Cultural theory, rejection of cultural bias, and party preference

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.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  Party Politics

• Publication date

  2022-02-23

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1177/13540688211071065
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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