How Cultural Orientations Create Shifting National Security Coalitions on Nuclear Weapons and Terrorist Threats in the American Public

Abstract

Scholars have used cultural theory (CT) to explain risk perceptions and opinion formation across an impressive array of public issues, ranging from environmental, regulatory, and energy policy to public health and economics. Although disparate, all these issues concern domestic policies. This article breaks with this trend by exploring the extent to which CT can help scholars better understand public beliefs about national security. Of critical importance in debates about national security are perceptions of individual versus collective threat and the appropriate role of authoritative institutions in protecting society from these threats. Because CT provides a framework that explicitly addresses these dimensions, national security issues provide an illuminating canvas for evaluating the theory's explanatory utility.

Cultural Theory and Managerial Values: Examining Trust as a Motivation for Collaboration

“…To measure these values, we construct three indices capturing egalitarian, individualist and hierarchic worldviews from nine survey items that have been developed over time by several scholars and are commonly used in studies of CT (e.g. Jones ; Ripberger et al ) . These items asked respondents whether they strongly disagreed (1) to strongly agreed (7) with various statements about social interactions that are consistent with the different cultural environments.…”

Weather, Climate, and Worldviews: The Sources and Consequences of Public Perceptions of Changes in Local Weather Patterns*

“…Among the promising approaches for understanding and predicting perceptions of risks are those evolving from anthropologist Mary Douglas' ''grid-group'' cultural theory (Douglas 1986;Douglas and Wildavsky 1982), although the specification of the theory has significant variants [e.g., note the diversity of approaches taken in Dake (1991), Wildavsky and Dake (1990), Rayner (1992), Adams (1995), Kahan et al (2010), and Ripberger et al (2011)]. Cultural theory generally posits that people can be usefully classified according to two dimensions of sociality.…”

“…Our measurement approach is similar to that used in Dake (1991) and Ripberger et al (2011). The wording of these questions in shown in Table 2, and more extensive discussion of the survey questionnaire is included in the supplemental materials.…”

Understanding and Creating Public Value: Business is the engine, government the flywheel (and also the regulator)

“…That risk management is the basic function of the state implies that risk preferences and attitudes are necessarily central to an understanding of partisan conflicts over who gets what, when, and how. Indeed, there is an extensive and growing literature in political science, largely inspired by Aaron Wildavsky, that takes how much and what kinds of risks people are willing to run to be the central question of political dynamics (see Chai et al 2011;Ellis and Thompson, 1997;Gastil et al 2011;Jones, 2011;Lockhart, 2011;Lodge and Wegrich, 2011;Ripberger et al 2011;Swedlow, 2011aSwedlow, , 2011bThompson et al 1990Thompson et al , 1999. Wildavsky's cultural theory is, for example, entirely consistent with Moss's view of American political dynamics.…”