This paper will examine value preferences within the American mass public. The most
fundamental reason for doing so lies in the fact that core values are widely believed to be important
determinants of subsequent political orientations and behavior. But, a more immediate motivation stems
from a contradiction that seems to be developing in the literature on this topic. On the one hand,
longstanding social psychological theories about human values stress the importance of value
structures— individuals’ organized, consistent preferences across a range of separate values.
On the other hand, a number of alternative theoretical perspectives suggest that people may be
unable, or unwilling, to make “real” choices between values. An inability to choose among values may
arise though a variety of specific mechanisms. But, regardless of its exact source, the resultant
indifference or ambivalence calls into question the existence of hierarchical value preferences. This, in
turn, has important consequences for understanding the nature and sources of American public opinion.
The analysis presented below uses data from a unique source— the 1994 Multi-Investigator
Study— to test the existence of value structures within the American public. Interestingly, previous
research efforts have never directly examined whether pairwise choices among values are transitive; that
is, whether choices can be combined into fully-ordered preference hierarchies. The empirical evidence
suggests that most people do, in fact, make consistent choices across values. And, to the extent that some
individuals do not exhibit fully-ordered preferences, it seems to be due to low levels of political
sophistication, rather than substantively-motivated difficulties in making the choices. Stated simply, value
ambivalence does not seem to be a very pervasive phenomenon, and individual preferences toward core
values do seem to provide useful guidelines for structuring mass political behavior.
BACKGROUND
For present purposes, values can be defined as each individual’s abstract, general conceptions
about the desirable and undesirable end-states of human life. As such, values provide criteria for
evaluating external stimuli and interacting with other elements of the social environment. They effectively
define what is “good” and “bad” in the world. Good things are those that facilitate, promote, or are
Convention