Why do people vote Republican (or, in Australia, for the Liberal Party)?
In a long essay at EDGE, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt asks, "What makes people vote Republican?" He puts it down to differing moral values systems.
In a long essay at EDGE, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt asks, "What makes people vote Republican?" He puts it down to differing moral values systems:
First, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to suffering and harm, particularly violent harm, and so nearly all cultures have norms or laws to protect individuals and to encourage care for the most vulnerable. Second, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to issues of fairness and reciprocity, which often expand into notions of rights and justice. Philosophical efforts to justify liberal democracies and egalitarian social contracts invariably rely heavily on intuitions about fairness and reciprocity.
But conservatives also attach much more importance than liberals to three additiional principles:
ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble).
Haidt presents his theory in an entertaining 20-minute video at TED. (Given the choice, watch the video rather than read the essay. Haidt is addressing an audience almost all of whom are liberal and he discusses why that is a problem.)
The essay is followed up by commentary pieces by nine other writers. Michael Shermer makes a very interesting point:
The liberal bias in academia is so entrenched that it becomes the political water through which the liberal fish swim-they don't even notice it. Even the question "What makes people vote Republican?" hints at something amiss in the mind of the conservative, along the lines of "Why do people believe weird things?" As Haidt notes, the standard liberal line is that people vote Republican because they are "cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death."
Haidt stresses that both the liberal and the conservative are complementary strands in society. Rather than attacking the one for being immoral and the other for being irrational there is great value in reaching out to understand one another's point of view. This appears to be the position that President Obama is attempting to take and that former Prime Minister Howard pretended to take when he said in 1996, "they will see in me somebody who will govern for all of us and not just for some of us". But in fact he did not.
How well Obama will succeed with a Congress that is more polarised than it has been for decades remains to be seen. But the principle is clear: a government can only govern for all of us if it respects the values of conservatives and liberals alike.
There is probably no best equilibrium point for a society. Some give more weight to conservative moral values; others to liberal ones. While there have been societies in which there is little evidence of liberal, I can think of no society in which the conservative strand was entirely absent. (Perhaps that is the kind of society that libertarians pine for.)
The World Values Survey is a collaborative enterprise run by social scientists around the world, surveying values in more than 90 societies. It has produced an interesting pictorial map of how societies compare with one another:
The map is discussed here and gives a slightly different perspective on moral values.
In short, for most people moral values are a faith, not a carefully reasoned choice. Nobody believes that they are stupid to hold the values that they do and don't react well to being told that they are.
Mike Martin is one of Open Forum's regular bloggers and commentators. He is a retired a computer systems programmer. Mike is interested in a wide range of Australian social and policy issues
sally.rose
February 5, 2009 at 6:47 am
born supporters
Often who people vote for is a matter of social hereditary though don't you think?
MikeM
February 7, 2009 at 1:48 am
Environment is part of it, but is it the whole story?
Certainly, many people adopt the political stance of their parents. A child brought up in a family environment where John Stuart Mill and the Utilitarians are hailed as ethical role models is as likely to develop liberal leanings as a child brought up in a strongly religious environment is to develop conservative ones.
However it is not uncommon for young adults to rebel against their parents' values – although sometimes drifting back later in life.
As far as I know, Haidt is silent on theories about how political orientations actually develop. I speculate that there is some genetic influence. The differentiating moral principles that he discusses – ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity – are evolutionary features of the human species. It is not the case that they are ignored by liberals and treasured by conservatives. There is a continuum and at some arbitrary point no doubt dictated in part by environment, comes the cross-over from voting one way to voting the other.
That is why results can change from one election to another. It is common to refer to the "rusted-on" supporters towards each end of the spectrum and the "swinging" voters between the extremes.
I have difficulty though in suggesting how evidence might be found to tease out interaction between genes and environment.
sally.rose
February 9, 2009 at 1:27 am
Really?
Really – I find it hard to believe there is anything genetic about it?
MikeM
February 11, 2009 at 11:50 am
Little evidence either way
It's hard to accept that there is "nothing" genetic about it – after all we accept that aspects of character such as introversion/extroversion have some genetic basis. The World Values Survey dichotomies of survival/self-expression and traditional/rational may be purely cultural too.
But we don't yet understand the full interplay between genetic potential and environment. For example:
Since then, with improved environmental standards, light-coloured peppered moths have again become common, but the dramatic change in the peppered moth's population has remained a subject of much interest and study, and has led to the coining of the term industrial melanism to refer to the genetic darkening of species in response to pollutants.
This was not a case of evolution in the sense that a species changed its genome over a brief period of time, but where latent characteristics became important because the environment changed, and when it changed again, the previous characteristics once again dominated.
MikeM is is not a moth.
sally.rose
February 11, 2009 at 10:51 pm
predispositions may be partly biologocial but not attachments
A typical justification for following any political party is something along the lines of "I support X because I believe they will do the best job of looking after the economy and the community". Which side of politics an individual prefers is a social preference, not a biological one. The same sorts of hard-wired predipositions for "values" (whether they be truth and justice or discipline and retribution) can become attached to any soicial political or social group.
MikeM
February 27, 2009 at 9:24 am
Is it who’ll do the best job, or is it whose values do I prefer?
Choice of a political party is indeed a social preference, but the determining factor is not necessarily which party will do the best job of looking after the economy and the community. It is more likely to be a choice of which party aligns best with one's values, and there is evidence of significant genetic component in determining one's values.
Values alignment has become particularly prominent in the United States over the last decade with the rise of the so-called Values Voters movement. This has been especially influential, not in orientation to Democratic or Republican parties (almost all "values" voters are Republicans), but in selection of congressional and presidential candidates.
In a paper prepared for the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, John Hibbing et al.:
This is not to say that political orientation is genetically fixed in the sense that eye colour is fixed. Plenty of teenage Marxists have evolved over the course of their life to become respected members of the conservative establishment. However perhaps British aristocracy were right in claiming that breeding matters.
FOOTNOTE: As an exercise in self-awareness, at Political Compass you can take a short questionnaire that will assess your personal values on two dimensions: the economic dimension (from Left to Right) and the social dimension (from Authoritarian to Libertarian). The score on each dimension ranges from -10 to +10.
MikeM scores -3.12 on the economic Left/Right axis and -3.95 on the social Libertarian/Authoritarian axis.