Political ideologies and moral foundations of engineering professionals in the United States

Scholars have argued that engineering practice should be understood in its societal context, including the political contexts in which engineers perform. However, very few research studies have systematically explored the political and moral backgrounds of engineering professionals, who would be the main agents in the political contexts. This paper reports our exploratory study of the political ideologies and moral foundations of engineers in the United States. Based on survey responses from 515 engineers, we conducted generalized ordinal logistic regression analyses and multiple linear regression analyses to examine how engineers' political ideologies are associated with their moral foundations and how engineers' political ideologies and moral foundations vary across their employment sectors, organizational positions, and demographic attributes. We found that engineers in the manufacturing sector are more politically conservative than engineers in the computer/electronics/IT sector. Additionally, engineers in higher positions in their organizations are more politically conservative than engineers in lower positions, and female engineers are more politically liberal than male engineers. We also found that engineers' endorsement of the five moral foundations differs by sector and demographic attributes. Moreover, engineers' moral foundations substantially explain engineers’ political ideologies, consistent with previous studies using the Moral Foundations Theory.