ABSTRACT
In a 1985 essay entitled "Change in Political Culture", Aaron Wildavsky suggested that in a world of nearly constant motion, political stability rather than political change is the remarkable phenomenon crying out for explanation. Culture is frequently conceived as unchanging habits that are passed down from generation to generation without question. When social scientists consider culture at all, it is generally treated as the bulwark of stability and the antithesis of change. In Cultural Theory, Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky also emphasized that cultural commitments are integrally connected to experience within the world. Culture acts as a filter through which the world is experienced, and yet at the same time experience with the world shapes one's cultural biases. Accordingly, Cultural Theory provides a basis for explaining why particular people want to increase or decrease the size of government. Moreover, its conception of societies as composed of multiple cultures alerts us to the possibility of shifting cultural coalitions.
