IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jscscx/v8y2019i8p233-d255226.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Moral Foundations in the 2015-16 U.S. Presidential Primary Debates: The Positive and Negative Moral Vocabulary of Partisan Elites

Author

Listed:
  • Paul G. Lewis

    (School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-3902, USA)

Abstract

Moral foundations theory (MFT) suggests that individuals on the political left draw upon moral intuitions relating primarily to care and fairness , whereas conservatives are more motivated than liberals by authority , ingroup , and purity concerns. The theory of conservatism as motivated social cognition (CMSC) suggests that conservatives are more attuned than liberals to threat and to negative stimuli. Because evidence for both accounts rests on studies of mass publics, however, it remains unclear whether political elites of the left and right exhibit these inclinations. Thus, this analysis uses the 2015-16 United States presidential primary season as an occasion to explore partisan differences in candidates’ moral rhetoric. The analysis focuses on verbal responses to questions posed during party primary debates, a setting that is largely unscripted and thus potentially subject to intuitive influences. The Moral Foundations Dictionary is employed to analyze how frequently candidates used words representing various moral foundations, distinguishing between positive and negative references to each. Consistent with CMSC, the Republican candidates were more likely to use negative-valence moral terminology, describing violations of moral foundations. The direction of some partisan differences contradicts the expectations of MFT. Donald Trump, a novice candidate, was an exception to the typical Republican pattern, making markedly lower overall use of moral-foundations vocabulary.

Suggested Citation

  • Paul G. Lewis, 2019. "Moral Foundations in the 2015-16 U.S. Presidential Primary Debates: The Positive and Negative Moral Vocabulary of Partisan Elites," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 8(8), pages 1-25, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:8:y:2019:i:8:p:233-:d:255226
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/8/233/pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/8/233/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gerber, Alan S. & Huber, Gregory A. & Doherty, David & Dowling, Conor M. & Ha, Shang E., 2010. "Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships across Issue Domains and Political Contexts," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 104(1), pages 111-133, February.
    2. Luciana Carraro & Luigi Castelli & Claudia Macchiella, 2011. "The Automatic Conservative: Ideology-Based Attentional Asymmetries in the Processing of Valenced Information," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(11), pages 1-6, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mengyao Xu & Lingshu Hu & Glen T. Cameron, 2023. "Tracking moral divergence with DDR in presidential debates over 60 years," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 6(1), pages 339-357, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Patrick W. Kraft & Milton Lodge & Charles S. Taber, 2015. "Why People “Don’t Trust the Evidenceâ€," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 658(1), pages 121-133, March.
    2. Marco R Steenbergen & Tomasz Siczek, 2017. "Better the devil you know? Risk-taking, globalization and populism in Great Britain," European Union Politics, , vol. 18(1), pages 119-136, March.
    3. Kauder, Björn & Potrafke, Niklas & Ursprung, Heinrich, 2018. "Behavioral determinants of proclaimed support for environment protection policies," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 26-41.
    4. André Blais & Jean-François Laslier & François Poinas & Karine Straeten, 2015. "Citizens’ preferences about voting rules: self-interest, ideology, and sincerity," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 164(3), pages 423-442, September.
    5. Buser, Thomas, 2024. "Adversarial Economic Preferences Predict Right-Wing Voting," IZA Discussion Papers 16711, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    6. Cantoni, Davide & Heizlsperger, Louis-Jonas & Yang, David Y. & Yuchtman, Noam & Zhang, Y. Jane, 2022. "The fundamental determinants of protest participation: Evidence from Hong Kong’s antiauthoritarian movement," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 211(C).
    7. Rebecca Morton & Jean-Robert Tyran & Erik Wengström, 2016. "Personality Traits and the Gender Gap in Ideology," Studies in Political Economy, in: Maria Gallego & Norman Schofield (ed.), The Political Economy of Social Choices, pages 153-185, Springer.
    8. Bert N Bakker & Claes H de Vreese, 2016. "Personality and European Union attitudes: Relationships across European Union attitude dimensions," European Union Politics, , vol. 17(1), pages 25-45, March.
    9. K Amber Curtis & Steven V Miller, 2021. "A (supra)nationalist personality? The Big Five’s effects on political-territorial identification," European Union Politics, , vol. 22(2), pages 202-226, June.
    10. Michael Callen & Jonathan Weigel & Noam Yuchtman & Michael J. Callen, 2023. "Experiments about Institutions," CESifo Working Paper Series 10833, CESifo.
    11. Arnošt Veselý, 2021. "Autonomy of policy instrument attitudes: concept, theory and evidence," Policy Sciences, Springer;Society of Policy Sciences, vol. 54(2), pages 441-455, June.
    12. Patrick Meyer & Fenja M Schophaus & Thomas Glassen & Jasmin Riedl & Julia M Rohrer & Gert G Wagner & Timo von Oertzen, 2019. "Using the Dirichlet process to form clusters of people’s concerns in the context of future party identification," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(3), pages 1-20, March.
    13. Jason M. T. Roos & Ron Shachar, 2014. "When Kerry Met Sally: Politics and Perceptions in the Demand for Movies," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 60(7), pages 1617-1631, July.
    14. Davide Cantoni & Andrew Kao & David Y. Yang & Noam Yuchtman, 2023. "Protests," NBER Working Papers 31617, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Niklas Harring & Sverker C. Jagers & Simon Matti, 2017. "Public Support for Pro-Environmental Policy Measures: Examining the Impact of Personal Values and Ideology," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(5), pages 1-14, April.
    16. Dimick, Matthew & Stegmueller, Daniel, 2015. "The Political Economy of Risk and Ideology," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 237, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    17. Markus Jokela & Jaakko Meriläinen & Janne Tukiainen & Åsa von Schoultz, 2022. "Personality Traits and Cognitive Ability in Political Selection," Discussion Papers 152, Aboa Centre for Economics.
    18. Bereket Kebede & Nicole Gross-Camp & Adrian Martin & Shawn McGuire & Joseph Munyarukaza, 2018. "Inequality, envy and personality in public goods: An experimental study," CSAE Working Paper Series 2018-10, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
    19. Shang Ha & Seokho Kim, 2013. "Personality and Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from South Korea," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 111(1), pages 341-359, March.
    20. Josie I Chen & Louis Putterman & Diego Ramos-Toro, 2023. "Gauging Preference for Democracy in Absence of Free Speech," Working Papers 2023-005, Brown University, Department of Economics.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:8:y:2019:i:8:p:233-:d:255226. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.