Moral Power: How Public Opinion on Culture War Issues Drives Political Change

• In Event: Partisanship, Affect, and Polarization

Abstract

Scholars view party identification and liberal-conservative identification as core political predispositions. These predispositions are durable, resist change, and shape public opinion on the issues of the day (Campbell et al. 1960; Sears 1983, 2001; Green et al. 2002). In a similar vein, conventional theories maintain that people hold weak, uncrystallized attitudes about post political issues (Converse 1964; Feldman and Zaller 1992; Lenz 2012; Achen and Bartels 2016).

By contrast, the theory of moral power proposes that attitudes toward abortion and gay rights endure over time, resist change, and shape a range of political judgments (Goren and Chapp 2017). The theoretical basis underlying this claim is that abortion/gay rights have been highly salient in political discourse since the 1990s and habitually evoke gut-level emotional responses (i.e., moral disgust and moral anger) when people evaluate these issues. Because people have many opportunities to evaluate the issues and they are constrained by moral intuitions to render consistent, bottom-line evaluations, culture war issue-attitudes are strong. As people evaluate these issues, their attitudes crystallize, rendering them durable and impactful.

In this paper, we test the theory of moral power by modeling the dynamic relationship between abortion/gay rights opinion, party id, and liberal-conservative id. Using data from five panel studies, we test whether moral issues dynamically shape political identities or vice versa. The data come from the 1992-1996 NES, the 2006-2010 GSS, the 2008-2012 GSS, the 2010-2014 GSS and 2011-2016 Democracy Fund Voter Study Group panels.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, but consistent with our theory, opinions on moral issues predict changes in partisan and liberal-conservative identifications. We find limited evidence that party and ideology predicts change in moral issue positions. These results hold in both lagged dependent variable models and fixed effects models. Extending our earlier work (Goren and Chapp 2017), we also test whether political sophistication moderates these relationships. We find limited evidence of sophistication interaction effects. This result suggests the effects of moral issues extend throughout the mass public and are not confined to the more sophisticated and engaged subsets of the electorate.

Overall, our results underscore the centrality and power of moral issues. Moral issues function as foundational elements in the minds of ordinary people. Moreover, party id and liberal-conservative id are endogenous to how people feel about the frontline issues that define America’s culture war. At the broadest level, our results suggest that culture war issues drive political change.

Authors

• Paul Goren, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• Christopher B. Chapp