Working Paper: NBER ID: w27511
Authors: Benjamin Enke; Ricardo RodrÃguez-Padilla; Florian Zimmermann
Abstract: Throughout the Western world, people's policy views are correlated across domains in a strikingly similar fashion. This paper proposes that what partly explains the structure of ideology is moral universalism: the extent to which people's altruism and trust remain constant as social distance increases. In new large-scale multinational surveys, heterogeneity in universalism descriptively explains why the left and right both simultaneously support and oppose different types of government spending. Moreover, the left-right divide on topics such as redistribution strongly depends on whether people evaluate more or less universalist policies. Large-scale donation data provide additional evidence for the political left's universalism.
Keywords: moral universalism; political ideology; policy preferences; altruism; trust
JEL Codes: D01; D72
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| moral universalism (A13) | policy preferences (D72) |
| moral universalism (A13) | support for welfare spending (H53) |
| moral universalism (A13) | support for environmental spending (Q58) |
| moral universalism (A13) | support for military expenditures (H56) |
| moral universalism (A13) | support for law enforcement expenditures (H76) |
| moral universalism (A13) | preference for policies that mitigate cheating (D72) |
| universalism framed policies (H53) | left-right divide in policy views (D72) |
| less universalist agents (L85) | opposition to welfare policies (I38) |