The late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky posited that that the cultural ways of life featured in Mary Douglas’s “group-grid” typology are the font of political preferences generally.  He therefore advocated the use of a two-dimensional framework based on group-grid rather than a one dimensional, left-right framework for explaining political attitudes and behavior.  See, e.g., Aaron Wildavsky, Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation, 81 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 1 (1987). 

The National Risk and Culture Survey generated evidence strongly supportive of Wildavsky’s view: 

· Egalitarians and solidarists support gun control and oppose the death penalty, while hierarchical and individualistic persons come out the other way. 

· Egalitarians and solidarists view environmental protection as an important policy goal.  Hierarchical and individualist persons do not; instead, they view protection of the economy from the disruptive effects of business regulation as an important priority. 

· Hierarchists see various forms of social deviancy -- including illegal drugs and promiscuous sex -- as matters of public concern.  On deviancy issues, however, individualists part way with hierarchs and side with egalitarians. 

Consistent with Wildavsky’s view, moreover, cultural worldviews better predict persons’ political preferences in these matters than either socio-demographic characteristics or conventional left-right political affiliations and ideologies. 

Even more importantly, data from the National Risk and Culture Survey furnish support for Wildavsky’s conjectures on the role of culture in orienting mass opinion. It is a staple of conventional public opinion research that conventional measures of ideology, such as “liberalism” and “conservativism,” lack the power to explain the opinion of most members of the public, who presumably lack the time and aptitude to deduce policy positions from abstract principles.  Wildavsky hypothesized that such persons are guided instead by cultural cues -- primarily the meanings policies express, and the positions espoused by culturally like-minded peers. Consistent with Wildavsky’s position, the National Risk and Culture Survey found that on a host of issues cultural orientations, but not political ideologies, explain the views of persons of low levels of political sophistication.

 Related papers:
The "Wildavsky Heuristic": The Cultural Orientation of Mass Political Opinion
Cultural Cognition and Public Policy