The dual evolutionary foundations of political ideology

Abstract

What determines our views on taxation and crime, healthcare and religion, welfare and gender roles? And why do opinions about these seemingly disparate aspects of our social lives coalesce the way they do? Research over the last 50 years has suggested that political attitudes and values around the globe are shaped by two ideological dimensions, often referred to as economic and social conservatism. However, it remains unclear why this ideological structure exists. Here, we highlight the striking concordance between these two dimensions of ideology and two key aspects of human sociality: cooperation and group conformity. Humans cooperate to a greater degree than our great ape relatives, paying personal costs to benefit others. Humans also conform to group-wide social norms and punish norm violators in interdependent, culturally marked groups. Together, these two shifts in sociality are posited to have driven the emergence of large-scale complex human societies. We argue that fitness trade-offs and behavioural plasticity have maintained strategic individual differences in both cooperation and group conformity, naturally giving rise to the two dimensions of political ideology. Supported by evidence from psychology, behavioural genetics, behavioural economics, and primatology, this evolutionary framework promises novel insight into the biological and cultural basis of political ideology.

Pandemic Leadership: Sex Differences and Their Evolutionary–Developmental Origins

“…For instance, to the extent that female politicians are chosen relatively more often to represent liberal political parties and have more liberal values themselves (e.g., Pratto et al, 1997;Oniszczenko et al, 2011;Harteveld et al, 2019), their decisions may reflect liberal values such as equality, social change, and system reform, rather than conservative hierarchic economic values (cf. Oniszczenko et al, 2011;Claessens et al, 2020;Hessami and da Fonseca, 2020). Therefore, studies on sex differences in pandemic leadership should analyze the extent to which political party affiliation mediates the relationship between leaders' sex, the policies they implement, and pandemic-related outcomes.…”

Why has the COVID-19 pandemic increased support for Universal Basic Income?

“…The final section asked for same sociodemographic variables as in study 1. In addition to the singleitem left-right political orientation measure, we also used two further items to separate social from economic conservatism (Claessens et al, 2020; see protocol for wording). Although the correlation between social and economic conservatism was only modest (r = 0.27), both measures correlated in the expected way with the single-item left-right measure (economic conservatism: r = -0.53; social conservatism: r = -0.50).…”

Factors Associated With Concern, Behaviour & Policy Support in Response to SARS-CoV-2

“…It should be noted however that whilst a linear model fit predicted the relationship between society concern and political ideology in the US and UK, there appears to be some non-linearity in this relationship in the US (Figure 1), such that people in the middle of the political spectrum consistently reported lower levels of concern (for self, family and society) than those at the liberal or conservative extreme. We did not anticipate this finding and did not explore it statistically, but future work could further test how this unexpected effect differs across economic and social dimensions to conservative ideology 12,13 , rather than a simple one-dimensional axis. These different (economic and social) dimensions to political ideology are highly correlated in the US and UK 14 , but collapsing across them here might be masking a more complex relationship.…”