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Scholars have used cultural theory (CT) to explain risk perceptions and opinion formation across an impressive array of public issues, ranging from environmental, regulatory, and energy policy to public health and economics. Although disparate, all these issues concern domestic policies. This article breaks with this trend by exploring the extent to which CT can help scholars better understand public beliefs about national security. Of critical importance in debates about national security are perceptions of individual versus collective threat and the appropriate role of authoritative institutions in protecting society from these threats. Because CT provides a framework that explicitly addresses these dimensions, national security issues provide an illuminating canvas for evaluating the theory's explanatory utility.

Abstract
As numerical modeling methods and forecasting technologies continue to improve, people may start to see more specific severe weather timing and location information hours before the event occurs. While studies have investigated response actions on the warning time scales, little work has been done to understand what types of actions residents will take given 4–8 h of advance notice for a possible tornado. This study uses data from the 2018 Severe Weather and Society Survey, an annual survey of U.S. adults, to begin analyzing response actions and how those responses differ with either 4 or 8 h of advance notice. Results show that response actions are largely the same between the two time periods. The small differences that do exist show that sheltering behaviors are more common with 4 h of advance notice whereas monitoring behaviors are more common with 8 h of notice. In addition, respondents claimed they would "wait and see" more often in the 8-h category, indicating they would seek additional information before deciding how to respond. Perhaps more important than the types of actions that respondents identify is the increase in those who are unsure of how to react or would choose to do nothing when given 8 h of notice. Respondents may be anchored to the current system and may not have considered all of the possible actions they can take given more time. Therefore, we emphasize the need for education campaigns as technology, forecasts, and desired responses continue to evolve.

Public administration theorists have long argued that values of administrative actors fundamentally shape the quality and nature of the public services they provide. While there has been some work in recent years to measure values in the public sector like Public Service Motivation, we know relatively little about the role that other (more basic) values play in shaping managerial behaviour. To fill this gap, we argue that Cultural Theory (CT), a prominent theory within research on risk and public opinion, provides a general framework for operationalizing and measuring the values of public managers, which (if pursued) allows scholars to directly test important yet untested hypotheses about the relationship between values and managerial decision‐making. To explore this proposition, we use data from a recent survey of American Indian education directors in public school districts to examine the relationship between cultural worldviews and managerial motivation to engage actors in collaborative arrangements.

This paper evaluates the prospects for application of the "grid/group" cultural theory (CT), as advanced by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, to the Advocacy Coalition Theory (ACF). CT would seem to be relevant to several key aspects of the ACF: the content of the core beliefs that provide the "glue" that binds coalitions; the resilience of core beliefs and associated implications for belief change and learning; and the structure of coalitions and the mechanisms for coordination and control within them. The paper considers the compatibility of the ACF's account of deep core beliefs and coalition structure with that of CT; surveys an array of empirical studies based on variations of CT; and extends accounts of change in cultural identities from CT to the ACF. In addition, we highlight some of the ways in which the ACF may offer important theoretical insights for scholars of CT, potentially clarifying hypotheses concerning the relationships among basic worldviews, more specific beliefs, and behaviors.

AbstractTrust is a key component of democratic decision‐making and becomes even more salient in highly technical policy areas, where the public relies heavily on experts for decision making and on the information provided by federal agencies. Research to date has not examined whether the members of the public place different levels of trust in the various agencies that operate within the same policy subsystem, especially in a highly technical subsystem such as that of nuclear energy and waste management. This paper explores public trust in multiple agencies operating within the same subsystem, trust in each agency relative to aggregate trust across agencies that operate within the nuclear waste subsystem, and trust in alternative agencies that have been suggested as possible players in the decision‐making process. We find that trust accorded to different federal agencies within the nuclear waste subsystem varies. The variation in trust is systematically associated with multiple factors, including basic trust in government, perceptions about the risks and benefits of nuclear energy/waste management, party identification, and education. These findings have significant implications for research on public trust in specific government agencies, alternative policy entities, and for policy makers who want to design robust and successful policies and programs in highly technical policy domains.

Deep core beliefs represent an important yet theoretically underspecified concept within the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). This underspecification can (in part) be attributed to the ad hoc way in which ACF scholars have defined and measured the concept over time. To overcome this, we advocate the development and future use of a standardized metric for measuring deep core beliefs in ACF studies. Such a measure, we contend, should be multidimensional, generalizable, measurable using multiple techniques, and broad enough in scope to operate across virtually all policy domains. Using these criteria as our benchmark, we evaluate the viability of cultural theory (CT) as one such metric. In short, we find that CT meets all of these criteria, and therefore provides ACF scholars with a way to measure deep core beliefs across enduring public policy disputes that are demarcated by conflicting belief systems. Accordingly, we advocate its use in future studies.

AbstractEffective communication about severe weather requires that providers of weather information disseminate accurate and timely messages and that the intended recipients (i.e., the population at risk) receive and react to these messages. This article contributes to extant research on the second half of this equation by introducing a "real time" measure of public attention to severe weather risk communication based on the growing stream of data that individuals publish on social media platforms, in this case, Twitter. The authors develop a metric that tracks temporal fluctuations in tornado-related Twitter activity between 25 April 2012 and 11 November 2012 and assess the validity of the metric by systematically comparing fluctuations in Twitter activity to the issuance of tornado watches and warnings, which represent basic but important forms of communication designed to elicit, and therefore correlate with, public attention. The assessment finds that the measure demonstrates a high degree of convergent validity, suggesting that social media data can be used to advance our understanding of the relationship between risk communication, attention, and public reactions to severe weather.

ObjectiveSocial scientists from a variety of disciplines have employed concepts drawn from cultural theory (CT) to explain preferences across an array of issues. Recent research has challenged key elements of CT in a number of ways, perhaps most importantly by arguing that cultural types are simply another formulation of political ideology, and that only politically knowledgeable respondents reliably utilize either cultural or ideological categories in formulating preferences. This study reconsiders and expands upon this contention.MethodsPrincipal component analyses of responses to a U.S. national survey of 4,387 people.ResultsOur findings are threefold: (1) people with low levels of political knowledge are able to sort egalitarianism and individualism into coherent worldviews; (2) people with high levels of knowledge do not collapse egalitarianism and individualism onto a single scale of political ideology; and (3) regardless of levels of knowledge, survey respondents are able to recognize all four of the value orientations proposed by CT.ConclusionCT, which is related to but different than political ideology, offers a robust system of worldviews that both high‐ and low‐knowledge individuals might draw upon to formulate opinions and make decisions.

Investments in new weather forecasting technologies and communication products can be costly and serve the ultimate purpose of protecting life and property. The Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs) paradigm attempts to improve technology and communication through the provision of probabilistic hazard information (PHI). The research and technology necessary to produce this information requires a substantial resource investment, but the societal value of the information may outweigh the costs. This study provides an initial estimate of this value by exploring public willingness to pay (WTP) for an app that provides continuously updated, geographically situated PHI that could be utilized during a tornado event. Findings indicate that the mean WTP, in a one-time payment, for this precise hazard information product is $7.53 per person. Aggregated to the US population, the estimated value is between $901 million and $1.56 billion. These findings indicate that federal agencies and private companies are likely to generate a substantial surplus by developing these products and will contribute to improving informed decision-making and protecting lives and property.

ObjectiveCultural Theory (CT) has attracted significant attention across the social sciences and is increasingly being used in survey research. We assess the construct validity of three CT survey operationalizations to help interpret and improve these measures.MethodsA coding protocol for face and content validity of survey items was developed with input from several CT scholars and applied independently by two of authors of this article. Convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of these items were assessed using survey data.ResultsWe find that these measures generally lack face and content validity but have reasonably good convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.ConclusionWhile these measures can continue to be used to predict attitudes and behaviors that CT hypothesizes will vary with culture, scholars interested in testing CT's basic claims in survey research should seek to improve their face and content validity, which will also allow better tests of convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.