The Moral Economy of Neoliberalism: How Voters Use Neoliberal Ideology to (De)Legitimate Undocumented Worker Access to Labor Markets

Abstract

Neoliberalism is prevalent in American life. While researchers have documented the use of neoliberal ideology in institutional and macrolevel policy contexts, they have yet to investigate how voters use neoliberal ideology to legitimate their position on economic policy. I use data from semi‐structured interviews with 85 Tucsonans about why they voted the way they did on Proposition 202 (2008): “Arizona Stop Illegal Hiring”—which sought to reregulate undocumented worker labor market access—to address this gap. I found evidence of two distinct neoliberal ideological legitimations: “fair market competition” and “individual responsibility.” Furthermore, I use these data to shed light on the debate over whether neoliberalism spans partisan affiliation or converges with American conservatism. I found that voters across party lines who supported the measure paired neoliberal legitimations with conservative legitimations. We can interpret this bipartisan use of neoliberal ideology as evidence of a neoliberal “moral economy”—or consensus about the moral principles in which market action is embedded. Evidence of this moral economy indicates that moral principles from neoliberal ideology are simultaneously bipartisan and converge with American conservatism. These findings suggest that there could be a broader moral consensus among voters concerning the legitimacy of anti‐immigration economic policies.

The Popular Basis of the State’s Monopoly on Legitimate Violence: How American Voters Use Political Values to (De)Legitimate Gun Rights

“…These findings present an interesting problem for moral foundations theory, which argues that individuals adopt a sole most sacred value and that their moral intuitions are genetic (Haidt 2012). Conversely, my findings combined with Vila‐Henninger’s previous work on most sacred values in voters’ legitimations (Vila‐Henninger 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2020a) demonstrate that respondents vary in their use of most sacred values according to the policy context—thus building the case that moral intuitions are, at least in part, the product of socialization. The resulting interpretation would be that while liberal respondents are sensitive to care and fairness in certain policy contexts, they are sensitive to all of the moral foundations in the context of gun rights.…”

“…Surprisingly, I found no evidence that the liberal most sacred value was used among my respondents to legitimate or delegitimate gun rights. All other studies that have employed the most sacred values framework in sociology to analyze American voters’ legitimations (Vila‐Henninger 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2020a) have found consistent evidence of respondents’ use of the liberal most sacred value to legitimate political positions that are traditionally associated with the Democratic party. This suggests that the gun debate in America could potentially be drawing very little on the liberal most sacred value—which would make this issue different from most other issues in American politics.…”

“…Seymour Lipset in particular developed an agenda for doing so (Lipset 1963a, 1963b, 1989)—which has developed into a fruitful empirical literature (Baer et al 1990; Baxter‐Moore et al 2018; Besley and Persson 2019). Building on Wuthnow (2008), recent work, however, has turned to moral psychology to develop a framework for understanding values (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013; Longest, Hitlin, and Vaisey 2013; Miles 2015; Miles and Vaisey 2015; Vaisey and Miles 2014; Vila‐Henninger 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2020b). This article seeks to build a bridge between both of these literatures.…”

A theory of “popular political legitimation”: A dual‐process model approach to legitimation and political socialization

“…Future work can then incorporate this account into broader theories of politics and legitimacy. Furthermore, qualitative work in sociology (Vila‐Henninger, 2017, 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2020) supports this model and presents an empirical framework for applying the theoretical perspective advanced here.…”

A Dual‐Process Model of Economic Behavior: Using Culture and Cognition, Economic Sociology, Behavioral Economics, and Neuroscience to Reconcile Moral and Self‐Interested Economic Action*

“…Moral Economy: A moral economy is a norm of economic exchange based on noneconomic moral principles that serves as the basis of an array of economic activitysuch as behavior, judgment, and legitimation (Mau 2003(Mau , 2005Sayer 2007;Svallfors 2006;Koos and Sachweh 2019;Taylor-Gooby et al 2019;Vila-Henninger 2019a, 2019b, 2020a. Moral economy then seeks to explain how economic action is embedded in moral norms, as well as how those norms become institutionalized.…”