Moral Universalism and the Structure of Ideology / Benjamin Enke, Ricardo Rodríguez-Padilla, Florian Zimmermann.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Enke, Benjamin.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Rodríguez-Padilla, Ricardo.

Zimmermann, Florian.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w27511.

NBER working paper series no. w27511

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2020.