Partisan Cues and Basic Human Values: Political is Personal

• In Event: Parties, Populism, and Politics

Abstract

Research has established that average American voters rely on the view and information conveyed by the more knowledgeable and resourceful political elites (Bullock 2020; Slothuus and Bisgaard 2018). Thus, as elites are increasingly sorted and polarized, partisans in the electorate have also become more polarized on political matters (Layman 2001; Bafumi and Shapiro 2009; Abramowitz 2010). That party identity and elite cues shape political judgments is hardly surprising. What is surprising is that party identity and elite cues may shape personal judgments. Scholars find that party ties affect who we find attractive; how happy we claim to be; where we want to live; how much we plan to spend on holidays and vacations; who we think would make suitable marriage partners for our children; and the precautions we take against COVID-19 (Bishop 2009; Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes 2012; Huber and Malhotra 2017; Jones and McDermott 2022). Results like these underscore the extraordinary power of party ID. Though the effects of party ID vary across contexts and overtime, few deny its strength. This paper builds onto these findings by systematically testing the power of partisan influence in the domain of personal principles and values, which had conventionally been believed to be durable psychological construct. In the original data collected by the Center for Study of Political Psychology during the 2022 Midterm Election, elite leader cues showed significant effect in moving people’s expression of values and party ID had significant interaction effects – that is, people were more likely to endorse values that their party’s leader endorses even when the values were not particularly in line with the party ideology. The results highlight the extent to which elite messages can reach beyond political matters as well as pose a counterevidence to the assumption made by social psychologists that external factors cannot move foundational human value structure.
The unique contribution that the paper makes lies on the intersection of political science and social psychology, as I administer a first rigorous test of endogeneity on Basic Human Values. In the prior political science literature, scholars have tested the partisan cues effect with respect to core political values (Goren 2005; Goren Federico, and Kittilson 2009). Recent work by Cuik (2018) shows this to be the case with respect to moral foundations. We take up the question of whether party cues affect basic human values (Schwartz 1992; Schwartz et al. 2012). Basic human values are developed by social psychologist Shalom Schwartz. Unlike the core political values, human values inventory taps into a variety of personal priorities like creativity, becoming rich, caring for others, safety, etc. Human values characterize personal priorities that affect a wide range of personal choices such as what to study, where to live, what to shop, etc. These are choices that go far beyond political preferences. Core political values, on the other hand, directly measures people’s beliefs regarding political judgments such as equality of opportunity, economic individualism, and free enterprise. As statements for personal priorities, basic human values present a more challenging test for the influence of party identity compared to core political values that are more intimately related to one’s political views. That said, I surmise that the power of party extends even here. The central hypothesis is that elite cues and party identity polarize people on personal values and priorities in life.
In fall of 2022, I administered a survey experiment test the hypothesis as part of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Study of Political Psychology bi-annual panel study. The respondents received the battery of statements developed by Shalom Schwartz, where each statement describes an imaginary third person’s support for one dimension from the basic human value structure. However, unlike the original battery, respondents were randomly assigned to treatments were the arbitrary third person (“he”) is switched by partisan cues – “Republicans”, “Republicans like Donald Trump”, “Democrats” and “Democrats like Joe Biden”. Respondents were found to react particularly strongly to the party leader cues. Furthermore, data suggest a strong interaction effect between partisan cues and party identity. For example, respondents who identify as Democrats were 1.49 times more likely to support tradition values – value that typically do not correlate strongly with Democratic party ID – when they were given the Biden cue. The opposite applies to Republicans. When they were given the Biden cue, Republican respondents were less likely to support tradition values. This offers the first sysetmatic evidence that basic human values that were believed to be trans-situational and exogenous may be endogenous to partisan political identity.

Author

• Minyoung Kim, University of Minnesota