To help explain the role scientists play in policy change, concepts such as coproduction, boundary‐work, and pollution and purity claims as they are used in science studies should be incorporated ...into policy theory. Moreover improved policy theory should specify the kinds of boundary‐work that can occur and the kinds of values and beliefs that drive boundary‐work, explaining how boundary‐work leads to policy change. The cultural theory (CT) developed by Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson, Aaron Wildavsky, and others can help specify conditions for coproduction and change in science, institutions, and policy when recast as a theory involving three critical institutional boundaries. This theory‐development article uses this recast version of CT to help explain the most recent dramatic shift in federal land and wildlife management policy in the Pacific Northwest. The article illustrates how cultural combatants use boundary‐work including pollution and purity claims to align themselves and the domain of authoritative science with scientists whose constructs of nature and policy prescriptions are functional for their preferred institutions.
What explains party preference? Ideology and values do but these explanations are undertheorized. We offer grid-group cultural theory (CT) to provide a theory of ideology and values to explain party ...preference. We aim to demonstrate the value of an operationalization of CT that includes rejection of cultural bias (rejection of political values and beliefs) to explain party preference. Our study builds on research that recognizes the importance of negative partisanship and of rejecting cultural biases and other values in party choice. We analyze the influence of cultural biases on party preference in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. We find that respondents’ top two cultural biases explain up to a third of the variation in respondents’ party support in these Nordic multi-party systems and that rejection of cultural biases is an important determinant of party preference. We discuss how our analysis can be extended to other party systems including those with only two major parties.
This article employs the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), a set of concepts developed to account for policymaking primarily in the United States, to analyze factors that led China to downsize its ...latest big hydropower project, on the Nu River. The ACF helps us identify two conflicting coalitions based on their policy beliefs and the resources they mobilized to translate their beliefs into policy change, which the ACF also helps us explain. Conflict between state agencies contributed to the rise of a societally based environmental coalition to oppose a state-centered development coalition, and struggle and strategic learning between these coalitions led to interventions by the premier and a scaling down of the project from 13 dams to four.
Cultural Theory (CT) is a constructivist theory, developed by Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky, and others, that seeks to participate in the positivist project of discovering, explaining, and predicting ...regularities in human behavior. Special Issue contributions and this introduction suggest some ways in which this theory can help advance policy studies. One way CT can help is by further specifying other approaches to policy theory. Thus, Hank Jenkins‐Smith and his collaborators argue (and with respect to belief systems demonstrate) that the theory can be used to specify belief systems, coalitions, and causes of policy change in the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF); Rob Robinson uses CT to specify further both sources of resistance to policy change and sources of dramatic policy change in Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET); and Christopher Weare, Paul Lichterman, and Nicole Esparza use the theory to specify sources of collaboration in policy networks as well as sources of network dissolution. Other contributors argue and/or demonstrate that CT can help specify the culturally pluralized conditions for successful policy deliberation, the cultural sources of policy narratives, and how cultural biases are likely to interact with policy frames. This Special Issue invites policy scholars to consider how the theory might help advance their research interests and the field.
Public support for and voluntary compliance with protective policy measures are crucial to mitigating the spread of infectious disease. However, it is unclear why and how people with diverse cultural ...biases support particular protective policies. Relying on the Cultural Theory (CT) of risk, we hypothesize that value congruence with social distancing and a vaccine mandate during the COVID‐19 pandemic influences the level of public support for and compliance with these protective policies. Analyzing a Chinese nationwide sample, we find that the effects of cultural biases on public support and compliance vary not only with cultural biases but by how these are mediated through value congruence with particular protective policies. As hypothesized, hierarchical cultural biases increase public support for and compliance with social distancing and a vaccine mandates both directly and (indirectly) through value congruence. By contrast, as hypothesized, fatalistic cultural biases decrease public support for and compliance with social distancing both directly and (indirectly) through lack of value congruence and individualistic biases decrease public support for and compliance with social distancing and a vaccine mandate both directly and (indirectly) through lack of value congruence. However, the hypothesized effects of fatalistic biases did not hold for the vaccine mandate. We discuss reasons why these latter hypotheses regarding the vaccine mandate were not validated and suggest that risk analysts and communicators do more to discover and explain why particular protective policies are congruent with diverse cultural values.
Resumen
El apoyo público y el cumplimiento voluntario de las medidas de política de protección son cruciales para mitigar la propagación de enfermedades infecciosas. Sin embargo, no está claro por qué y cómo las personas con diversos sesgos culturales apoyan políticas de protección particulares. Basándonos en la teoría cultural (CT) del riesgo, planteamos la hipótesis de que la congruencia del valor con el distanciamiento social y el mandato de vacunación durante la pandemia de COVID‐19 influye en el nivel de apoyo público y el cumplimiento de estas políticas de protección. Al analizar una muestra china a nivel nacional, encontramos que los efectos de los sesgos culturales en el apoyo y el cumplimiento públicos varían no solo con los sesgos culturales, sino también con la forma en que estos están mediados a través de la congruencia de valores con políticas de protección particulares. Como se planteó como hipótesis, los sesgos culturales jerárquicos aumentan el apoyo público y el cumplimiento de los mandatos de distanciamiento social y vacuna tanto directamente como (indirectamente) a través de la congruencia de valores. Por el contrario, como se hipotetizó, los sesgos culturales fatalistas disminuyen el apoyo público y el cumplimiento del distanciamiento social tanto directa como (indirectamente) a través de la falta de congruencia de valores y los sesgos individualistas reducen el apoyo público y el cumplimiento del distanciamiento social y los mandatos de vacunación tanto directa como (indirectamente) por falta de congruencia de valores. Sin embargo, los efectos hipotéticos de los sesgos fatalistas no se mantuvieron para el mandato de la vacuna. Discutimos las razones por las cuales estas últimas hipótesis con respecto al mandato de la vacuna no fueron validadas y sugerimos que los analistas de riesgos y los comunicadores hagan más para descubrir y explicar por qué las políticas de protección particulares son congruentes con diversos valores culturales.
摘要
公众对保护性政策措施的支持和自愿遵守对于减缓传染病传播一事至关重要。不过，尚不清楚的是，具有不同文化偏见的人为何以及如何支持特定的保护性政策。基于风险文化理论(CT)，我们假设，2019冠状病毒病(COVID‐19)大流行期间，与保持社交距离和疫苗强制令一致的价值观会影响公众对这些保护性政策的支持程度和遵守程度。通过分析一项全中国范围的样本，我们发现，文化偏见对公众支持与公众合规的影响不仅因文化偏见而存在差异，还因“与特定保护性政策一致的价值观如何调节文化偏见”而存在差异。正如假设的那样，等级文化偏见直接和(间接)通过价值观一致性来增加公众对保持社交距离和疫苗强制令的支持与遵守。相反，也如假设的那样，由于直接和(间接)缺乏价值观一致性，宿命论文化偏见降低了公众对保持社交距离的支持和遵守，并且由于直接和(间接)缺乏价值观一致性，个人主义偏见减少了公众对保持社交距离和疫苗强制令的支持和遵守。不过，宿命论偏见的假设影响并不适用于疫苗强制令。我们探讨了为何关于疫苗强制令的假设没有得到验证的原因，并建议风险分析师和传播者对此加以研究，以期发现和解释为何特定的保护性政策与不同的文化价值观相一致。
A Cultural Theory of Politics Swedlow, Brendon
PS, political science & politics,
10/2011, Letnik:
44, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Many political scientists first learned of anthropologist Mary Douglas's cultural theory (CT) through Aaron Wildavsky's APSA presidential address (Wildavsky 1987), in which he sought to explain the ...value of this theoretical approach for political science. Since then, much additional work has been done to develop CT as an ambitious general theory of politics.
Abstract Objective Efforts to measure cultural identities in survey research rely on self‐reported ethnic, racial, and national identities. We test how survey operationalization of grid–group ...cultural theory (CT) influences the classification of individuals’ (sub)cultural identities. Methods A national online sample of Americans ( n = 697 for current analyses) rated items from CT indices, CT statements, and cultural cognition theory (CCT) indices in a 2016–2017 panel survey. Individuals were classified as identifying with a culture if they supported it (e.g., rating it above the scale mean or median, or in the top 35 percent of the scale distribution) or agreed with each item constituting the scale (the “midpoint method” introduced here). Results Different classification methods and cultural measures yield different proportions of support of cultural biases, yielding statistically significant differences despite most people being similarly classified. Survey measures can unequivocally assign a minority of people to a single cultural identity, with a majority so classified only if one does not require the individual to support only one bias. Conclusions Using a short, conceptually valid measure of culture with the novel midpoint method seems best for CT survey researchers but should have implications more broadly in cultural identity research and social science efforts to classify individuals.
Cultural theory (CT) developed from grid/group analysis, which posits that different patterns of social relations—hierarchist, individualist, egalitarian, and fatalist—produce compatible cultural ...biases influencing assessment of which hazards pose high or low risk and how to manage them. Introduced to risk analysis (RA) in 1982 by Douglas and Wildavsky's Risk and Culture, this institutional approach to social construction of risk surprised a field hitherto focused on psychological influences on risk perceptions and behavior. We explain what CT is and how it developed; describe and evaluate its contributions to the study of risk perception and management, and its prescriptions for risk assessment and management; and identify opportunities and resources to develop its contributions to RA. We suggest how the diverse, fruitful, but scattered efforts to develop CT both inside and outside the formal discipline of RA (as exemplified by the Society for Risk Analysis) might be leveraged for greater theoretical, methodological, and applied progress in the field.
In this study, we investigate four attitudinal structures (including liberal, conservative, and libertarian configurations) associated with two ideological dimensions among American voters and ...demonstrate that these attitudinal structures are related in expected ways to differential preferences for the values of freedom, order, and equality/caring. Liberals are inclined to trade freedom for equality/caring but not for order, whereas conservatives are their opposites—willing to trade freedom for order but not for equality/caring. In contrast, libertarians are generally less willing than others to trade freedom for either order or equality/caring (although they probably prefer order to equality/caring). The fourth ideological type is more willing than the others to relinquish freedom, preferring both order and equality/caring. Depending on how our results are interpreted, this fourth type may be characterized as either communitarian or humanitarian. These findings help close the gap between unidimensional conceptions and multidimensional evidence of ideological organization in political attitudes by demonstrating that value structure and attitudinal structure are strongly related in two ideological dimensions.
In States of Knowledge (2004), Sheila Jasanoff argues that we gain explanatory power by thinking of natural and social orders as being produced together, but she and her volume contributors do not ...yet offer a theory of the coproduction of scientific knowledge and social order. This article uses Mary Douglas's cultural theory to identify four recurring states of knowledge and to specify political-cultural conditions for the coproduction of scientific knowledge, social order, and scientific, cultural, and policy change. The plausibility of this theory is illustrated by using it to explain the coproduction and transformation of forest and wildlife science and management in the Pacific Northwest.
