Publications
Publications
- 2022
Morals as Luxury Goods and Political Polarization
By: Benjamin Enke, Mattias Polborn and Alex A Wu
Abstract
This paper develops a theory of political behavior in which moral values are a luxury good: the relative weight that voters place on moral rather than material considerations increases in income. This idea both generates new testable implications and ties together a broad set of empirical regularities about political polarization in the U.S. The model predicts (i) the emergence of economically left-wing elites; (ii) that more rich than poor people vote against their material interests; (iii) that within-party heterogeneity is larger among Democrats than Republicans; and (iv) widely-discussed realignment patterns: rich moral liberals who swing Democrat, and poor moral conservatives who swing Republican. Assuming that parties set policies by aggregating their supporters’ preferences, the model also predicts increasing social party polarization over time, such that poor moral conservatives swing Republican even though their relative incomes decreased. We relate these predictions to known stylized facts, and test our new predictions empirically.
Keywords
Citation
Enke, Benjamin, Mattias Polborn, and Alex A Wu. "Morals as Luxury Goods and Political Polarization." Working Paper, April 2022.