Voters’ Partisan Responses to Politicians’ Immoral Behavior

Walter, Annemarie S.; Redlawsk, David P.

Abstract

Politicians’ moral behaviors affect how voters evaluate them. But existing empirical research on the effects of politicians’ violations of moral standards pays little attention to the heterogeneous moral foundations of voters in assessing responses to violations. It also pays little attention to the ways partisan preferences shape responses. We examine voters’ heterogeneous evaluative and emotional responses to presumably immoral behaviors by politicians. We make use of moral foundation theory’s argument that people vary in the extent to which they endorse, value, and use the five universally available moral intuitions: care, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. We report on a 5 × 3 between‐subjects experiment asking a random sample of 2,026 U.S. respondents to respond to politicians’ violations of different moral foundations. We randomly vary which of the five foundations is violated and the partisanship of the actor (Republic/Democrat/Nonpartisan). Results suggest that partisanship rather than moral foundations drives most of U.S. voters’ responses to moral foundations violations by politicians. These foundations seem malleable when partisan actors are involved. While Democrats in this sample show stronger negative emotional response to moral violations than Republicans, partisans of both parties express significantly greater negativity when a politician of the other party violates a moral foundation.

Citation

Walter, A. S., & Redlawsk, D. P. (2019). Voters’ Partisan Responses to Politicians’ Immoral Behavior. Political Psychology, 40(5), 1075-1097. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12582

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 3, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Mar 27, 2019
• Publication Date: Oct 1, 2019
• Deposit Date: Apr 4, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 5, 2019
• Journal: Political Psychology
• Print ISSN: 0162-895X
• Electronic ISSN: 1467-9221
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 40
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 1075-1097
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12582
• Keywords: Political Science and International Relations; Philosophy; Experimental and Cognitive Psychology; Sociology and Political Science; Clinical Psychology; Social Psychology
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1745688
• Publisher URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pops.12582
• Contract Date: Apr 5, 2019