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
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.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences.
Zajonc, R. B. (1980) · American Psychologist · doi:10.1037/0003-066x.35.2.151 · Cited by 8,094
The Economic Approach to Human Behavior
Becker, G. S. (1976) · University of Chicago Press eBooks · doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226217062.001.0001 · Cited by 5,027
The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life
March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1983) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.2307/1961840 · Cited by 4,011
BOUNDED RATIONALITY, AMBIGUITY, AND THE ENGINEERING OF CHOICE
March, J. G. (1988) · Decision Making · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511598951.004 · Cited by 1,688
Voting, a Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign
Roshwalb, I., Berelson, B. R., Lazarsfeld, P. F., & McPhee, W. N. (1955) · Journal of Marketing · doi:10.2307/1247297 · Cited by 1,590
Bounded rationality, ambiguity and the engineering of choice
March, J. G. (1978) · The Bell Journal of Economics · doi:10.2307/3003600 · Cited by 1,539
Agar, M., Douglas, M., & Wildavsky, A. (1983) · Anthropological Quarterly · doi:10.2307/3317347 · Cited by 1,277
Self-citationVoting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign
Smith, D., Berelson, B. R., Lazarsfeld, P. F., & McPhee, W. N. (1955) · The American Catholic Sociological Review · doi:10.2307/3709070 · Cited by 1,093
Toward a Structural Theory of Action
(1982) · Elsevier eBooks · doi:10.1016/c2009-0-21953-2 · Cited by 773
Toward a Structural Theory of Action
BURT, R. S. (1982) · Toward a Structural Theory of Action · doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-147150-7.50014-4 · Cited by 772
Cited by
The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis
Wildavsky, A. (1979) · doi:10.1007/978-1-349-04955-4 · Cited by 896
Self-citationGoverning with Judges: Constitutional Politics in Europe
Sweet, A. S. (2000) · doi:10.1093/0198297718.001.0001 · Cited by 855
Metzger, M. J., Hartsell, E. H., & Flanagin, A. J. (2020) · Communication Research · doi:10.1177/0093650215613136 · Cited by 272
Is There a Culture War? Conflicting Value Structures in American Public Opinion
JACOBY, W. G. (2014) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.1017/s0003055414000380 · Cited by 248
Price, J. C., Walker, I. A., & Boschetti, F. (2014) · Journal of Environmental Psychology · doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2013.10.001 · Cited by 154
Metadata
- Authors
- Wildavsky, A.
- Venue
- American Political Science Review
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- 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
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/1960776
- The paper
- Wildavsky, A. (1987). Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation. American Political Science Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/1960776
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
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.