Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Home
  • Home
EnglishFrançais
PS: Political Science & Politics PS: Political Science & Politics

Article contents

The Cultural Orientation of Mass Political Opinion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2011

John Gastil ,
Don Braman ,
Dan Kahan  and
Paul Slovic
John Gastil
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Don Braman
Affiliation:
George Washington University
Dan Kahan
Affiliation:
Yale University
Paul Slovic
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
Corresponding
E-mail address:
jgastil@psu.edu
dbraman@law.gwu.edu
dan.kahan@yale.edu
pslovic@uoregon.edu
Get access
Rights & Permissions[Opens in a new window]

Extract

Most Americans lack any substantial degree of ideological sophistication (Kinder 1998), yet they often manage to express coherent views across a range of issues. The conventional explanation for this is that people rely on judgmental shortcuts (e.g., Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991). These “heuristics” permit individuals with sufficient political sophistication to sort and filter incoming messages to form relatively consistent views that align with preexisting values (Zaller 1992).

Type
Symposium
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , October 2011 , pp. 711 - 714
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below.
If you should have access and can't see this content please contact technical support.

References

Dake, Karl, and Wildavsky, Aaron. 1990. “Theories of Risk Perception: Who Fears What and Why?” Daedalus (Spring): 41–60.Google Scholar
Delli Carpini, Michael X., and Keeter, Scott. 1996. What Americans Know and Why It Matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Douglas, Mary. 1982. In the Active Voice. Boston: Routledge.Google Scholar
Douglas, Mary, and Wildavsky, Aaron B.. 1982. Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Gastil, John, Braman, Don, Kahan, Dan, and Slovic, Paul. 2005. “The ‘Wildavsky Heuristic’: The Cultural Orientation of Mass Political Opinion.” Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 107. Available at SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract_id=834264.Google Scholar
Goren, P. 2004. “Political Sophistication and Policy Reasoning: A Reconsideration.” American Journal of Political Science 48 (3): 462–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graber, Doris. 2004. “Mediated Politics and Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century.” Annual Review of Psychology 55: 545–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Imai, Kosuke, King, Gary, and Lau, Oliva. 2007. “ologit: Ordinal Logistic Regression for Ordered Categorical Dependent Variables.” In Zelig: Everyone's Statistical Software, eds. Imai, Kosuke, King, Gary, and Lau, Olivia, http://gking.harvard.edu/zelig.Google Scholar
Jacoby, William G. 2002. “Liberal-Conservative Thinking in the American Electorate.” Political Decision Making, Deliberation and Participation 6: 97–147.Google Scholar
Jenkins-Smith, Hank C., and Smith, Walter K.. 1994. “Ideology, Culture, and Risk Perception.” In Politics, Policy, and Culture, ed. Coyle, D. J. and Ellis, Richard J.. Boulder, CO: Westview.Google Scholar
Kahan, Dan M., and Braman, Donald. 2003. “More Statistics, Less Persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 151: 1291–1327.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahan, Dan M., Braman, Donald, Gastil, John, and Slovic, Paul. 2007. “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White-Male Effect in Risk Perception.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 4: 465–505.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinder, Donald R. 1998. “Communication and Opinion.” Annual Review of Political Science 1: 167–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Gary, Tomz, Michael, and Wittenberg, Jason. 2000. “Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation.” American Journal of Political Science 44: 341–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lupia, Arthur. 2002. “Who Can Persuade Whom? Implications from the Nexus of Psychology and Rational Choice Theory.” In Thinking about Political Psychology, ed. Kuklinski, James H., 51–88. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mamadouh, Virginie. 1999. “Grid-Group Cultural Theory: An Introduction.” GeoJournal 47: 395–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michaud, Kristy E.H., Carlisle, Juliet, and Smith, Eric R.A.N.. 2009. “The Relationship between Cultural Values and Political Ideology, and the Role of Political Knowledge.” Political Psychology 30: 27–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mondak, Jeffery J. 1993. “Public Opinion and Heuristic Processing of Source Cues.” Political Behavior 15: 167–192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Narayan, S., and Krosnick, J. A.. 1996. “Education Moderates Some Response Effects in Attitude Measurement.” Public Opinion Quarterly 60 (1): 58–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peters, Ellen, and Slovic, Paul. 1996. “The Role of Affect and Worldviews as Orienting Dispositions in the Perception and Acceptance of Nuclear Power.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 26: 1427–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, Greg M., Shapiro, Robert Y., Lock, Shmuel, and Jacobs, Lawrence R.. 1998. “The Polls-Trend: Crime, the Police, and Civil Liberties.” Public Opinion Quarterly 62: 405–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sniderman, Paul M., Brody, Richard A., and Tetlock, Philip E.. 1991. Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verweij, Marco. 1995. “Cultural Theory and the Study of International Relations.” Millenium 24: 87–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wildavsky, Aaron B. 1987. “Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation.” American Political Science Review 81: 3–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zaller, John R. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Full text views reflects PDF downloads, PDFs sent to Google Drive, Dropbox and Kindle and HTML full text views.

Total number of HTML views: 50
Total number of PDF views: 388 *
View data table for this chart

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between September 2016 - 28th January 2021. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

35 Cited by
Hostname: page-component-6585876b8c-p4jp5 Total loading time: 0.295 Render date: 2021-01-28T10:14:28.440Z Query parameters: { "hasAccess": "0", "openAccess": "0", "isLogged": "0", "lang": "en" } Feature Flags: { "shouldUseShareProductTool": true, "shouldUseHypothesis": true, "isUnsiloEnabled": true, "metricsAbstractViews": false, "figures": false, "newCiteModal": false, "newCitedByModal": false }

Send article to Kindle

To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle.

Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

The Cultural Orientation of Mass Political Opinion
Available formats
×

Send article to Dropbox

To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox.

The Cultural Orientation of Mass Political Opinion
Available formats
×

Send article to Google Drive

To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive.

The Cultural Orientation of Mass Political Opinion
Available formats
×
×

Reply to: Submit a response

Your details

Conflicting interests

Do you have any conflicting interests? *