Read chapter 1: "The Political Culture, People, and Economy of Texas" in the text down below.

Familiarize yourself with the following concepts and answer the questions below. 

Texas Political Culture

Political culture is the broadly shared values, beliefs, and attitudes about how the government should function and politics should operate. To understand the complexity of political culture in Texas today, it is useful to consider three long-lasting patterns in Texas politics and the changes that they are undergoing: the one-party state, the idea of provincialism, and business dominance.

• The One-Party State Persists
  • For over 100 years, Texas was dominated by the Democratic Party. But between 2002 and 2014, all major statewide elected offices became controlled by Republicans.
• Provincialism Is Declining
  • A second pattern that once defined Texas political culture is provincialism, a narrow view of the world that is often associated with rural values and notions of limited government. However, the growing influence of minorities, women, and gays in state politics, increasing urbanization, and Texas's relevance in the global economy have all undercut Texas's traditional provincialism.
• Business Dominance Continues
  • A third continuing pattern that has helped define Texas's political culture is its longtime dominance by business. Business groups are major players in Texas politics, in terms of campaign contributions, organized interest groups, and lobbyists.

The Land

Much of Texas's history and political life have been shaped by the relationship forged between its people and the land. Today, Texas is the second-largest state in size, next to Alaska. To understand the dynamics of political life and governance in Texas demands an appreciation of the vast spaces and topography that define the state.

• The Gulf Coastal Plains
  • The Gulf Coastal Plains extend from the Louisiana border and the Gulf of Mexico, along the Rio Grande up to Del Rio, and northward to the line of the Balcones Fault and Escarpment. Urbanization and suburbanization in Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth have added new dimensions to the political life of this region.
• The Interior Lowlands
  • The Interior Lowlands are bordered by the Balcones Escarpment on the east and south and the Caprock Escarpment on the west. Beginning to the west of Fort Worth, the eastern edge of the Interior Lowlands has predominantly an agricultural economy and a rural population.
• The Great Plains
  • Pushing down into northwest Texas from the Rocky Mountains to the Balcones Fault, the Great Plains define the terrain in much of   western Texas, rising from 2,700 feet in the east to more than 4,000 feet along the New Mexico border. Ranching and petroleum production dominate the economy.
• The Basin and Range Province
  • The area running from the Basin and Range Province to the Lower Rio Grande has always had a distinctive political culture, heavily dominated by the fact that Texas and Mexico have been joined at the hip economically and demographically. The population in this region is overwhelmingly Latino.

Economic Change in Texas

• Cotton
  • Cotton is one of the oldest crops grown in Texas. Cotton production cycled up and down as farmers experienced a series of crises and opportunities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The general decline of the cotton culture continued after World War II.
• Cattle
  • The history of ranching and the cattle industry parallels that of cotton in many ways. Following the Civil War, the cattle industry took off, expanding throughout the state. Today, neither cotton production nor ranching drives the Texas political economy. The number of people making a living from agriculture has dropped significantly over the last 50 years as agribusiness has pushed out the family farm and ranch.
• Oil
  • The oil and gas industry transformed the social and economic fabric of Texas in a number of important ways. More by more the economic fortunes of Texas were tied to the price of oil and gas; when prices were high, the economy boomed, but when prices fell, so did the fortunes of Texas. Today the Texas economy is less dependent on the oil and gas industry than before, but the people and government of Texas still rely heavily on this industry.
• High-Tech Industries
  • By the last decade of the twentieth century, new industries and technologies not based in extraction from the land assumed significant roles in plotting the state's economic future. By 2014, approximately 331,000 jobs in Texas were supported by the tech industry.
• NAFTA and the International Economy
  • One defining feature of the Texas economy in the 1990s and 2000s was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA links approximately 450 million consumers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico with a combined gross domestic product of $19.6 trillion.
• The Military in Texas
  • Military installations continue to be important to the economic well-being of certain parts of the state. There are over 173,000 active military, reserve military, and civilian individuals directly employed by the U.S. military living in Texas in 2014.
• The Great Recession and "The Texas Miracle"
  • Texas was one of the last states to enter the Great Recession and one of the first to exit. Low taxes and low services, pro-business and free market government, an entrepreneurial spirit—all were given credit for the "Texas economic miracle" by some politicians, though there were other factors that also helped soften the blow to Texas's economy.

The People of Texas

Three factors account for the population growth in Texas: natural increase as a result of the difference between births and deaths; international immigration, particularly from Mexico; and domestic immigration from other states.

• Whites
  • For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the largest ethnic group was non-Hispanic whites. However, as a percentage of the population, white population peaked at 74 percent in 1950. This percentage began to fall, reaching 43.5 percent in 2015, and will likely continue to fall in the twenty-first century.
• Latinos
  • Most Latinos in Texas are people of Mexican descent. In 2015 there were 10.6 million Latinos residing in Texas. Texas Latinos constituted over 19 percent of all Latinos in the United States.
• African Americans
  • The African American population of Texas is concentrated in east Texas, where the southern plantation and sharecropping systems were dominant during the nineteenth century. Large numbers of African Americans had also migrated to form sizable minorities in the urban and suburban areas of Houston and Dallas
• Asians
  • In 2015 the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that approximately 1 million Asians resided in Texas, or about 4.5 percent of the state's population.
• Age
  • When compared with the rest of the nation, the population of Texas is relatively young. In 2015, 27.3 percent of the population was estimated to be under 18 years old, compared with 24.0 percent nationally.
• Poverty and Wealth
  • While Texas's economy and per-capita income have expanded rapidly since 1990, Texans are, on average, slightly less wealthy than the average American. Per capita income in Texas tends to be higher in urban areas than in rural areas.

Urbanization

Urbanization is the process by which people move from rural to urban areas. Suburbanization is the process by which people move out of central city areas to surrounding suburban areas.

• The Urban Political Economy
  • Houston: Houston, located in Harris County, is the largest city in Texas and the fourth-largest city in the United States—with a population of 2.1 million.
  • Dallas–Fort Worth: The Metroplex is an economic region encompassing the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, as well as a number of other suburban cities. The overall metropolitan area of Dallas–Fort Worth included 6.954 million people in 2014.
  • San Antonio: San Antonio is Texas's second-largest city. The population of the city was estimated to be 1,436,697 in 2014, and the San Antonio metropolitan area as a whole had a population of 2,234,003. In Bexar County, where San Antonio is located, approximately 59.4 percent of the people are Latino.

1. To what extent is Texas's political culture distinct from the larger U.S. political culture?2
2. Do you think that Texas's political culture is traditionalistic-individualistic, as the textbook implies? If so, can you give examples of political events that point to that conclusion?
3. Texas is often considered a "red state," meaning that on the whole Texans are strongly Republican, conservative, and religious. Do you consider Texas to be a very religious state? Does this comport with Texas's traditionalistic-individualistic political culture?