Iowa is relatively conservative and most people probably believe that many problems can be solved outside of government. Rice currently is using data from Sigma, the ISU sociology department's study of 99 rural Iowa communities, to examine the civic culture in the state. He also is studying the connections between religion and civic culture. Rice and another University of Virginia colleague recently completed a study of how the civic cultures of European immigrants persist in their contemporary descendants. The study will be published next year in The Journal of Politics.
Some cultures are clearly higher in civicness both here and abroad.
Danes are the most civic in Europe right now and American people of Danish descent are the most civic here. We're finding that many of us carry fingerprints of our ancestral cultures. Research on civic culture has become a hot topic among social scientists, partly because of the opening of Eastern Europe. You don't create a democracy by throwing money at a country. Capitalist economies and healthy democracies flow from civicness.