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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Morals as Luxury Goods and Political Polarization

By: Benjamin Enke, Mattias Polborn and Alex A Wu
  • Format:Print
  • | Language:English
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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

Political Polarization; Government and Politics; Moral Sensibility; Luxury

Citation

Enke, Benjamin, Mattias Polborn, and Alex A Wu. "Morals as Luxury Goods and Political Polarization." Working Paper, April 2022.
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  • Complexity and Time By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan Oprea
  • Confidence, Self-Selection and Bias in the Aggregate By: Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber and Ryan Oprea
  • Cognitive Biases: Mistakes or Missing Stakes? By: Benjamin Enke, Uri Gneezy, Brian Hall, David Martin, Vadim Nelidov, Theo Offerman and Jeroen van de Ven
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