Nationhood Lab recently mapped the regional cultures across Canada, Greenland, Northern Mexico and parts of the Caribbean, allowing the American Nations analytical model to be used for cross-country comparisons.
By Colin Woodard
In American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, I first defined and described the dominant regional cultures of North America, primarily as a historical exercise. The book, published in 2011, inspired researchers and political commentators to start using it as an analytical tool, first for understanding elections and politics, and then other fields, from the membership collegiate sports leagues to the organization of church governments.
With the establishment of Nationhood Lab at the end of 2022, my Motivf colleagues and I refined the ad hoc models and produced what you might call the “official” American Nations Model spreadsheets for the United States, mapping the regional cultures at county-level resolution. We’ve also created crosswalks for using data coded to zip codes, U.S. House Districts, and Metropolitan Statistical Areas, as well as an analysis of the region’s proportional strength in each U.S. state, both presently and back in 1900 and 1950. We’ve even described it in the academic literature, for use in public health research.
This summer, we’ve expanded the analytical model to the rest of North America covered in American Nations. The “official” Canadian map, released in early July, goes down to Canadian Census subdistrict level resolution where necessary, though we also have versions at district-only- and federal electoral riding-level resolution for when the data is only available in those forms. We’ve also added the Mexican states that belong to El Norte, parts of the Greater Antilles that are in Spanish Caribbean, and Greenland, allowing us to produce the full map above. (You can find a higher-resolution file here.)
This map shows the full extent of all the “nations” described in American Nations, except possibly for Spanish Caribbean. This region, which has its core hub in Havana and includes South Florida, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, is the legacy of Spain’s maritime commercial empire in the New World, is distinct from El Norte and the Aztec and Maya cultural regions of central and southern Mexico and northern Central America. I expect Spanish Caribbean would also include parts of the “Spanish Main” — the northern Caribbean coast of South America but, to be honest, that hasn’t been properly researched yet, so we’re leaving that for another day.
Here, also, is the “official” United States map, with the two “shared” counties — Cook County, Illinois and Orleans Parish, Louisiana — crosshatched.
And, from our post last month, the Canada map, down to the subdistrict level where neccessary.
Researchers can contact us to request coded spreadsheets of this data.
Thanks to our partners at Motivf, John Liberty (who made these maps) and Tova Perlman (who patiently worked on the underlying data.)
— Colin Woodard is the director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.