Voters’ Partisan Responses to Politicians’ Immoral Behavior

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.

Politics Turns Moral Foundations Into Consequences of Intergroup Attitudes

“…Furthermore, we found that moral foundations did not predict the longitudinal change in intergroup attitudes. These results support former experimental (Ciuk, 2018;Eriksson et al, 2019;Walter & Redlawsk, 2019) and longitudinal studies (Hatemi et al, 2019;Smith et al, 2017) which concluded that moral values (measured as moral foundations) are not necessarily bases of our social beliefs, but are consequences of them since people tend to reset their moral priorities to get them in line with their current motivated social beliefs. Besides supporting this idea, our study took one step further and demonstrated in a real-life political context that people rely on the available information provided by political communication when doing this moral reset.…”

The Effects of Politician’s Moral Violations on Voters' Moral Emotions

“…But as Walter and Redlawsk (2019) find in examining valence emotion, the potential impact of immoral behavior by politicians is conditioned by partisanship. 2 They view partisanship as a group identity (Mason, 2018), such that when an in-party politician violates moral imperatives, co-partisans do not have the negative emotional response one might anticipate.…”

“…However, it may be that this finding is an artifact of their analytical approach. While Haidt (2003) defines a set of discrete moral emotions, Walter and Redlawsk (2019) examine only valence emotion-obscuring the effects of specific emotional responses. In this paper we extend this by considering a set of discrete moral emotions and examining how these moral emotional responses depend on voters' own moral principles and partisan group identity.…”

“…The distinction is important. Walter and Redlawsk (2019) do not examine motivated reasoning processes as such since their study used unnamed "politicians" for whom participants had no prior evaluations to maintain. Earlier work has also examined political preferences and moral principles, including Emler (2003), Emler et al (1983), Narvaez et al (1999) and Sparks and Durkin (1987) although from varying perspectives and not directly examining partisanship in the U.S. as we do here.…”

How partisanship and sexism influence voters’ reactions to political #MeToo scandals

“…All else equal, voters favor politicians who are free of scandals such as tax evasion, marital infidelity, or corruption (Basinger, 2013; Carlson et al, 2000; Doherty et al, 2011; Funk 1996; Sigal et al, 1988). On the other hand, voters’ evaluations of politicians accused of unethical behavior are shaped by their preconceived perceptions (Fischle, 2000) and partisanship can be a stronger driver of voters’ responses to immoral behavior than their moral foundations (Walter and Redlawsk, 2019).…”