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For years specialists in local politics have deplored the anecdotal quality of literature in the field and have called for theoretically-based comparative research. One of the most stimulating and ambitious attempts in this direction is Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson's theory of “public-regardingness” and “private-regardingness,” which states that much of what Americans think about the political world can be subsumed under one or the other of these conflicting orientations and that the prevalence of one ethos over the other influences the style, structure, and outcome of local politics. Banfield and Wilson attribute these two ethics to different elements in the population and hypothesize that a number of political forms and policies are manifestations of each ethos. We intend to examine the associations between these hypothesized consequences and the demographic characteristics that are said to be the bases of the two ethics.

We are grateful to Mr. Robert Weeks for assistance in several computer runs, to Raymond E. Wolfinger and John W. Meyer for helpful advice, to Berit Sellevold and Leona Semon for typing services at various stages of preparation, and to the Stanford Computation Center for numerous forms of assistance. The data utilized in this study were made available Downloaded from J» This means that we are dealing with essentially the same American population. 2» The variation is not due simply to sampling error. Applying the difference-ofproportions test, we found that the changing percentage of Ideologues (combined context), by any conventional significance criterion, e.g., p <, 0.001, is too large to have occurred by chance alone.

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