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Cited by 1,021

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 30 of the 30 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation

Wildavsky, Aaron·1987·American Political Science Review

Abstract

Preferences come from the most ubiquitous human activity: living with other people. Support for and opposition to different ways of life, the shared values legitimating social relations (here called cultures) are the generators of diverse preferences. After discussing why it is not helpful to conceive of interests as preferences or to dismiss preference formation as external to organized social life, I explain how people are able to develop many preferences from few clues by using their social relations to interrogate their environment. The social filter is the source of preferences. I then argue that culture is a more powerful construct than conceptual rivals: heuristics, schemas, ideologies. Two initial applications—to the ideology of the left-right distinctions and to perceptions of danger—test the claim that this theory of how individuals use political cultures to develop their preferences outperforms the alternatives.

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Metadata

Authors
Wildavsky, A.
Venue
American Political Science Review
Published
1987-03
Volume
81
Issue
1
Pages
3-21
ISSN
  • 0003-0554 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5943
OpenAlex
W2139301063
Cited by
1,021
References
30
FWCI
153.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/1960776
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Wildavsky, A. (1987). Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation. American Political Science Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/1960776

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.