Economic Issues Are Moral Issues: The Moral Underpinnings of the Desire to Reduce Wealth Inequality

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 553-562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew S. Franks ◽  
Kyle C. Scherr
Keyword(s):  
Economic Inequality ◽  
Psychological Disorders ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Foundations ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
Relevant Factors

Economic inequality is a pervasive and growing source of social problems such as poor health, crime, psychological disorders, and lack of trust in others. U.S. citizens across the political spectrum both underperceive the extent of economic inequality and would prefer to live in a society with much less inequality than both exist in reality and in their subjective estimations. Across multiple studies, we examined the ability of “moral foundations” to predict people’s desire to reduce economic inequality (while also replicating research showing widespread desire for a more equal society). Moral foundations endorsements consistently predicted desire to reduce inequality even when controlling for other relevant factors (e.g., political orientation). In addition, requests for donations to an organization focused on reducing economic inequality were able to elicit more money when the requests largely appealed to the type of moral foundations endorsed by participants.

scholarly journals Ideological Consistency, Political Orientation, and Variability Across Moral Foundations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Pyszczynski ◽  
Pelin Kesebir ◽  
Matt Motyl ◽  
Andrea Yetzer ◽  
Jacqueline M. Anson
Keyword(s):  
Political Orientation ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Foundations ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The Relationship

We conceptualized ideological consistency as the extent to which an individual’s attitudes toward diverse political issues are coherent among themselves from an ideological standpoint. Four studies compared the ideological consistency of self-identified liberals and conservatives. Across diverse samples, attitudes, and consistency measures, liberals were more ideologically consistent than conservatives. In other words, conservatives’ individual-level attitudes toward diverse political issues (e.g., abortion, gun control, welfare) were more dispersed across the political spectrum than were liberals’ attitudes. Study 4 demonstrated that variability across commitments to different moral foundations predicted ideological consistency and mediated the relationship between political orientation and ideological consistency.

Political orientation and moral foundations

2019 ◽  
Vol 118 (11) ◽  
pp. 365-371
Author(s):  
J Dorasamy ◽  
Mr Jirushlan Dorasamy
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
North America ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Foundations ◽  
Open Approach ◽  
Online Questionnaire ◽  
Moral Foundation ◽  
The North

Studies, especially in the North America, have shown a relationship between political orientation and moralfoundation. This study investigated whether moral judgements differ from the political orientation of participantsin South Africa moral judgment and the extent to which moral foundations are influenced by politicalorientation.Further, the study investigated the possibility of similar patterns with the North AmericanConservative-Liberal spectrum and the moral foundation. There were 300participants, 78 males and 222 females,who completed an online questionnaire relating to moral foundation and political orientation. The results partiallysupported the hypothesis relating to Liberal and Conservative orientation in South Africa. Further, this studypartially predicted the Liberal-Conservative orientation with patterns in the moral foundation, whilst showingsimilar findings to the North American studies. A growing rate of a neutral/moderate society is evidenced in SouthAfrica and abroad, thereby showing the emergence of a more open approach to both a political and generalstance.”””

scholarly journals What’s Left? Political orientation, economic conditions and incarceration in Greece under Syriza-led government

2020 ◽  
pp. 147737082096656
Author(s):  
Leonidas K. Cheliotis ◽  
Sappho Xenakis
Keyword(s):  
Political Orientation ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Downturn ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
State Punishment ◽  
National Economic ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The One ◽  
Fiscal Implications

An important body of scholarly work has been produced over recent decades to explain variation in levels and patterns of state punishment across and within different countries around the world. Two variables that have curiously evaded systematic attention in this regard are, first, the orientation of incumbent governments along the political spectrum, and second, the experience and fiscal implications of national economic downturn. Although recent years have seen both variables receive somewhat greater consideration, there is still precious little research into the effects on state punishment that they have in interaction with one another. With a view to helping fill this gap in the literature, this article identifies the direction and assesses the extent of influence exerted by government political orientation, on the one hand, and by economic downturn alongside its fiscal repercussions, on the other hand, upon the evolution of incarceration in the context of contemporary Greece. In so doing, we offer a uniquely detailed account of carceral trends before and during the period that a coalition government led by the left-wing Syriza party was in power. With regard to carceral trends as such, the scope of our analysis extends beyond conventional imprisonment also to include immigration detention. As well as arguing that economic downturn can place crucial limits on a government’s ability to execute progressive plans in carceral matters, we additionally conclude that a government’s scope of action in this vein may be further restricted depending on the autonomy it can wield in defiance of foreign forces intervening in both economic and political realms.

scholarly journals Political Regimes and External Voting Rights: A Cross-National Comparison

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastián A. Umpierrez de Reguero ◽  
Inci Öykü Yener-Roderburg ◽  
Vivian Cartagena
Keyword(s):  
Voting Rights ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
External Voting ◽  
Strategic Role ◽  
National Comparison ◽  
Political Spectrum

In this article, we analyze the nexus between political regimes and external voting rights. Using a global longitudinal dataset, we report that higher levels of inclusion and contestation bring higher probabilities that a state adopts and implements emigrant enfranchisement. Taking outliers from our quantitative assessment, we then further examine two liberal democracies, Ireland and Uruguay, and two electoral autocracies, Turkey and Venezuela. These country cases reveal three mechanisms that shed light on the strategic role of political elites in explaining the relation between political regime type and emigrant enfranchisement. First, the democracies under study show us that in certain contexts with a relatively large diaspora size and in which part of the political spectrum is hesitant about the political orientation of nonresident citizens, emigrant enfranchisement is neither necessarily promulgated nor implemented. Second, the autocracies illustrate that when the diaspora favors (or is perceived to favor) the incumbency, then external voting rights are extended; otherwise, third, they are withheld or limited for nonresident citizens.

scholarly journals Powerful posters

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
Maiken Ana Kores
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
The Political ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Multimodal Analysis ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Political Discourse Analysis ◽  
Political Spectrum

Given the rise in far-right and populist rhetoric in Europe, particularly in light of the 2015 refugee crisis and the racist and xenophobic responses to it, this paper provides a multimodal analysis of the campaign slogans and posters of Slovenian political parties that gained parliamentary seats during the 2018 parliamentary elections that were, alongside focusing on issues pertaining to the Slovenian political landscape, heavily infused with concerns and potential solutions on how to tackle the challenges currently faced by Europe. The aim is to examine the linguistic and visual tools used by parties across the political spectrum, and to find out if the use of certain elements is characteristic of a determined political orientation. A brief outline of Slovenian party dynamics and the conditions that have contributed to them is followed by an analysis of the parties’ political campaigns. Using the tools of political discourse analysis, the first part is centred around parties’ choice of syntax and lexis in their political slogans, as well as the imagery on their posters, whereas the second is devoted to a linguistic analysis of how parties frame and address five key common issues in their political programmes: pensions, corruption, finance, healthcare and safety. Their stances and how these differ or coincide based on their place on the political spectrum are exemplified by short excerpts from the programmes.

scholarly journals What Makes Diets Political? Moral Foundations and the Left-Wing-Vegan Connection

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-52
Author(s):  
Thomas Grünhage ◽  
Martin Reuter
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Meat Consumption ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Environmental Damage ◽  
Moral Foundations ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Meat Eating

AbstractThough meat-consumption is known to be a key factor in environmental damage, veganism and vegetarianism are still perceived to be left-wing-phenomena, ironically not penetrating to those who hold ideologies of conservation. Logical contradictions and historical counter-examples cast doubt on a substantive connection between political orientation and meat-eating. Instead, common psychological factors may predispose people toward both: left vs. right-wing political orientation and self-restrictive vs. omnivore eating preferences. Moral foundations have been shown to explain why even seemingly contradictory issue stances are brought forward in the context of the same ideological or political orientation. Here, we expand on these findings by showing the moral foundations to connect political orientation and vegan and vegetarian eating preferences as well as specific strategies of meat-eating justification in a large German sample. Specifically, the binding foundations authority and purity as well as avoidance tendencies are shown to differentially interact with meat-eating across the political spectrum with stronger effects for left-wing adherents and centrists than for the right-wing. Mediation analyses reveal that substantive parts of the association between political orientation and self-restriction in eating are attributable to differences in the moral makeup of left- and right-wing adherents. Connecting our results to prior work on the explanatory power of moral foundations for the political polarization of environmentalism, we discuss how our results may inform inter-ideologically appealing communications of reducing meat consumption, which is a worthwhile and necessary goal for mitigating climate change.

scholarly journals The Effect of Ideological Identification on the Endorsement of Moral Values Depends on the Target Group

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan G. Voelkel ◽  
Mark John Brandt
Keyword(s):  
Moral Values ◽  
Target Group ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Foundations ◽  
Group Conflict ◽  
Partial Support ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Total N ◽  
Political Group ◽  
Political Groups

Research suggests that liberals and conservatives use different moral foundations to reason about moral issues (moral divide hypothesis). An alternative prediction is that observed ideological differences in moral foundations are instead driven by ingroup-versus-outgroup categorizations of competing political groups (political group conflict hypothesis). In two pre-registered experiments (total N = 958), using experimentally manipulated measures of moral foundations, we test strong versions of both hypotheses and find partial support for both. Supporting the moral divide hypothesis, conservatives endorsed the binding foundations more strongly than liberals even when a moderate target group was explicitly specified. Supporting the political group conflict hypothesis, both conservatives and liberals endorsed moral foundations more when moral acts targeted ingroup versus outgroup members. These results have implications for improving measures of moral values and judgments and point to ways to enhance the effectiveness of strategies aimed at building bridges between people from different political camps.

American Evangelical Politics before the Christian Right

2017 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-372
Author(s):  
DANIEL K. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Christian Right ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
American Evangelicalism

Is American Evangelicalism a politically progressive tradition? For contemporary observers who are familiar with American Evangelicalism only in its modern, politically conservative guise, the idea that many American Evangelicals have traditionally been on the left end of the political spectrum might come as a surprise. Yet, according to Randall Balmer's Evangelicalism in America and Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals, both of which offer two-hundred-year surveys of Evangelical political activism in the United States, the Christian Right is an aberration in American Evangelicalism and not representative of the tradition's political orientation.

scholarly journals The Effect of Ideological Identification on the Endorsement of Moral Values Depends on the Target Group

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 851-863 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan G. Voelkel ◽  
Mark J. Brandt
Keyword(s):  
Moral Values ◽  
Target Group ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Foundations ◽  
Group Conflict ◽  
Partial Support ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Total N ◽  
Political Group ◽  
Political Groups

Research suggests that liberals and conservatives use different moral foundations to reason about moral issues (moral divide hypothesis). An alternative prediction is that observed ideological differences in moral foundations are instead driven by ingroup-versus-outgroup categorizations of competing political groups (political group conflict hypothesis). In two preregistered experiments (total N = 958), using experimentally manipulated measures of moral foundations, we test strong versions of both hypotheses and find partial support for both. Supporting the moral divide hypothesis, conservatives endorsed the binding foundations more strongly than liberals even when a moderate target group was explicitly specified. Supporting the political group conflict hypothesis, both conservatives and liberals endorsed moral foundations more when moral acts targeted ingroup versus outgroup members. These results have implications for improving measures of moral values and judgments and point to ways to enhance the effectiveness of strategies aimed at building bridges between people from different political camps.

scholarly journals Examining Moral Foundations Theory through Immigration Attitudes

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-30
Author(s):  
Leda Nath ◽  
Nicholas Pedriana ◽  
Christopher Gifford ◽  
James W. McAuley ◽  
Marta Fülöp
Keyword(s):  
Public Attitudes ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Original Position ◽  
Moral Foundations ◽  
Moral Foundations Theory ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Moral Diversity ◽  
Immigration Attitudes ◽  
Political Spectrum

Moral foundations theory (MFT) explains how political and cultural attitudes are shaped significantly by people’s moral intuitions; gut-level judgments about proper human behavior and social relationships. We examine the theory through the topic of immigration attitudes. Social scientists of various stripes have built a comprehensive research program studying public attitudes towards immigrants and immigration policy. Immigration is currently among the most contentious political issues in the United States and Europe—evidenced in part by the election of Donald Trump, the UK’s Brexit vote, and the recent rise of nationalist parties on the continent. Drawing on MFT and using one politically diverse sample and one liberal-leaning sample, we conducted two experiments respectively, to test whether effects of political orientation on US immigration attitudes may be moderated by alternative moral framing of pro-immigration appeals. Data support hypotheses, and is consistent with theoretical claims about moral diversity and political attitudes generally. Also, results shed new light on how shifts in immigration attitudes, that is whether one entrenches further into an original position or is persuaded into a new attitude, depend on one’s place on the political spectrum. Keywords: moral foundations theory, moral foundations, immigration, attitudes, moral intuition, experiment

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