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How different are cultural and economic ideology?
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ScienceDirect How different are cultural and economic ideology? Christopher D Johnston and Trent Ollerenshaw While a single left-right dimension is often used for elites, many scholars have found it useful to distinguish mass political ideology along two dimensions: an ‘economic’ dimension concerning issues of redistribution, regulation, and social insurance, and a ‘cultural’ (or ‘social’) dimension concerning issues of national boundaries and traditional morality. While economic and cultural ideology do not reduce to a single leftright dimension, they are often moderately — and sometimes strongly — correlated. These correlations vary in magnitude and direction across individuals and countries. The association of these dimensions is due, in part, to shared antecedents in psychological needs for security and certainty. However, these needs explain more variance in cultural than economic ideology, and their relationship with the latter varies across individuals and countries. Traits related to empathy, compassion, and agreeableness are an additional source of variation in mass ideology and are especially important to orientations toward inequality and thus to economic ideology. Address Duke University, United States Corresponding author: Johnston, Christopher D ([email protected])
Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2019, 34:94–101 This review comes from a themed issue on Emotion, motivation, personality and social sciences *Political Ideologies* Edited by John Jost, Eran Halperin and Kristin Laurin
In this paper, we review recent research on the extent to which cultural and economic ideology can be distinguished within the mass public. We address this question in two, related ways. First, we examine the empirical association between cultural and economic ideology in public opinion data. How strong (and in what direction) is the correlation between these dimensions in the mass public?1 Second, we consider the extent to which cultural and economic ideology share common psychological antecedents. How much overlap is there in the psychological sources of preference structure within each domain?2 The recent literature suggests there is no single answer to either of these questions that is accurate for all people in all places. Rather, the relationship of cultural to economic ideology, as well as the determinants of orientations along these two dimensions, is conditioned by the characteristics of citizens and the contexts in which they reside.
Shared and unshared variance in economic and cultural ideology We begin with a review of the association between economic and cultural ideology in the mass public. It is important at the outset to emphasize that our concern is with ideology,such as it is, and not specific policy preferences. Consistent with seminal work on public opinion, recent research finds modest correlations among policy preferences (r < 0.20, on average), and instability in these preferences across time (r < 0.50 over a four year period), though both consistency and stability increase as a function of political sophistication [1].
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.01.008 2352-1546/ã 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
We see little conflict between these findings and the research we review below. First, political sophistication is indeed a crucial moderator of the association between economic and cultural ideology. Second, our concern is not with specific policy preferences, but with the more
Introduction Scholars often describe mass political ideology along two dimensions: an ‘economic’ dimension concerning issues of redistribution, regulation, and social insurance, and a ‘cultural’ (or ‘social’) dimension concerning issues of national boundaries and traditional morality. Ideology is what is latent, or shared, among the preferences within each domain, and thus the source of the covariance among them. But is this as far as mass political ideology extends or is it useful to posit a superordinate left-right dimension that binds cultural and economic preferences together? How different are cultural and economic ideology? Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2020, 34:94–101
1 We refer to correlations between economic and cultural ideology as ‘positive’ when preferences align with contemporary U.S. liberalismconservatism (i.e. anti-redistributive preferences positively correlate with traditional values) and ‘negative’ in the opposite case (i.e. antiredistributive preferences negatively correlate with traditional values). 2 It is important to note at the outset that we do not review the literature on estimating (and interpreting) the dimensionality of mass ideology empirically. While this is an interesting and important issue, space limitations require a narrower focus. This article assumes that it is useful to talk about a subset of mass preferences in terms of latent ‘economic’ and ‘cultural’ orientations. This assumption can (and should) be critically evaluated, but it is not our charge to do so in this short article.
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abstract orientations that link them within domains. Even if policy preferences are rather modestly correlated, there is still some structure that needs to be explained. Our review concerns the relationship between, and the determinants of, the broader orientations that give rise to the structure that we do observe. It is also important to remember that the question of ideological constraint — the extent to which specific preferences are shaped by broader ideological orientations — is distinct from the question of correlation among ideological dimensions. For example, recent work in China finds that overall levels of ideological constraint are lower than in the U. S. and Europe, but the three latent dimensions of ideology that provide this minimal structure are correlated at nearly 1.0 [2]. Turning to the focal question, recent work suggests that there is a great deal of variation in the size and the nature of the association of economic and cultural ideology [e.g. Refs. 2,3,4,5]. If we consider the several dozen nations with available data in the World Values Survey, the average within-nation correlation between indicators of economic and cultural ideology is close to zero [5]. Yet the mean obscures many statistically significant, small to moderate correlations within nations and these are roughly equally distributed in terms of direction.3,4 That is, with a diverse set of countries, negative correlations between cultural and economic views are about as likely as positive correlations. In studies of the United States — the most closely examined context — the estimated correlation between these two dimensions in recent decades is positive in sign and typically moderate to large in magnitude [6,7,8,9,10]. A recent study also finds a large, positive relationship between these dimensions in the United Kingdom [7]. Several factors appear to be influential in shaping the size and direction of the relationship between economic and cultural ideology across countries. In nations not under communist rule during the Cold War, with high levels of human development, and with low levels of traditional sexual morality, leftist economic ideology tends to be positively correlated with cultural liberalism. However, in post-communist nations, and those with lower levels of development and higher levels of traditional morality, the correlation tends to reverse direction [2,5]. Withincountry factors may also matter. In the U.S. case, for 3
This research relies on the limited number of indicators available in the World Values Survey and does not combine them into scales of economic and cultural conservatism. Unreliable measures of the dimensions may attenuate the size of the relationship within countries toward zero (from either the positive or negative direction). More comparative research is needed on this question. 4 When using qualitative terms to discuss magnitudes, we refer to correlations as ‘low’, ‘small’, or ‘weak’ when they are less than 0.20; ‘medium’ or ‘moderate’ when they are between 0.20 and 0.50; and ‘high’ or ‘large’ when they are greater than or equal to 0.50. www.sciencedirect.com
example, cross-domain constraint is increasing from the mid-20th Century to the present [11]. This is likely due, in part, to the growing clarity of elite cues as a result of party polarization during this period [12–14]. Recent research also finds moderators at the individual level. A particularly robust finding in the Western context is that the association between cultural and economic ideology increases as a function of political engagement. Citizens who know and care about politics display stronger correlations than citizens who largely tune out [8,11 ,15,16]; though some recent work suggests this engagement gap is smaller for self-placements on economic and cultural dimensions, for which the correlation is generally large [7,17]. At the highest levels of engagement, ideology may effectively collapse to a single dimension. Among delegates to U.S. major party conventions, for example, correlations between economic and cultural preferences are close to 1.0 [9], and for Western European parties there is a strong relationship between expert placements on the economic and cultural (‘TAN-GAL’) dimensions [18]. There are at least two mechanisms that account for the moderating role of political engagement. First, citizens whose preferences better align with the structure of elite conflict at a given point in time may feel stronger about their political options and thus participate at higher rates [19–23]. Second, engaged citizens may change their issue positions to better match those of their favored party and politicians [24,25]. It is likely that both are operative to at least some degree [26–28]. For example, Layman et al. find that policy activists who become committed partisans tend to bring preferences less central to their political identity into alignment with their party’s platform [29]. To summarize, economic and cultural forms of ideology are clearly distinguishable in the mass public. At the same time, they are correlated at substantively important levels in many places and one recent study with a diverse set of countries suggests that within-country correlations are about as likely to be negative as positive. This suggests common factors shaping ideology across dimensions, but also that the specific factors in play — or perhaps the way in which these factors operate — varies across citizens and contexts.
Psychological determinants of cultural and economic ideology In this section we first review recent work that explains the shared variance between cultural and economic ideology: why are they correlated to the extent, and in the way, that they are? We then examine research that explains the unshared variance: why do economic and cultural ideology move, in part, independently? Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2020, 34:94–101
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Explanations for shared variance between economic and cultural ideology
examinations of this interaction and more research is needed, especially in contexts outside the U.S.
Perhaps the most influential framework for understanding the covariation of economic and cultural ideology is Jost et al.’ theory of political conservatism as motivated social cognition [30,31]. They argue that rightist views on both dimensions are rooted in psychological needs for security and certainty because both are system-justifying ideologies. That is, both economic and cultural conservatisms rationalize status quo values, institutions, and socioeconomic hierarchies and thus provide stability in one’s environment and closure on normative questions [7,31,32]. In turn, these needs drive not only cultural traditionalism, but also an ideology that justifies market economies and the inequalities they produce [7] (though with important exceptions [e.g. Eastern Europe; 33]). For example, Azevedo et al. find that economic conservatism is moderately correlated with both right-wing authoritarianism and general system justification tendencies in the U.S. and the U.K. [7]. A very large literature has accumulated since Jost et al.’ seminal paper in 2003, and this work is summarized in several recent meta-analyses [32,34,35]. Overall, these find strong support for the claim that epistemic and existential needs promote rightist ideology.
One of the few comparative projects in the literature finds that, averaging across a diverse set of countries, needs for security and certainty weakly promote left-wing economic views. However, the relationship varies substantially at the country level and political context may explain some of this variation [68]. What the authors term country-level ‘ideological constraint’ — the extent to which economic and cultural ideology are positively related within a given country — reduces the size of the relationship between needs and leftist economic views. At the highest levels of ideological constraint, this relationship flips sign such that needs for certainty and security promote rightist economic ideology. Further, context interacts with individual-level political engagement such that security and certainty needs promote rightist economic ideology primarily among engaged citizens in ideologically constrained countries. While an important initial contribution, much more comparative research is needed on this topic as this work uses only a single, relatively unreliable measure of epistemic and existential needs.
However, these meta-analyses largely sidestep the question of whether epistemic and existential needs shape ideology in similar ways across the economic and cultural domains. Recent reviews that more directly address this question find that needs for security and certainty (and related variables) have, on average, a stronger relationship to cultural ideology than economic ideology [36 ,37,38,39]. Recent empirical examples illustrating this asymmetry include the effects of feelings of physical safety [40], need for cognitive closure [8,41,42], openness to experience [43], disgust sensitivity [44], need for cognition [8], and analytic cognitive style [42,45–48]. Moreover, research is mixed with respect to the direction of the relationship in the economic domain. Some research finds that epistemic and existential needs (and related variables) promote leftist economic views [49–58] while other work finds such needs promote rightist views [59–65]. Recent research also finds substantial variation in the relationship of security and certainty needs with economic ideology across individual-level and country-level variables. At the individual level, political engagement is particularly influential. In several recent studies, mostly with data from the U.S., needs for certainty and security consistently promote rightist economic ideology among politically interested and knowledgeable citizens [39,66,67]. As political engagement decreases, however, this association moves toward zero and, in many cases, eventually flips sign such that needs for certainty and security promote leftist economic views at the lowest levels of engagement. Todate, however, there are relatively few empirical Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2020, 34:94–101
One possible explanation for this pattern is that, in countries with high levels of ideological constraint, elite discourse constructs the meaning of the economic domain in a way that ties it more closely to cultural ideology, but politically engaged citizens are more likely to be exposed to such discourse. For example, this might involve framing rightist economic policy in system-justifying terms or simply pairing rightist economic views with symbols that strongly resonate with needs for security and certainty for cultural reasons, such as ‘conservative’ or ‘Republican’ in the U.S. [39,69]. Indeed, recent experimental work demonstrates that partisan and cultural cues strengthen the relationship between needs for certainty and security and economic ideology in the U.S. [39,70]. In sum, while there is strong support for the hypothesis that needs for security and certainty are related to rightist ideology in a general sense, a growing body of work suggests the relationship is stronger for cultural than economic ideology. Moreover, recent studies find variation in the relationship with economic ideology across both political engagement and political context. Overall, however, there is a dearth of comparative research and this is an area ripe for further investigation. Explanations for unshared variance between cultural and economic ideology
Even in countries where there is a moderate to strong association of cultural and economic ideology, most of the variance in these two orientations is unshared — that is, despite substantively meaningful associations between dimensions, mass ideology remains multidimensional. www.sciencedirect.com
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Interestingly, much work in psychology suggests that (at least) two dimensions are useful in explaining the psychological antecedents of sociopolitical attitudes: ‘One dimension has been labeled authoritarianism, social conservatism, or traditionalism, at one pole, versus openness, autonomy, liberalism, or personal freedom at the other pole. The other has been labeled economic conservatism, power, hierarchy, and inequality at one pole, versus egalitarianism, humanitarianism, social welfare, and social concern at the other pole’ [71; see also Ref. 72]. Duckitt et al.’ dual-process model of ideology and prejudice attempts to unify this body of work within a single theory [73,74]. They argue for two primary dimensions underpinning sociopolitical attitudes: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). While RWA and SDO are typically moderately, positively correlated, Duckitt et al. argue that they are primarily rooted in distinct psychological antecedents. Low dispositional openness, and a view that the world is a threatening and dangerous place, drive an ideology emphasizing traditionalism, submission to established authority, and aggression toward social deviants (i.e. high RWA). In contrast, low levels of dispositional agreeableness, compassion, and empathy, and a view that the world is a zero-sum ‘competitive jungle,’ drive an ideology seeking advantageous inequality for the self and the in-group (i.e. high SDO). RWA and SDO are not intended to be conceptually equivalent to cultural and economic ideology, respectively. Nevertheless, concerns with traditional values and social deviance are more relevant to cultural than economic issues, which suggests that threat sensitivity and openness should be more powerful in explaining cultural than economic ideology. This is supported by research reviewed in the previous section. In contrast, concerns with equality and inequality are more relevant to economic debates. This suggests that agreeableness, compassion, and empathy may be more important in explaining economic than cultural ideology. Recent research provides some support for this prediction. Agreeableness has a weak-to-moderate relationship with leftist economic preferences (especially in highly developed countries), while its relationship to cultural views is less consistent and often (though not always) weaker [43,59,62,75,76,77]. While there is less research on the topic, empathy may promote leftist economic preferences under some conditions, though recent work suggests it interacts with citizens’ political predispositions in complex ways [78,79,80]. Overall, the relationship of these traits to economic versus cultural ideology is a topic that requires additional research. Also consistent with the dual-process framework, SDO is moderately (negatively) related to concerns with caring for others and ensuring fair outcomes, but only weakly to www.sciencedirect.com
moderately associated with concerns with maintaining social order. Conversely, RWA is moderately to strongly related to concerns with maintaining social order, but only weakly (negatively) associated with care and fairness [81–84].5 Research also demonstrates that both SDO and low levels of agreeableness explain unique variance (above and beyond RWA and other personality traits) in support for politicians and parties that cross-cut the traditional left-right cleavage, such as Donald Trump in the United States and populist parties in Western Europe [85–88], though one study suggests the relationship of agreeableness to populist attitudes may actually be positive [89]. Research on core human values and ideology, in the context of Schwartz value theory (SVT) [90], also supports the dual-process approach. Within SVT, basic values can be mapped to a two-dimensional space. The first dimension is anchored by ‘self-transcendence’ (e.g. benevolence and universalism) at one end and ‘selfenhancement’ (e.g. power and achievement) at the other, while the second dimension is anchored by ‘conservation’ (e.g. tradition, conformity, and security) at one end and ‘openness to change’ (e.g. self-direction and stimulation) at the other. These two dimensions are moderately correlated with SDO and RWA, respectively [71,91] and research finds that the ‘self-transcendence’ dimension is more closely tied to economic ideology, while the ‘conservation’ dimension is more closely tied to cultural ideology [92–94].6 In sum, a large body of research suggests two dimensions are useful for capturing the psychological antecedents of sociopolitical attitudes: a dimension related to agreeableness, compassion, and empathy is primarily associated with orientations toward equality and inequality, while a dimension related to threat sensitivity and uncertainty aversion is primarily associated with orientations toward traditionalism and social deviance. Consistent with this framework, recent work suggests that the latter variables are more important in explaining cultural ideology, while the former are more important to economic ideology. Thus, the dual-process framework provides a plausible psychological basis for the multidimensional structure of mass ideology.
Conclusion Economic and cultural ideology do not reduce to a single left-right dimension, but they are not orthogonal. This suggests both shared psychological antecedents as well as differences in the roots of ideology across dimensions. 5 This asymmetry is even more pronounced in multiple regression and structural equation models where RWA and SDO are included simultaneously. 6 Though this research also suggests that in non-post-communist Western nations political values show a tendency to collapse toward a single left-right dimension.
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Consistent with seminal work in the field, variables related to needs for security and certainty partly explain the positive association of rightist cultural and economic ideology in the U.S. and Western Europe. Moreover, the impact of these needs is larger for politically engaged citizens — especially in the economic domain — which tracks the more general finding that economic and cultural ideology are correlated more strongly among politically active citizens. Importantly, however, these two forms of ideology are sometimes negatively correlated and needs for certainty and security may help to explain this pattern as well. While these needs consistently promote rightist cultural preferences, they often promote leftist economic preferences, and this is particularly true of politically unengaged citizens and countries with less ideologically constrained political systems. Finally, much variance in cultural and economic ideology remains unshared and this is reflected in research that finds asymmetries in the predictive power of psychological antecedents across dimensions. Variables related to security and certainty needs are more influential in shaping cultural ideology than economic ideology. Variables related to agreeableness, compassion, and empathy, by contrast, appear more powerful in the economic domain, though more research is needed on this question. This pattern mirrors to some extent long-standing work in psychology that identifies two broad dimensions underpinning sociopolitical attitudes, one related to orientations toward social deviance and traditional morality and the other orientations toward equality and inequality.
Conflict of interest statement Nothing declared.
References and recommended reading Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as: of special interest of outstanding interest
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Christopher D Johnston: Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Trent Ollerenshaw: Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.
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Belief Systems in Mass Publics using more recent data from the American National Elections Studies. The authors find (contrary to some narratives in the literature) that Converse’s claims stand the test of time: few citizens use ideological concepts in describing their political likes and dislikes, static constraint among policy preferences remains low, and overtime stability of preferences is low in both absolute terms and relative to partisan identity. As Converse argued, only a small subset of especially ‘sophisticated’ citizens evinces high levels of ideological thinking. The third part of the book considers a puzzle: if the mass public is largely ‘innocent of ideology,’ why do so many people identify as liberal or conservative? The authors propose that ideological identification is better understood as an extension of group identities than abstract ideological thinking. 2. Pan J, Xu Y: China’s ideological spectrum. J Politics 2018, 80:254-273 This article examines political ideology in Chinese mass politics. Using data from the zuobiao survey, conducted online between 2012 and 2014, the authors explore the extent to which individual preferences are constrained by more abstract ideological principles, as well as the relationship among those principles. First, they find relatively low levels of ideological constraint relative to the U.S.: latent ideological dimensions account for less variance in specific preferences in the Chinese compared to the U.S. mass public. Nonetheless, there is structure to Chinese mass preferences, and a three-dimensional model appears to best fit the data. The authors conceptualize these dimensions as tapping preferences over the inclusivity of political institutions, market economies combined with non-traditional values, and nationalism. Strikingly, despite the superior fit of the three-dimensional model, they find that these three ideological dimensions are correlated at close to 1.0. This suggests that, for practical purposes, they collapse to a single dimension which we might conceptualize as political, economic, and social liberalism (in the classical, not American, sense). 3.
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conservatism and ‘neoliberalism’ in the economic sphere are systemjustifying ideologies that serve similar purposes in perpetuating existing social and economic inequalities. This also explains why they should find common roots in personality traits and beliefs related to authoritarianism. Empirically, the article examines four high-quality samples, three from the U.S. in 2016 and one from the U.K. in 2014 and 2015. The article reports several important results. First, using several different operationalizations of each, the authors find substantial correlations between economic and cultural ideology, for both low and high sophisticates, such that cultural conservatism tends to be positively related to support for laissez-faire capitalism. They also find that both dimensions are strongly correlated with ideological self-placements, suggesting ideological coherence in the mass public. Examining the psychological antecedents of these dimensions, they find that both rightist economic and cultural ideology are predicted by general system justification and rightist authoritarianism, and that neoliberal ideology is predicted (among both high and low sophisticates) by social dominance orientation, rightist authoritarianism, general system justification, economic system-justification, and gender system justification. These results support the argument that both economic and cultural ideology are determined, in large part, by needs to rationalize status quo inequalities of various forms. 8.
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38. Hibbing JR, Smith KB, Alford JR: Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology. Behav Brain Sci 2014, 37:297-350. 39. Johnston CD, Lavine HG, Federico CM: Open Versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution. Cambridge University Press; 2017 In this book, the authors propose a theory linking economic ideology in the American mass public to personality factors related to low levels of openness, such as the need for cognitive closure and conservation values. They argue that such factors predispose people to leftist economic ideology because of the security and certainty enhancing function served by redistribution, social welfare, and government regulation of markets. Importantly; however, elite packaging of rightist economic policies with cultural conservatism reverses the sign of this relationship among citizens attentive to elite discourse, for whom economic ideology becomes inextricable from the broader cultural and political symbols of political conflict in the United States. The upshot is that economic ideology among politically engaged citizens is, to a large extent, a reflection of deeper cultural conflicts, as well as the personality factors that underpin these conflicts. The authors provide support for this theory in several ways. First, they show that the relationship of these traits to leftist economic preferences is positive among the politically unengaged and negative among the engaged. Second, they show that these traits predict rightist political identification and information seeking, but this relationship is much stronger among engaged citizens. Third, they show experimentally that the provision of partisan, ideological, and cultural cues increases the relationship of these traits to rightist economic preferences, but primarily among engaged citizens. 40. Napier JL et al.: Superheroes for change: physical safety promotes socially (but not economically) progressive attitudes among conservatives. Eur J Soc Psychol 2018, 48:187-195. 41. Federico CM, Ergun D, Hunt C: Opposition to equality and support for tradition as mediators of the relationship between epistemic motivation and system-justifying identifications. Group Processes Intergroup Relat 2014, 17:524-541.
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70. Johnston CD, Wronski J: Personality dispositions and political preferences across hard and easy issues. Political Psychol 2015, 36:35-53.
47. Yilmaz O, Saribay SA: Lower levels of resistance to change (but not opposition to equality) is related to analytic cognitive style. Soc Psychol 2018, 49:65-75.
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48. Yılmaz O, Sarıbay SA: The relationship between cognitive style and political orientation depends on the measures used. 2017.
72. Miles A, Vaisey S: Morality and politics: comparing alternate theories. Soc Sci Res 2015, 53:252-269.
49. Carl N: Verbal intelligence is correlated with socially and economically liberal beliefs. Intelligence 2014, 44:142-148.
73. Duckitt J: A dual-process cognitive-motivational theory of ideology and prejudice. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. Elsevier; 2001:41-113.
50. Jedinger A, Burger AM: The ideological foundations of economic protectionism: authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and the moderating role of political involvement. Poltical Psychol 2020 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/pops.12627.
74. Duckitt J, Sibley CG: The dual process motivational model of ideology and prejudice. The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Prejudice. 2017:188-221.
51. Lewis GJ, Bates TC: Higher levels of childhood intelligence predict increased support for economic conservatism in adulthood. Intelligence 2018, 70:36-41. 52. Arikan G, Sekercioglu E: Authoritarian predispositions and attitudes towards redistribution. Political Psychol 2019, 0. 53. Ludeke SG, Rasmussen SHR: Different political systems suppress or facilitate the impact of intelligence on how you vote: a comparison of the U.S. and Denmark. Intelligence 2018, 70:1-6. 54. Carl N: Cognitive ability and political beliefs in the United States. Pers Individual Diff 2015, 83:245-248. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2020, 34:94–101
75. Aichholzer J, Danner D, Rammstedt B: Facets of personality and “ideological asymmetries. J Res Pers 2018, 77:90-100. 76. Bakker BN: Personality traits, income, and economic ideology. Political Psychol 2017, 38:1025-1041. 77. Bakker BN, Lelkes Y: Selling ourselves short? How abbreviated measures of personality change the way we think about personality and politics. J Politics 2018, 80:1311-1325 This article makes the simple but important point that the push for representative samples in the study of personality and politics has had the unintended side-effect of attenuating the observed relationship between traits and political attitudes and behavior, on average. The www.sciencedirect.com
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reason is that researchers using representative samples tend to cut costs by using abbreviated personality instruments that have poor reliability. Empirically, the authors provide a stark demonstration of the implications with examples taken from literature on the need for cognition and political decision making and from the literature on the Big Five personality traits and political ideology. 78. Feldman S, Huddy L, Wronski J, Lown P: The interplay of empathy and individualism in support for social welfare policies. Political Psychol 2019 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ pops.12620. 79. Lucas BJ, Kteily NS: (Anti-)egalitarianism differentially predicts empathy for members of advantaged versus disadvantaged groups. J Pers Soc Psychol 2018, 114:665-692 This paper examines the relationship between egalitarianism and empathy. Previous research suggests that egalitarianism and related constructs (e.g. low social dominance orientation) are associated with higher levels of empathy. In contrast, the authors propose a conditional theory in which egalitarianism is associated with higher empathy for disadvantaged targets but lower levels of empathy for advantaged targets. They argue that egalitarianism shapes perceptions of harm differently for the two types of targets and that these differential perceptions mediate the effect of egalitarianism on empathy. Across eight studies, with varied sampling frames and a variety of stimulus materials, they find strong support for this theory. The authors find that the dynamic holds regardless of the respondent’s own social status. They also examine perceived value conflict with the target and perceived deservingness of the target as alternative mediating pathways and find that perceptions of harm are the primary mediator of the effect of egalitarianism. 80. Sparkman DJ, Eidelman S, Till DF: Ingroup and outgroup interconnectedness predict and promote political ideology through empathy. Group Processes Intergroup Relations 2019. p. 1368430218819794.
83. Kugler M, Jost JT, Noorbaloochi S: Another look at moral foundations theory: do authoritarianism and social dominance orientation explain liberal-conservative differences in “Moral” intuitions? Soc Justice Res 2014, 27:413-431. 84. Milojev P et al.: Right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation predict different moral signatures. Soc Justice Res 2014, 27:149-174. 85. Choma BL, Hanoch Y: Cognitive ability and authoritarianism: understanding support for Trump and Clinton. Pers Individual Diff 2017, 106:287-291. 86. Bakker BN, Rooduijn M, Schumacher G: The psychological roots of populist voting: evidence from the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. Eur J Political Res 2016, 55:302-320. 87. Pettigrew TF: Social psychological perspectives on Trump supporters. J Soc Political Psychol 2017, 5:107-116. 88. Womick J et al.: Group-based dominance and authoritarian aggression predict support for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. Soc Psychol Pers Sci 2018. 1948550618778290. 89. Fatke M: The personality of populists: how the Big Five traits relate to populist attitudes. Pers Individual Diff 2019, 139:138-151. 90. Schwartz SH et al.: Refining the theory of basic individual values. J Pers Soc Psychol 2012, 103:663. 91. Feather NT, McKee IR: Values, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and ambivalent attitudes toward women. J Appl Soc Psychol 2012, 42:2479-2504. 92. Goren P et al.: A unified theory of value-based reasoning and US public opinion. Political Behav 2016, 38:977-997.
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94. Schwartz SH et al.: Basic Personal values underlie and give coherence to political values: a cross national study in 15 countries. Political Behav 2014, 36:899-930.
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ScienceDirect How different are cultural and economic ideology? Christopher D Johnston and Trent Ollerenshaw While a single left-right dimension is often used for elites, many scholars have found it useful to distinguish mass political ideology along two dimensions: an ‘economic’ dimension concerning issues of redistribution, regulation, and social insurance, and a ‘cultural’ (or ‘social’) dimension concerning issues of national boundaries and traditional morality. While economic and cultural ideology do not reduce to a single leftright dimension, they are often moderately — and sometimes strongly — correlated. These correlations vary in magnitude and direction across individuals and countries. The association of these dimensions is due, in part, to shared antecedents in psychological needs for security and certainty. However, these needs explain more variance in cultural than economic ideology, and their relationship with the latter varies across individuals and countries. Traits related to empathy, compassion, and agreeableness are an additional source of variation in mass ideology and are especially important to orientations toward inequality and thus to economic ideology. Address Duke University, United States Corresponding author: Johnston, Christopher D ([email protected])
Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2019, 34:94–101 This review comes from a themed issue on Emotion, motivation, personality and social sciences *Political Ideologies* Edited by John Jost, Eran Halperin and Kristin Laurin
In this paper, we review recent research on the extent to which cultural and economic ideology can be distinguished within the mass public. We address this question in two, related ways. First, we examine the empirical association between cultural and economic ideology in public opinion data. How strong (and in what direction) is the correlation between these dimensions in the mass public?1 Second, we consider the extent to which cultural and economic ideology share common psychological antecedents. How much overlap is there in the psychological sources of preference structure within each domain?2 The recent literature suggests there is no single answer to either of these questions that is accurate for all people in all places. Rather, the relationship of cultural to economic ideology, as well as the determinants of orientations along these two dimensions, is conditioned by the characteristics of citizens and the contexts in which they reside.
Shared and unshared variance in economic and cultural ideology We begin with a review of the association between economic and cultural ideology in the mass public. It is important at the outset to emphasize that our concern is with ideology,such as it is, and not specific policy preferences. Consistent with seminal work on public opinion, recent research finds modest correlations among policy preferences (r < 0.20, on average), and instability in these preferences across time (r < 0.50 over a four year period), though both consistency and stability increase as a function of political sophistication [1].
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.01.008 2352-1546/ã 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
We see little conflict between these findings and the research we review below. First, political sophistication is indeed a crucial moderator of the association between economic and cultural ideology. Second, our concern is not with specific policy preferences, but with the more
Introduction Scholars often describe mass political ideology along two dimensions: an ‘economic’ dimension concerning issues of redistribution, regulation, and social insurance, and a ‘cultural’ (or ‘social’) dimension concerning issues of national boundaries and traditional morality. Ideology is what is latent, or shared, among the preferences within each domain, and thus the source of the covariance among them. But is this as far as mass political ideology extends or is it useful to posit a superordinate left-right dimension that binds cultural and economic preferences together? How different are cultural and economic ideology? Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2020, 34:94–101
1 We refer to correlations between economic and cultural ideology as ‘positive’ when preferences align with contemporary U.S. liberalismconservatism (i.e. anti-redistributive preferences positively correlate with traditional values) and ‘negative’ in the opposite case (i.e. antiredistributive preferences negatively correlate with traditional values). 2 It is important to note at the outset that we do not review the literature on estimating (and interpreting) the dimensionality of mass ideology empirically. While this is an interesting and important issue, space limitations require a narrower focus. This article assumes that it is useful to talk about a subset of mass preferences in terms of latent ‘economic’ and ‘cultural’ orientations. This assumption can (and should) be critically evaluated, but it is not our charge to do so in this short article.
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abstract orientations that link them within domains. Even if policy preferences are rather modestly correlated, there is still some structure that needs to be explained. Our review concerns the relationship between, and the determinants of, the broader orientations that give rise to the structure that we do observe. It is also important to remember that the question of ideological constraint — the extent to which specific preferences are shaped by broader ideological orientations — is distinct from the question of correlation among ideological dimensions. For example, recent work in China finds that overall levels of ideological constraint are lower than in the U. S. and Europe, but the three latent dimensions of ideology that provide this minimal structure are correlated at nearly 1.0 [2]. Turning to the focal question, recent work suggests that there is a great deal of variation in the size and the nature of the association of economic and cultural ideology [e.g. Refs. 2,3,4,5]. If we consider the several dozen nations with available data in the World Values Survey, the average within-nation correlation between indicators of economic and cultural ideology is close to zero [5]. Yet the mean obscures many statistically significant, small to moderate correlations within nations and these are roughly equally distributed in terms of direction.3,4 That is, with a diverse set of countries, negative correlations between cultural and economic views are about as likely as positive correlations. In studies of the United States — the most closely examined context — the estimated correlation between these two dimensions in recent decades is positive in sign and typically moderate to large in magnitude [6,7,8,9,10]. A recent study also finds a large, positive relationship between these dimensions in the United Kingdom [7]. Several factors appear to be influential in shaping the size and direction of the relationship between economic and cultural ideology across countries. In nations not under communist rule during the Cold War, with high levels of human development, and with low levels of traditional sexual morality, leftist economic ideology tends to be positively correlated with cultural liberalism. However, in post-communist nations, and those with lower levels of development and higher levels of traditional morality, the correlation tends to reverse direction [2,5]. Withincountry factors may also matter. In the U.S. case, for 3
This research relies on the limited number of indicators available in the World Values Survey and does not combine them into scales of economic and cultural conservatism. Unreliable measures of the dimensions may attenuate the size of the relationship within countries toward zero (from either the positive or negative direction). More comparative research is needed on this question. 4 When using qualitative terms to discuss magnitudes, we refer to correlations as ‘low’, ‘small’, or ‘weak’ when they are less than 0.20; ‘medium’ or ‘moderate’ when they are between 0.20 and 0.50; and ‘high’ or ‘large’ when they are greater than or equal to 0.50. www.sciencedirect.com
example, cross-domain constraint is increasing from the mid-20th Century to the present [11]. This is likely due, in part, to the growing clarity of elite cues as a result of party polarization during this period [12–14]. Recent research also finds moderators at the individual level. A particularly robust finding in the Western context is that the association between cultural and economic ideology increases as a function of political engagement. Citizens who know and care about politics display stronger correlations than citizens who largely tune out [8,11 ,15,16]; though some recent work suggests this engagement gap is smaller for self-placements on economic and cultural dimensions, for which the correlation is generally large [7,17]. At the highest levels of engagement, ideology may effectively collapse to a single dimension. Among delegates to U.S. major party conventions, for example, correlations between economic and cultural preferences are close to 1.0 [9], and for Western European parties there is a strong relationship between expert placements on the economic and cultural (‘TAN-GAL’) dimensions [18]. There are at least two mechanisms that account for the moderating role of political engagement. First, citizens whose preferences better align with the structure of elite conflict at a given point in time may feel stronger about their political options and thus participate at higher rates [19–23]. Second, engaged citizens may change their issue positions to better match those of their favored party and politicians [24,25]. It is likely that both are operative to at least some degree [26–28]. For example, Layman et al. find that policy activists who become committed partisans tend to bring preferences less central to their political identity into alignment with their party’s platform [29]. To summarize, economic and cultural forms of ideology are clearly distinguishable in the mass public. At the same time, they are correlated at substantively important levels in many places and one recent study with a diverse set of countries suggests that within-country correlations are about as likely to be negative as positive. This suggests common factors shaping ideology across dimensions, but also that the specific factors in play — or perhaps the way in which these factors operate — varies across citizens and contexts.
Psychological determinants of cultural and economic ideology In this section we first review recent work that explains the shared variance between cultural and economic ideology: why are they correlated to the extent, and in the way, that they are? We then examine research that explains the unshared variance: why do economic and cultural ideology move, in part, independently? Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2020, 34:94–101
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Explanations for shared variance between economic and cultural ideology
examinations of this interaction and more research is needed, especially in contexts outside the U.S.
Perhaps the most influential framework for understanding the covariation of economic and cultural ideology is Jost et al.’ theory of political conservatism as motivated social cognition [30,31]. They argue that rightist views on both dimensions are rooted in psychological needs for security and certainty because both are system-justifying ideologies. That is, both economic and cultural conservatisms rationalize status quo values, institutions, and socioeconomic hierarchies and thus provide stability in one’s environment and closure on normative questions [7,31,32]. In turn, these needs drive not only cultural traditionalism, but also an ideology that justifies market economies and the inequalities they produce [7] (though with important exceptions [e.g. Eastern Europe; 33]). For example, Azevedo et al. find that economic conservatism is moderately correlated with both right-wing authoritarianism and general system justification tendencies in the U.S. and the U.K. [7]. A very large literature has accumulated since Jost et al.’ seminal paper in 2003, and this work is summarized in several recent meta-analyses [32,34,35]. Overall, these find strong support for the claim that epistemic and existential needs promote rightist ideology.
One of the few comparative projects in the literature finds that, averaging across a diverse set of countries, needs for security and certainty weakly promote left-wing economic views. However, the relationship varies substantially at the country level and political context may explain some of this variation [68]. What the authors term country-level ‘ideological constraint’ — the extent to which economic and cultural ideology are positively related within a given country — reduces the size of the relationship between needs and leftist economic views. At the highest levels of ideological constraint, this relationship flips sign such that needs for certainty and security promote rightist economic ideology. Further, context interacts with individual-level political engagement such that security and certainty needs promote rightist economic ideology primarily among engaged citizens in ideologically constrained countries. While an important initial contribution, much more comparative research is needed on this topic as this work uses only a single, relatively unreliable measure of epistemic and existential needs.
However, these meta-analyses largely sidestep the question of whether epistemic and existential needs shape ideology in similar ways across the economic and cultural domains. Recent reviews that more directly address this question find that needs for security and certainty (and related variables) have, on average, a stronger relationship to cultural ideology than economic ideology [36 ,37,38,39]. Recent empirical examples illustrating this asymmetry include the effects of feelings of physical safety [40], need for cognitive closure [8,41,42], openness to experience [43], disgust sensitivity [44], need for cognition [8], and analytic cognitive style [42,45–48]. Moreover, research is mixed with respect to the direction of the relationship in the economic domain. Some research finds that epistemic and existential needs (and related variables) promote leftist economic views [49–58] while other work finds such needs promote rightist views [59–65]. Recent research also finds substantial variation in the relationship of security and certainty needs with economic ideology across individual-level and country-level variables. At the individual level, political engagement is particularly influential. In several recent studies, mostly with data from the U.S., needs for certainty and security consistently promote rightist economic ideology among politically interested and knowledgeable citizens [39,66,67]. As political engagement decreases, however, this association moves toward zero and, in many cases, eventually flips sign such that needs for certainty and security promote leftist economic views at the lowest levels of engagement. Todate, however, there are relatively few empirical Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2020, 34:94–101
One possible explanation for this pattern is that, in countries with high levels of ideological constraint, elite discourse constructs the meaning of the economic domain in a way that ties it more closely to cultural ideology, but politically engaged citizens are more likely to be exposed to such discourse. For example, this might involve framing rightist economic policy in system-justifying terms or simply pairing rightist economic views with symbols that strongly resonate with needs for security and certainty for cultural reasons, such as ‘conservative’ or ‘Republican’ in the U.S. [39,69]. Indeed, recent experimental work demonstrates that partisan and cultural cues strengthen the relationship between needs for certainty and security and economic ideology in the U.S. [39,70]. In sum, while there is strong support for the hypothesis that needs for security and certainty are related to rightist ideology in a general sense, a growing body of work suggests the relationship is stronger for cultural than economic ideology. Moreover, recent studies find variation in the relationship with economic ideology across both political engagement and political context. Overall, however, there is a dearth of comparative research and this is an area ripe for further investigation. Explanations for unshared variance between cultural and economic ideology
Even in countries where there is a moderate to strong association of cultural and economic ideology, most of the variance in these two orientations is unshared — that is, despite substantively meaningful associations between dimensions, mass ideology remains multidimensional. www.sciencedirect.com
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Interestingly, much work in psychology suggests that (at least) two dimensions are useful in explaining the psychological antecedents of sociopolitical attitudes: ‘One dimension has been labeled authoritarianism, social conservatism, or traditionalism, at one pole, versus openness, autonomy, liberalism, or personal freedom at the other pole. The other has been labeled economic conservatism, power, hierarchy, and inequality at one pole, versus egalitarianism, humanitarianism, social welfare, and social concern at the other pole’ [71; see also Ref. 72]. Duckitt et al.’ dual-process model of ideology and prejudice attempts to unify this body of work within a single theory [73,74]. They argue for two primary dimensions underpinning sociopolitical attitudes: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). While RWA and SDO are typically moderately, positively correlated, Duckitt et al. argue that they are primarily rooted in distinct psychological antecedents. Low dispositional openness, and a view that the world is a threatening and dangerous place, drive an ideology emphasizing traditionalism, submission to established authority, and aggression toward social deviants (i.e. high RWA). In contrast, low levels of dispositional agreeableness, compassion, and empathy, and a view that the world is a zero-sum ‘competitive jungle,’ drive an ideology seeking advantageous inequality for the self and the in-group (i.e. high SDO). RWA and SDO are not intended to be conceptually equivalent to cultural and economic ideology, respectively. Nevertheless, concerns with traditional values and social deviance are more relevant to cultural than economic issues, which suggests that threat sensitivity and openness should be more powerful in explaining cultural than economic ideology. This is supported by research reviewed in the previous section. In contrast, concerns with equality and inequality are more relevant to economic debates. This suggests that agreeableness, compassion, and empathy may be more important in explaining economic than cultural ideology. Recent research provides some support for this prediction. Agreeableness has a weak-to-moderate relationship with leftist economic preferences (especially in highly developed countries), while its relationship to cultural views is less consistent and often (though not always) weaker [43,59,62,75,76,77]. While there is less research on the topic, empathy may promote leftist economic preferences under some conditions, though recent work suggests it interacts with citizens’ political predispositions in complex ways [78,79,80]. Overall, the relationship of these traits to economic versus cultural ideology is a topic that requires additional research. Also consistent with the dual-process framework, SDO is moderately (negatively) related to concerns with caring for others and ensuring fair outcomes, but only weakly to www.sciencedirect.com
moderately associated with concerns with maintaining social order. Conversely, RWA is moderately to strongly related to concerns with maintaining social order, but only weakly (negatively) associated with care and fairness [81–84].5 Research also demonstrates that both SDO and low levels of agreeableness explain unique variance (above and beyond RWA and other personality traits) in support for politicians and parties that cross-cut the traditional left-right cleavage, such as Donald Trump in the United States and populist parties in Western Europe [85–88], though one study suggests the relationship of agreeableness to populist attitudes may actually be positive [89]. Research on core human values and ideology, in the context of Schwartz value theory (SVT) [90], also supports the dual-process approach. Within SVT, basic values can be mapped to a two-dimensional space. The first dimension is anchored by ‘self-transcendence’ (e.g. benevolence and universalism) at one end and ‘selfenhancement’ (e.g. power and achievement) at the other, while the second dimension is anchored by ‘conservation’ (e.g. tradition, conformity, and security) at one end and ‘openness to change’ (e.g. self-direction and stimulation) at the other. These two dimensions are moderately correlated with SDO and RWA, respectively [71,91] and research finds that the ‘self-transcendence’ dimension is more closely tied to economic ideology, while the ‘conservation’ dimension is more closely tied to cultural ideology [92–94].6 In sum, a large body of research suggests two dimensions are useful for capturing the psychological antecedents of sociopolitical attitudes: a dimension related to agreeableness, compassion, and empathy is primarily associated with orientations toward equality and inequality, while a dimension related to threat sensitivity and uncertainty aversion is primarily associated with orientations toward traditionalism and social deviance. Consistent with this framework, recent work suggests that the latter variables are more important in explaining cultural ideology, while the former are more important to economic ideology. Thus, the dual-process framework provides a plausible psychological basis for the multidimensional structure of mass ideology.
Conclusion Economic and cultural ideology do not reduce to a single left-right dimension, but they are not orthogonal. This suggests both shared psychological antecedents as well as differences in the roots of ideology across dimensions. 5 This asymmetry is even more pronounced in multiple regression and structural equation models where RWA and SDO are included simultaneously. 6 Though this research also suggests that in non-post-communist Western nations political values show a tendency to collapse toward a single left-right dimension.
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Consistent with seminal work in the field, variables related to needs for security and certainty partly explain the positive association of rightist cultural and economic ideology in the U.S. and Western Europe. Moreover, the impact of these needs is larger for politically engaged citizens — especially in the economic domain — which tracks the more general finding that economic and cultural ideology are correlated more strongly among politically active citizens. Importantly, however, these two forms of ideology are sometimes negatively correlated and needs for certainty and security may help to explain this pattern as well. While these needs consistently promote rightist cultural preferences, they often promote leftist economic preferences, and this is particularly true of politically unengaged citizens and countries with less ideologically constrained political systems. Finally, much variance in cultural and economic ideology remains unshared and this is reflected in research that finds asymmetries in the predictive power of psychological antecedents across dimensions. Variables related to security and certainty needs are more influential in shaping cultural ideology than economic ideology. Variables related to agreeableness, compassion, and empathy, by contrast, appear more powerful in the economic domain, though more research is needed on this question. This pattern mirrors to some extent long-standing work in psychology that identifies two broad dimensions underpinning sociopolitical attitudes, one related to orientations toward social deviance and traditional morality and the other orientations toward equality and inequality.
Conflict of interest statement Nothing declared.
References and recommended reading Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as: of special interest of outstanding interest
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Christopher D Johnston: Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Trent Ollerenshaw: Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.
References 1.
Kinder DR, Kalmoe NP: Neither Liberal Nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. University of Chicago Press; 2017 This is a book-length examination of the extent and nature of ideological thinking in the American mass public. It is roughly divided into three parts, and all of which are valuable. The first provides a concise and highly readable overview of the debate over Philip Converse’s seminal work in the 1960s and 1970s on mass belief systems. The second reexamines Converse’s primary empirical claims from his 1964 paper The Nature of
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Belief Systems in Mass Publics using more recent data from the American National Elections Studies. The authors find (contrary to some narratives in the literature) that Converse’s claims stand the test of time: few citizens use ideological concepts in describing their political likes and dislikes, static constraint among policy preferences remains low, and overtime stability of preferences is low in both absolute terms and relative to partisan identity. As Converse argued, only a small subset of especially ‘sophisticated’ citizens evinces high levels of ideological thinking. The third part of the book considers a puzzle: if the mass public is largely ‘innocent of ideology,’ why do so many people identify as liberal or conservative? The authors propose that ideological identification is better understood as an extension of group identities than abstract ideological thinking. 2. Pan J, Xu Y: China’s ideological spectrum. J Politics 2018, 80:254-273 This article examines political ideology in Chinese mass politics. Using data from the zuobiao survey, conducted online between 2012 and 2014, the authors explore the extent to which individual preferences are constrained by more abstract ideological principles, as well as the relationship among those principles. First, they find relatively low levels of ideological constraint relative to the U.S.: latent ideological dimensions account for less variance in specific preferences in the Chinese compared to the U.S. mass public. Nonetheless, there is structure to Chinese mass preferences, and a three-dimensional model appears to best fit the data. The authors conceptualize these dimensions as tapping preferences over the inclusivity of political institutions, market economies combined with non-traditional values, and nationalism. Strikingly, despite the superior fit of the three-dimensional model, they find that these three ideological dimensions are correlated at close to 1.0. This suggests that, for practical purposes, they collapse to a single dimension which we might conceptualize as political, economic, and social liberalism (in the classical, not American, sense). 3.
Lame´ris MD, Jong-A-Pin R, Garretsen H: On the measurement of voter ideology. Eur J Political Econ 2018, 55:417-432.
4.
Lefkofridi Z, Wagner M, Willmann JE: Left-authoritarians and policy representation in Western Europe: electoral choice across ideological dimensions. West Eur Politics 2014, 37:6590.
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Malka A, Lelkes Y, Soto CJ: Are cultural and economic conservatism positively correlated? A large-scale crossnational test. Br J Political Sci 2019, 49:1045-1069 This paper examines the association between economic and cultural ideology across around 100 nations included in the World Values Survey between the late-1980s and 2014 (a total of 229 nation-years). There are several interesting results from this paper. First, if we average the withinnation correlations between economic and cultural conservatism, the two dimensions are negatively related, in the sense that leftist economic preferences predict rightist cultural preferences, though this average correlation is quite small. However, looking at the within-nation correlations individually reveals many statistically and substantively meaningful associations which are about as likely to be negative as positive. Thus, there is substantial cross-country heterogeneity in the association of these ideological dimensions. They find that this variation is explained in part by post-communist status (makes the correlation more negative), extent of human development (makes the correlation less negative), and extent of moral traditionalism (makes the correlation more negative). Third, the authors find that individual-level political engagement also moderates this relationship in several cases, such that the relationship between economic and cultural ideology is most likely to be positive among politically engaged citizens in non-post-communist countries with high levels of human development and low levels of moral traditionalism. Finally, the authors argue that the general pattern of rightist cultural ideology paired with leftist economic ideology is partly explained by their common roots in needs for security and certainty. While these needs increase cultural conservatism, as predicted by past work, they promote leftist economic ideology, on average. 6.
Bartels LM: Partisanship in the Trump era. J Politics 2018, 80:1483-1494.
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Azevedo F et al.: Neoliberal ideology and the justification of inequality in capitalist societies: why social and economic dimensions of ideology are intertwined. J Social Issues 2019, 75:49-88 This article reconsiders several results in the recent literature, including the claim that citizens are ‘innocent of ideology,’ that cultural and economic ideology are largely independent, and that various forms of ‘authoritarianism’ are positively related to leftist economic ideology. The authors also make an extended argument for why economic and cultural ideology should be closely related. Specifically, they argue that cultural www.sciencedirect.com
How different are cultural and economic ideology? Johnston and Ollerenshaw 99
conservatism and ‘neoliberalism’ in the economic sphere are systemjustifying ideologies that serve similar purposes in perpetuating existing social and economic inequalities. This also explains why they should find common roots in personality traits and beliefs related to authoritarianism. Empirically, the article examines four high-quality samples, three from the U.S. in 2016 and one from the U.K. in 2014 and 2015. The article reports several important results. First, using several different operationalizations of each, the authors find substantial correlations between economic and cultural ideology, for both low and high sophisticates, such that cultural conservatism tends to be positively related to support for laissez-faire capitalism. They also find that both dimensions are strongly correlated with ideological self-placements, suggesting ideological coherence in the mass public. Examining the psychological antecedents of these dimensions, they find that both rightist economic and cultural ideology are predicted by general system justification and rightist authoritarianism, and that neoliberal ideology is predicted (among both high and low sophisticates) by social dominance orientation, rightist authoritarianism, general system justification, economic system-justification, and gender system justification. These results support the argument that both economic and cultural ideology are determined, in large part, by needs to rationalize status quo inequalities of various forms. 8.
Feldman S, Johnston C: Understanding the determinants of political ideology: implications of structural complexity. Political Psychol 2014, 35:337-358.
9.
Lupton RN, Myers WM, Thornton JR: Political sophistication and the dimensionality of elite and mass attitudes, 1980 2004. J Politics 2015, 77:368-380.
10. Treier S, Hillygus DS: The nature of political ideology in the contemporary electorate. Public Opin Q 2009, 73:679-703. 11. Freeze M, Montgomery JM: Static stability and evolving constraint: preference stability and ideological structure in the mass public. Am Politics Res 2016, 44:415-447 As the title suggests, the authors explore how two of Converse’s empirical claims hold up over time: the extent of preference stability in the mass public and the extent of static constraint. Using panel data from the American National Elections Study (two datasets from the 1970s and 1990s, respectively) and The American Panel Study (TAPS; from the 2010s) as a means of correcting for measurement error, they find a substantial degree of preference stability over time for a wide array of issues, in some cases approaching that of partisanship. Of particular interest to the present review, they find substantial correlations between error-cleaned economic and cultural preferences and also find that interdomain constraint is increasing over time. For example, in TAPS, gay marriage preferences are correlated at about 0.40 with preferences on the minimum wage and 0.60 with preferences on government health insurance. The authors confirm prior research in finding greater stability and (especially) constraint among high sophisticates relative to low sophisticates. Critically, however, they also find substantial stability and constraint among the latter group.
higher among high knowledge citizens. Further, the variance attributable to ideology doubles if we allow for two dimensions rather than one. 17. Klar S: A multidimensional study of ideological preferences and priorities among the american public. Public Opin Q 2014, 78:344-359. 18. Bakker R et al.: Measuring party positions in Europe: The Chapel Hill expert survey trend file, 1999–2010. Party Politics 2015, 21:143-152. 19. Iyengar S et al.: The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annu Rev Political Sci 2019, 22:129-146. 20. Federico CM, Fisher EL, Deason G: The authoritarian left withdraws from politics: ideological asymmetry in the relationship between authoritarianism and political engagement. J Politics 2017, 79:1010-1023. 21. Carmines EG, Ensley MJ, Wagner MW: Issue preferences, civic engagement, and the transformation of American politics. Facing the Challenge of Democracy: Explorations in the Analysis of Public Opinion and Political Participation. 2011:329-354. 22. Bougher LD: The correlates of discord: identity, issue alignment, and political hostility in polarized America. Political Behav 2017, 39:731-762. 23. Webster SW, Abramowitz AI: The ideological foundations of affective polarization in the US electorate. Am Politics Res 2017, 45:621-647. 24. Barber M, Pope JC: Does party trump ideology? Disentangling party and ideology in America. Am Political Sci Rev 2019, 113:38-54. 25. Lenz GS: Follow the Leader?: How Voters Respond to Politicians’ Policies and Performance. University of Chicago Press; 2013. 26. Carsey TM, Layman GC: Changing sides or changing minds? Party identification and policy preferences in the American electorate. Am J Political Sci 2006, 50:464-477. 27. Tesler M: Priming predispositions and changing policy positions: an account of when mass opinion is primed or changed. Am J Political Sci 2015, 59:806-824. 28. Schonfeld B, Winter-Levy S: Policy Voting or Partisanship in the United Kingdom? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Brexit. Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Brexit (March 28, 2019). 2019. 29. Layman GC et al.: Activists and conflict extension in American party politics. Am Political Sci Rev 2010, 104:324-346.
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30. Jost JT, Federico CM, Napier JL: Political ideology: Its structure, functions, and elective affinities. Annu Rev Psychol 2009, 60:307-337.
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16. Lauderdale BE, Hanretty C, Vivyan N: Decomposing public opinion variation into ideology, idiosyncrasy, and instability. J Politics 2018, 80:707-712 This short article uses two-wave panel data in the U.S. (with a one-month gap between waves), and an innovative statistical model, to decompose the variance in mass policy preferences into three components: ideology (variation across respondents that is constant across both time and issues), instability (variation within respondents across time that is specific to issues), and idiosyncrasy (variation across respondents that is specific to a given issue and constant across time). The authors find that about one-seventh of the total variance is attributable to ideology, threesevenths to instability, and three-sevenths to idiosyncrasy. However, they find that the variance attributable to instability is higher among citizens low in political knowledge and the variance attributable to ideology is
34. Jost JT: Ideological asymmetries and the essence of political psychology. Political Psychol 2017, 38:167-208.
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35. Stern C, Sterling J, Jost JT: Getting closure on conservatism, or the politics of epistemic and existential motivation. The Motivation-cognition Interface. Routledge; 2017:74-105. 36. Federico CM, Malka A: The contingent, contextual nature of the relationship between needs for security and certainty and political preferences: evidence and implications. Political Psychol 2018, 39:3-48. 37. Crawford JT: Are conservatives more sensitive to threat than liberals? It depends on how we define threat and conservatism. Social Cogn 2017, 35:354-373. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2020, 34:94–101
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38. Hibbing JR, Smith KB, Alford JR: Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology. Behav Brain Sci 2014, 37:297-350. 39. Johnston CD, Lavine HG, Federico CM: Open Versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution. Cambridge University Press; 2017 In this book, the authors propose a theory linking economic ideology in the American mass public to personality factors related to low levels of openness, such as the need for cognitive closure and conservation values. They argue that such factors predispose people to leftist economic ideology because of the security and certainty enhancing function served by redistribution, social welfare, and government regulation of markets. Importantly; however, elite packaging of rightist economic policies with cultural conservatism reverses the sign of this relationship among citizens attentive to elite discourse, for whom economic ideology becomes inextricable from the broader cultural and political symbols of political conflict in the United States. The upshot is that economic ideology among politically engaged citizens is, to a large extent, a reflection of deeper cultural conflicts, as well as the personality factors that underpin these conflicts. The authors provide support for this theory in several ways. First, they show that the relationship of these traits to leftist economic preferences is positive among the politically unengaged and negative among the engaged. Second, they show that these traits predict rightist political identification and information seeking, but this relationship is much stronger among engaged citizens. Third, they show experimentally that the provision of partisan, ideological, and cultural cues increases the relationship of these traits to rightist economic preferences, but primarily among engaged citizens. 40. Napier JL et al.: Superheroes for change: physical safety promotes socially (but not economically) progressive attitudes among conservatives. Eur J Soc Psychol 2018, 48:187-195. 41. Federico CM, Ergun D, Hunt C: Opposition to equality and support for tradition as mediators of the relationship between epistemic motivation and system-justifying identifications. Group Processes Intergroup Relat 2014, 17:524-541.
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70. Johnston CD, Wronski J: Personality dispositions and political preferences across hard and easy issues. Political Psychol 2015, 36:35-53.
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71. Duckitt J, Sibley CG: Personality, ideology, prejudice, and politics: a dual-process motivational model. J Pers 2010, 78:1861-1894.
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72. Miles A, Vaisey S: Morality and politics: comparing alternate theories. Soc Sci Res 2015, 53:252-269.
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51. Lewis GJ, Bates TC: Higher levels of childhood intelligence predict increased support for economic conservatism in adulthood. Intelligence 2018, 70:36-41. 52. Arikan G, Sekercioglu E: Authoritarian predispositions and attitudes towards redistribution. Political Psychol 2019, 0. 53. Ludeke SG, Rasmussen SHR: Different political systems suppress or facilitate the impact of intelligence on how you vote: a comparison of the U.S. and Denmark. Intelligence 2018, 70:1-6. 54. Carl N: Cognitive ability and political beliefs in the United States. Pers Individual Diff 2015, 83:245-248. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 2020, 34:94–101
75. Aichholzer J, Danner D, Rammstedt B: Facets of personality and “ideological asymmetries. J Res Pers 2018, 77:90-100. 76. Bakker BN: Personality traits, income, and economic ideology. Political Psychol 2017, 38:1025-1041. 77. Bakker BN, Lelkes Y: Selling ourselves short? How abbreviated measures of personality change the way we think about personality and politics. J Politics 2018, 80:1311-1325 This article makes the simple but important point that the push for representative samples in the study of personality and politics has had the unintended side-effect of attenuating the observed relationship between traits and political attitudes and behavior, on average. The www.sciencedirect.com
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reason is that researchers using representative samples tend to cut costs by using abbreviated personality instruments that have poor reliability. Empirically, the authors provide a stark demonstration of the implications with examples taken from literature on the need for cognition and political decision making and from the literature on the Big Five personality traits and political ideology. 78. Feldman S, Huddy L, Wronski J, Lown P: The interplay of empathy and individualism in support for social welfare policies. Political Psychol 2019 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ pops.12620. 79. Lucas BJ, Kteily NS: (Anti-)egalitarianism differentially predicts empathy for members of advantaged versus disadvantaged groups. J Pers Soc Psychol 2018, 114:665-692 This paper examines the relationship between egalitarianism and empathy. Previous research suggests that egalitarianism and related constructs (e.g. low social dominance orientation) are associated with higher levels of empathy. In contrast, the authors propose a conditional theory in which egalitarianism is associated with higher empathy for disadvantaged targets but lower levels of empathy for advantaged targets. They argue that egalitarianism shapes perceptions of harm differently for the two types of targets and that these differential perceptions mediate the effect of egalitarianism on empathy. Across eight studies, with varied sampling frames and a variety of stimulus materials, they find strong support for this theory. The authors find that the dynamic holds regardless of the respondent’s own social status. They also examine perceived value conflict with the target and perceived deservingness of the target as alternative mediating pathways and find that perceptions of harm are the primary mediator of the effect of egalitarianism. 80. Sparkman DJ, Eidelman S, Till DF: Ingroup and outgroup interconnectedness predict and promote political ideology through empathy. Group Processes Intergroup Relations 2019. p. 1368430218819794.
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