomes, along with the state’s increasing diversity, on politics and policy. Political Culture, Partisanship, and Public Policy...Texas’s political culture is conservative. Many Texans share a belief in a limited role for government in taxation, economic regulation, and providing social services; conservatives support traditional values and lifestyles and are cautious in response to social change. Ideology The Texas brand of conservatism is skeptical of state government involvement in the economy. A majority of Texans favor low taxes, modest state services, and few business regulations. Because they support economic individualism and free-market capitalism, Texans generally value profit as a healthy incentive to promote economic investment and individual effort, while they see social class inequality as the inevitable result of free-market capitalism. For them, an individual’s quality of life is largely a matter of personal responsibility rather than an issue of public policy. Some conservatives accept an active role for the government in promoting business. They are willing to support direct government subsidies and special tax breaks for businesses to encourage economic growth. They may also support state spending for infrastructure, such as transportation and education, that sustains commercial and manufacturing activity. Social conservatives support energetic government activity to enforce what they view as moral behavior and traditional cultural values. For example, social conservatives, who often are evangelical Christians, usually advocate for the use of state power to limit abortion and narcotics or cannabis usage. A distinct minority in Texas, liberal Texans believe in using government to improve the welfare of individuals; they favor government regulation of the economy, actively support the expansion of civil rights, and embrace social change. Liberals believe state government can be used as a positive tool to benefit the population as a whole. Most Texas liberals accept private enterprise as the state’s basic economic system but believe excesses of unregulated capitalism compromise the common good. They endorse state policies to abate pollution, increase government investment in public education and health care, protect workers and consumers, and prevent discrimination against ethnic/racial minorities and members of the LGBTQ community, among others. Liberals often believe that a great deal of social inequality results from institutional and economic forces that are often beyond a single individual’s control. As a result, they support the use of government power to balance these forces and to promote a better quality of life for middle- and lower-income people. For example, liberals argue that it is fair to tax those with the greatest ability to pay and to provide social services for the community as a whole. A significant number of Texans have mixed views. On some issues, they take a liberal position, but on others they have a conservative perspective or no opinion at all. Others have moderate views: Figure 1.1 shows that 27 percent of Texans say that they are “in the middle”; that is, their beliefs are between conservative and liberal viewpoints. The “Think Critically and Get Active!” features in this and later chapters give you the tools to explore Texans’ political differences in greater depth and to engage with various ideological groups in Texas. Conservatives and Liberals in Texas Today Figure 1.1 provides information on the ideological self-identification of Texans overall and among subgroups of Texans based on their gender, ethnic/racial identity, and generation. The data are drawn from a series of University of Texas/Texas Tribune statewide polls of registered voters conducted between 2016 and 2020.1A survey question asked respondents to place themselves on a seven-point ideological scale where 1 was “extremely liberal,” 4 “in the middle,” and 7 “extremely conservative.” Respondents who located themselves as a 5, 6,or 7 are considered to be conservative; as a 1, 2, or 3 to be liberal; and as a 4 to be moderate. Close to half of Texans (46 percent) identify as conservative, while more than a quarter(27 percent) identify as liberal. Figure 1.1 highlights, however, that these statewide percentages mask considerable ideological variance among men and women, members of different ethnic/racial groups, and generational cohorts. For example, men as a group are notably more conservative than women (50 percent vs. 42 percent), and Anglos (55 percent) are notably more conservative than Latinos (39 percent), Asian Americans (39 percent), or African Americans(25 percent). At the same time, however, no noteworthy gender or ethnic/racial differences exist in the proportion of liberals, which are fairly equal between men and women and among the four principal ethnic/racial groups in the state, with the exception of a notably larger pro-portion of Asian Americans than Anglos being liberal. Data also are provided for Texans based on their political generation: Generation Z (those born since 1997), the Millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996), Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1980), the Baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964), and the Silent Generation (those born between 1928 and 1945).2As a group, both Generation Z and Millennials tend to be significantly less conservative and, in the case of Generation Z, more liberal than members of the other generations, with the ideological gulf separating Generation Z from their Silent Generation grandparents and great-grandparents far and away the widest. It will remain to be seen if the members of Generation Z will become more conservative (and less liberal) as they age, or if this more liberal ideological profile will remain a hallmark of Generation Z for years to come. Figure 1.2 highlights the considerable amount of ideological variance across the state’s 24most populous counties, which combined contain more than three-fourths (76 percent) of the Texas population. At the liberal end of the ideological spectrum, by itself, is Travis County(Austin), with an average ideological score of 3.74. The next most liberal county is Dallas County, followed by Travis County’s southern neighbor, Hays County, which has been trans-formed from a conservative to liberal county by the expansion of the Austin suburbs across its northern border. After this trio, the three most liberal counties are Bexar (San Antonio), Collin(a suburb of Dallas), and Cameron (Brownsville). The state’s other two major counties, Harris (Houston) and Tarrant (Fort Worth), possess moderately higher average ideological scores than both Dallas (especially) and Bexar counties, but scores that are still less conservative than the state average of 4.42.The three most conservative counties are all the hubs of regional population centers in different regions of Texas: Smith (Tyler) in the northeast, Lubbock in the northwest, and McLennan (Waco) in the center. They are followed within the conservative ranks by two suburban Houston counties, Brazoria to the south and Montgomery to the north.