How Voters' Moral Identities Influence Responses to Candidate Misconduct

• In Event: External Influences on Candidate Evaluations

Abstract

Moral identity, i.e. self-schema organized around a set of specific moral traits’ (Aquino & Reed II, 2002), plays an important role in people's interpretation of and decision-making in moral situations, including their reactions to others.

Remarkably, moral identity has not received much attention in the study of voters' heterogeneous responses to politicians' immoral behavior. As a result, voters’ heterogeneous responses to politicians involved in moral transgressions still puzzle scholars, as some politicians seem to be punished, while others appear to escape any consequences.

We examine this by focusing on the role voters’ own moral identities play in their assessments of politicians. The cognitive accessibility of moral identity differs across voters. First of all, moral identity is more accessible to voters’ whose moral identity is more central to their self-definition. Second, situations can make voters’ moral identity more accessible. We conduct a set of survey embedded experiments to better understand the causal link between voters' moral identity and voters’ emotional and attitudinal response to immoral behavior by politicians. In these experiments we prime the cognitive accessibility of voters’ moral identities (and competing partisan identity) before exposure to information about politicians’ behavior, some of which is presented as violations of generally accepted moral principles.

Respondents whose moral self-schema is primed are expected to experience more condemning moral emotions than those for whom moral identity remains more in the background. This increase in focus on morality should also lead to more negative evaluations of specific moral violations and the transgressing politician again compared to voters for whom moral self-schema is not brought to the foreground. In addition, existing partisan bias in evaluating in and out party transgressors should be reduced for voters whose moral identity is primed than for respondents in the control group, due to heightened consideration of moral dimensions of the politician’s actions reducing the impact of partisanship.

This study contributes to work explaining voters’ heterogeneous reaction to politicians involved in moral transgression, research on the cognitive accessibility of moral self-schema and the study of competing self-schema.

Authors

• Annemarie Sophie Walter, Saxion University of Applied Sciences

• David P. Redlawsk, University of Delaware

• Heon Lee, University of Delaware