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Chapter 1

The Building Blocks of Politics

Introduction

The “big” questions of human society have likely always been with us. For as long as

humans have congregated in groups that extend beyond immediate kin relations, we have

had to strike uneasy negotiations between competing ideals. “Liberty” is in constant

tension with “equality,” “stability” and “progress” have often been pitted against one

another. As a species, we have experimented with countless different social systems

that settle on different balances between individual autonomy and the collective good,

and it seems very unlikely that we will discover the perfect balance for all times and

in all places. Indeed, it seems impossible to even settle on what criteria we might use

objectively assess these competing goods.

The persistence of disagreement about fundamental principles of human organization

suggests something deeper than a difference of opinion concerning empirically discover-

able facts. The most enduring conflicts that humans encounter center around differences

in values that resist attempts at rational argument. The most divisive political problems

seem to have pre-rational roots. Unfortunately, our theories of political attitudes and

conflict do not sufficiently grapple with these pre-rational differences in perspective.

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Plan for the chapter

In this chapter, I will outline the theoretical orientation of my dissertation. My aim

is three-fold. First, I will briefly review the relevant literature with a special attention to

the ways in which predispositions have been overlooked in scholarly accounts of political

behavior and attitude formation. I argue that attending to the source of attitudes,

what I term “pre-political dispositions,” allows us to build our models of individual-

level politics and our understandings of mass-elite interactions on a firmer foundation.

These pre-political dispositions are grounded in biology, but they are shaped and molded

in critical ways by cultural context. Having highlighted the importance of both biology

and culture, secondly, I outline a productive framework for understanding the interaction

between these two fundamental forces on political life. The old “nature/nurture” binary

is a false dichotomy. As with most things in life, the answer is “both/and” rather

than “either/or.” I will give high-level reviews of other research programs that focus

on the interaction between biology and culture to show how the same framework might

be successfully applied to the study of politics. Finally, I will outline the biological

and cultural factors that seem most relevant to politics, and develop a model of the

ways in which predispositions affect individual-level political reasoning and mass-elite

interactions. I conclude by briefly previewing the remaining chapters in the dissertation

with a focus on how they fit within the larger framework outlined here.

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The State of the Literature

From the American Voter to the Rationalizing Voter

Any study of individual-level political attitudes must begin with The American Voter.

In their sweeping account of American political behavior, Campbell, Converse, Miller,

and Stokes (1960) set the agenda for a new approach to political science. Their seminal

research program relied on carefully constructed questionnaires delivered to a representa-

tive sample of citizens (which would become the perennial National Election Studies–the

longest running study of individual political attitudes and behavior bar none), and it

represented a new and exciting approach to the study of politics. The body of work

that followed the initial studies as well as the many hundreds (thousands?)1 of studies

that have relied on NES data have substantially advanced our understanding of how the

average person confronts the political world.

Perhaps in their haste to move on to substantive, external political problems, the

authors of The American Voter are brief when it comes to the origins of the voter’s

political preferences and predispositions. Sequels to the Michigan School’s initial study

(Nie, Verba, and Petrocik 1979; Miller and Shanks 1996; Lewis-Beck et al. 2008) are

similarly short-spoken when it comes to the origins of preferences. The latest addition

to the growing genre of “The [adjective phrase] Voter” studies, Lodge and Taber’s The

Rationalizing Voter (2013), moves right past the question of the origins of preferences

(the particular attitudes that individuals are motivated to “rationalize”) and on to the

process of how they go about doing it.

1A search of JSTORs political science archives returns more than 1700 hits for the phrase NationalElection Studies. A Google scholar search returns nearly 9,000 results.

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Apart from the relatively small literature on political socialization (see Sapiro (2004)

for a review), and some more recent exceptions (Chong 2000; Alford and Hibbing 2004;

Orbell et al. 2004; Funk et al. 2013), the political science literature seems to have largely

ignored the in-depth study of the origins of political predispositions. When they are

mentioned, it is almost always of peripheral interest in the form of some “stylized fact”

or incompletely articulated assumption.

The most thorough account of the origins of political preferences comes from Jen-

nings and Niemi’s pioneering work on political socialization (Jennings and Niemi 1981;

Jennings and Markus 1984; Niemi and Jennings 1991a).2 In a singular and ambitious

multi-wave and multi-generational study, the authors are some of the first to bring rep-

resentative data to bear on the question of political socialization. While they present

evidence for the socialization hypothesis (in the form of correlations between parents and

children), they too are quiet with respect to the ultimate origins of political preferences.

The binding thread in all of this research is what some have called the “Standard

Social Science Model” (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). The Standard Social Science Model

is a product of pioneering theorists of the new social sciences in the late 19th and early

20th centuries. These theorists drew a sharp line between the cultural and biological

realm. Humans, it was understood, had transcended our base animal natures and become

products of culture. From this broad theoretical perspective, it doesn’t make sense to

think about predispositions. The Standard Social Science model views humans as blank

slates. While the specifics of the Standard model are rarely fully spelled out (and

unstated assumptions are often the most dangerous sort), its key components—namely,

2Jennings and Niemi expanded upon a research program initially outlined in the 1960s by Eastonand Dennis (1965) and Greenstein (1960).

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humans are blank slates who are shaped entirely by their surroundings—seem to be

implicit in much of how we understand individual political behavior. Consequently

from this theoretical perspective, political elites (those with the most influence over the

political elements of culture) have almost unbounded agency to shape the world.

In one of the most influential books written on the subject of political attitudes and

cognition, John Zaller (1992) presents a world that is dominated by elite actors. When

an individual gives his or her opinion on a political topic, that person is accessing a set

of considerations stored in memory. These considerations, in Zaller’s story, come from

political elites. At a recent discussion held at the 20th anniversary of the publication

of The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, a distinguished panel reflected on the

somewhat troubling moral of Zaller’s story. Andrew Sabl, a UCLA political theorist,

remarked (in a sentiment that was shared by several others on the panel):

To simplify his [Zaller’s] argument, if competing popular ideologies each havetheir own teams of experts, and voters can in turn accept or reject expertmessages by means of the filters suggested to them by their own dispositions,the polity will, on balance, get the public opinion outcomes that most of itscitizens would have chosen. However: what if ideology itself ... is also expert-driven (as the theory suggests but does not stress)? Then popular controlseems a lot more doubtful. Politics seems elitist all the way down. To quoteC.S. Lewis, “The whole point of seeing through something is to see somethingthrough it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because thestreet or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the gardentoo?” (Sabl 2012)

Since we seem to have assumed away the capacity of mass audiences to satisfactorily

reign in elite actors, we are led to the troubling conclusion that the not only the voice

(Key and Cummings 1966), but also the will of the people is only an echo of elite conflict

(Jacobs and Shapiro 2000).

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The Promise and Pitfalls of the Standard Model

The Michigan School of political behavior (whose patron saints are the authors of

The American Voter) built their impressive body of work upon a model of individual

psychology that represented the state of the art in the 1950s and 1960s. Campbell et

al. were beginning their work at a moment of great upheaval in thinking about human

psychology, strict behaviorism was giving way to the “cognitive revolution” in psychology

departments across the country (Miller 2003; Sperry 1993). The cognitive revolution

signalled a shift away from observable behaviors and into the subjective experience of the

individual. This approach is clearly reflected in the theoretical outlook of the Michigan

School. However, the cognitive revolution did more than just draw the attention of

researchers to individuals’ subjective experiences. It also began to erode the implicit

equipotentiality assumption of behaviorists (Jones 2001; Joseph, Graham, and Haidt

2009; Pinker 2003). This latter assumption, equipotentiality, or the idea that all human

behavior is learned and constructed from one’s immediate environment, seems to have

largely gone unquestioned in the political science literature.

For years after the publication of The American Voter, this new approach to the study

of political attitudes and behavior seemed endlessly promising. The model seemed to

have great explanatory power. Much of the work produced during this period is heavily

inflected with positivistic language, and it must have been a heady time to be a political

scientist. Findings seemed to accumulate and one gets the sense from reading this early

work that the scholars of this era believed the end was nearly in sight. However, as

James Stimson put it, “Blossoms are most brilliant just before they wilt” (2004, 160).

As ever more complicated statistical methods were brought to bear on this promising

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new data, cracks began to appear.

Given an individual’s partisan identification and evaluations of candidates and issues,

we could predict (or rather “postdict”) his or her vote choice with reasonable certainty.

However, on reflection, this finding seemed unsatisfying (Converse 2006b). To borrow

Converse’s metaphor, data on individuals’ party affiliation and contemporaneous po-

litical attitudes were entirely too far down the “funnel of causality.”3 It is almost a

tautology to observe that Republicans and those who like Republican candidates and

agree with Republican issue positions tend to vote for Republican candidates.

An Aside on the Values Literature

“Values” have popped up from time to time in the political science literature as

an alternative structuring force in political life that might avoid the complications of

too much focus on the proximate focus of the Michigan model (Alvarez and Brehm

2002; Chong 1993; Craig, Martinez, and Kane 2005; Feldman 1988a; Schwartz, Caprara,

and Vecchione 2010; Goren 2012; Jacoby 2006a; Stenner 2005a). Comparative work

in anthropology, cultural and personality psychology, and philosophy has identified a

host of candidate values and moral concerns that make good candidates for application

to the political world. Conceptually, the values literature is the closest analog to the

3For the uninitiated, the “Funnel of Causality” was evoked early on in The American Voter as away to structure thinking about the causes of a particular behavior. We can think of the stream ofevents that lead to an individual voting in any particular election as having a place somewhere alongthe funnel. At the wide end of the funnel, we have things that are unambiguously causes of the eventin question but are too remote to have useful predictive power (e.g. a necessary precondition of votingin an American election is the Revolutionary War and American independence from Britain, howevermost of us would agree that this event is much to far removed from an individual’s choice to participatein an election 230 years later to be of much use). At the narrow end of the funnel, we have eventsand factors that immediately precede the behavior. These events can also be considered causes of thebehavior, but may be too closely connected to it to be of any interest. This kind of reasoning is similarto the idea of ”ultimate” and ”proximate” causes (Mayr 1961).

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pre-political dispositions that are central to my thesis, but for many reasons, the values

literature has so far failed to provide an adequate solution.

One of the problems with the values literature is its general lack of sound theoretical

work.4 Values research seems to have been eclipsed by the study of attitudes. Rokeach

enunciates and presages this privileging of attitudes over values well when he observes,

This generally greater emphasis on attitudes [in the social sciences] has notarisen from any deep conviction that man’s attitudes are more importantdeterminants of social behavior than his values. Rather, it seems to havebeen forced upon us or to have evolved out of the more rapid developmentof methods for measuring attitudes, combined perhaps with a lack of clarityabout the conceptual differences between values and attitudes and abouttheir functional interconnections (1973, 17-18)

To Rokeach’s observation, I might add that the privileging of attitudes over some

more fundamental aspects of human experience is also a result of the implicit assump-

tions of the Standard model. Attitudes could be derived from one’s cultural context and

are easily written upon the blank slates assumed to populate the political world. Values

— stable differences between individuals — did not fit the model, and consequently they

were overlooked and undertheorized.

Apart from the lack of good theory as to their nature and origins, another limitation

facing the researcher interested in incorporating values into accounts of political behav-

ior is the tremendous number of potential candidates. Rokeach’s original values survey

had thirty-six separate values. In the political science literature, several scholars have

narrowed the field down to four or five, but even within the relatively narrow subdis-

cipline of American political behavior there is no generally agreed upon set of values.

Feldman (1988a) identifies three: economic individualism, equality of opportunity, and

4Recent exceptions to this general trend can be found. For example, Goren (2012) provides anextensive discussion of the development of “core” values.

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support for the free enterprise system. Goren (2005) adds traditional family values and

moral tolerance but excludes support for the free enterprise system. Jacoby (2006a)

focuses on liberty, equality, economic security, and social order. It is difficult to identify

any pair of studies by different authors that make use of the same set of values.5 Zaller

(1991) outlines a particularly expansive definition of values. In his classic study, values

“refers to any relatively stable, individual-level predisposition to accept or reject certain

kinds of arguments”, and he notes that they “may be rooted in personality, philosophy,

ideology, gender, experience, religion, ethnicity, occupation, or interest (among other

things). Party attachments ... also qualify as values under this definition” (1991, 1216).

Given the broad pool of possible candidates and lack of consensus as to which qualify

as values at all, it is no wonder the values literature has had difficulty accumulating.

Researchers who draw on the nebulous concept of “core values” are free to choose among

scores of candidate concepts with varying degrees of overlap. Mondak (2010) describes

a similar situation that faced personality psychologists. Until the development of the

Big Five (McCrae and Costa Jr 1997), the study of trait psychology was suffering under

an excess of pluralism. The bewildering array of personality traits was applied to new

research questions in an ad hoc manner. Under these conditions it was difficult to

make any cumulative contributions, as there was no commonly agreed upon framework.

The Big Five allowed personality psychologists to begin speaking the same language.

Consequently, the study of personality has made tremendous strides in the past 20

years.

Understanding the origins of these preferences can help us to understand how they

5One exception to the ad hoc amalgamations of values that seems to characterize this literature isShalom Schwartz’s careful construction of his “Universal Values” theory which has been successfullyapplied to questions of political behavior.

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function (and sometimes malfunction) in a contemporary environment. It might also

provide some insight about the expected pattern of covariation. My hope is that focusing

on the origins of preferences and values can bring the literature on core values in political

science—a literature that seems in need of some central organizing principle (Hitlin and

Piliavin 2004)—under one theoretical framework.

Geno-Politics and the Demise of the Standard Model

In recent years, political scientists, psychologists, and others have begun the work

of outlining an alternative to the standard model of socialized political preferences.

Alford, Funk, and Hibbing’s (2005) article in the APSR renewed the debate in earnest.

Their study highlighted the possibility of a biological basis for political attitudes and

dispositions, and almost every journal in the discipline has highlighted research exploring

the relationship between genetic factors and political attitudes and behavior (Fowler,

Baker, and Dawes 2008; Hatemi et al. 2009; Fowler and Dawes 2008; Hatemi et al.

2011a; Bell, Schermer, and Vernon 2009; Deppe et al. 2013; Cesarini, Johannesson,

and Oskarsson 2014). This genetic research deals a major blow to the Standard Social

Science Model, but it is less clear how it is immediately relevant to contemporary politics.

Genetic factors surely belong at the widest end of Converse’s Funnel.6

The recent revival of interest in genetic influences over political orientations owes a

debt to a research program that started more than forty years ago. Eaves and Eysenck

6The most exciting research that is occurring on the relationship between genes and political be-haviors and attitudes investigates gene-environment interactions. These studies have more “real-world”relevance (rather than purely academic interest), and can be thought of as linking these distal causesto more proximate factors. For some examples, see Settle et al. (2010), Eaves and Hatemi (2008), andDawes and Fowler (2009).

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perhaps first highlighted the importance of genetic factors for politically relevant at-

titudes. In a study that seems to have only recently been rediscovered by political

scientists, Eaves and Eysenck (1974) showed that a significant portion of the variance

in ideological orientations appears to be heritable.7 These findings have been replicated

in several different samples more recently (Alford, Funk, and Hibbing 2005; Bourgeois

2002; Hatemi et al. 2011b; Funk et al. 2013), and (although contrarian voices remain)

the bulk of the evidence seems to suggest that at least some political predispositions are

heritable. These findings should lead us to question the foundational assumptions of the

dominant social learning model.

The genetic research has opened the door for others to explore alternatives to social

learning in politics. Research on basic personality traits (Gerber, Huber, and Washing-

ton 2010a; Mondak et al. 2010; Mondak 2010; Stenner 2005a)8 and the role of physio-

logical factors in political behavior and attitudes (Smith et al. 2011; Gruszczynski et al.

2013; Hatemi et al. 2013) represent attempts by scholars to root the political world in

something that is a little more stable. In line with the aims of my project, these ap-

proaches share the common strategy of shifting the focus away from the narrow parts of

the causal funnel.

The revival of attention to genetic factors in political attitudes has also brought

with it a revival of criticism toward the geno-politics project (Charney 2008b,a; Charney

7The authors appear to have been much more circumspect with respect to the generalizability oftheir findings than have been some of the more enthusiastic proponents (and critics) of the geneticmodel. Their data came from a sample of British twins, and they are careful to limit their discussion tothe particular cultural and generational context of their sample. They write, ”Extrapolation from theseresults to other populations and cultures is likely to be misleading .... The sensitivity of attitudes tocultural change may, however, make them a useful indication of the interdependence of gene expressionand culture and encourage further research in this subject” (1974, 289). This kind of nuance is sometimesmissing from the contemporary scholarly debate on the role of genes and biology in political behavior.

8But see Verhulst, Eaves, and Hatemi (2012) for a possible corrective.

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and English 2012). Although the debate is highly technical at times (delving deep

in the minutiae of molecular biology), many of these criticisms fall along the battle-

lines drawn by the Standard Model. Critics of the connection between genetic factors

and political attitudes often make the point that it strains the bounds of credulity

to believe that any particular gene or set of genes can be translated into meaningful

political differences. Politics is a product of culture and it changes too quickly to be

easily mapped onto biological differences. Indeed, if this were the claim,9 it would be

incredible. However, one need not subscribe to untenable notions about the connection

between, say, a particular set of genes and 20th and 21st century notions of liberalism

and conservatism. The critics are right to note that there are other forces at work, but

they are wrong, in my estimation, to discount the biological roots of these divisions. In

the next section, I outline a method of connecting these very distant genetic factors with

the more proximate cultural factors.

Culture and Biology as Fundamental Influences

The most sensible models of complex social behavior (of which politics is one exam-

ple) give place for both biological and cultural factors.10 These models become most

interesting when we also acknowledge the interaction between biology and culture. In

general, this approach to the study of human behavior directs attention to three distinct

areas. First, we catalog the systems that are ultimately responsible for the collection of

stimuli and responses that are associated with the behavior. Next, we need to identify

9And, at times, the enthusiasm of the scholars pursuing genetic links to political attitudes hasprobably resulted in some unfortunate overstatements (made all the more unfortunate by the un-nuanced way in which these findings have been reported in popular media).

10e.g., the gene-environment research cited in note 6.

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the adaptive function of the systems that are responsible for generating the behavior of

interest. This enables us to understand the biological constraints on culture and other

socially constructed processes (as well as suggesting ways in which culture may have

affected biology). Thirdly, we can examine the ways in which the biological systems

fail in order to help us understand their function (the basic premise behind abnormal

psychology).

Human language from a cultural/biological perspective

Language acquisition and function in humans provides a useful analogy to other social

behaviors. In the case of language, the adaptive function is uncontroversial. Language

allows for the “efficient transmission of nongenetic information between individuals”

(Nowak, Komarova, and Niyogi 2001). Although meaningful spoken (or sung) com-

munication between individual members of a species is not uniquely human (Diamond

2006), human language is, from everything we can tell, significantly more complex and

capable of conveying larger quantities of information than comparable systems found

anywhere else in the animal kingdom (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002; Pinker and

Jackendoff 2005).

Spoken language is clearly rooted in biological systems. Despite the banality of the

observation that speech is generated with the vocal folds and relies on the respiratory

system, the exercise of identifying and isolating the systems implicated in speech sug-

gests several interesting areas of study. By focusing on the actual mechanics of sound

production in humans we can quickly see that there are some sounds that are more

natural for the biological machinery than others. It is also important to remember that

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the largest part of the machinery of human speech (the lungs, the tongue, the nasal

cavity, the teeth, etc.) have all been recruited into the job of communication from other

primary roles.

All of these biological constraints on vocal communication have the effect of “canal-

izing” speech in certain predictable directions. For example, the words “mama” and

“papa” (or “dada” or “baba”) are found in languages from across the globe. This comes

about through some combination of parental encouragement and the sounds that are

easiest for the infant to produce (Ferguson and Farwell 1975; Oller et al. 1976). Thus,

the biological systems responsible for producing language place constraints on the types

and durations of sounds that humans are capable of independently generating, and, on

the other side of the communication equation, to be useful as a system for commu-

nication the sounds produced must be within the range that most other humans can

hear.

This model can also be extended backwards in time to hypothesize about the initial

development of the vocal system. Paleoanthropologists and primatologists have con-

structed a plausible model of the coevolution of language and the biological systems

that generate it (de Boer 2005; Aiello and Dunbar 1993; Arbib 2005). Roughly, hominid

species that had the capacity and inclination to communicate vocally were advantaged

evolutionarily. These models account for variation in the suitability of the vocal tract

for complex vocalizations found in primates and changes in the size and function of

neural systems. They suggest that humans are hard-wired in some sense for language

acquisition.

Beyond the mechanical systems implicated in speech, the brain seems to be equipped

with special language modules that facilitate language learning. Although somewhat

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controversial, theorizing about neural systems as if they were composed of intercon-

nected “modules” has proved very productive for psychology (Frankenhuis and Ploeger

2007). An example drawn from the study of language acquisition illustrates this modu-

larity thesis well. Infants easily acquire the characteristic sounds (phonemes) associated

with languages to which they are exposed. Indeed, the study of infant babbling is a sur-

prisingly prolific subfield among linguists. The learning module in the brain responsible

for babbling in infants is activated even those who are born deaf (Petitto and Marentette

1991). Without input from their auditory system, deaf infants who are exposed to sign

will engage in “manual babbling” (mimicking some of the component parts of sign lan-

guage). The similarities between manual and vocalized babbling suggest that they are

driven by the same underlying language learning module.

Further evidence for the presence of generalized language processors in the brain can

be found in comparative studies of language processing. Sun, Morita, and Stark (1985)

found that native readers of Chinese and English were comparable in terms of the total

amount of information processed. Despite written Chinese’s much greater information

density, individuals who read Chinese characters do so at a much slower pace than

those who read English words which are much less efficient in terms of the amount

of information contained. Similarly, Pellegrino, Coupe, and Marsico (2011) found that

native speakers of languages with differing spoken information density also varied their

speed to compensate, so Spanish-speakers who have a relatively low information-to-

syllable ratio spoke at a faster pace than Germans who have a higher information density.

All of this suggests that our brains function as a bottle-neck in our capacity to process

language. Although the variable cultural expression of language varies in some significant

regards, the biological machinery that processes and produces it reigns in the effects of

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culture.

The evidence seems clear that language is thoroughly biological, but it would be

ludicrous to suggest that culture plays no role. No child is born with the capacity to

speak, and the details of one’s first language are not somehow contained within our

genetic code. Human children learn the language of their culture. Indeed, language

would be meaningless unless embedded within a culture.11 The bewildering diversity of

human languages is a testament to the many ways in which it is possible to harness the

same fundamental biological building blocks and produce a wide range of possibility.

From an ancient set of African languages which make extensive use of click consonants,

to the tonal languages of Asia, to English’s capacity for borrowing and adaptation, the

variety of human language is nothing short of remarkable, but it is reigned in by the

requirements of biology. Cultural expression is shaped by biology.

I will make the case that we should consider our pre-political dispositions in an

analogous fashion. Within any culture over time, as well as between cultures, there

exists a startling variety of variation in political ideas and debates. However, as we look

deeper, important commonalities become clear. Just as our speech systems were built

from existing structures that constrain and cannalize language, the fact that our pre-

political dispositions have been repurposed for new settings implies a similar constraint

and cannalization of political conflicts.

11A fascinating line of scholarship suggests that the capacity of language coevolved with the demandsa proto-culture was putting on human groups. Dunbar (Dunbar 1993) argues that as humans begancongregating in larger and larger groups, there was an increased demand for a more efficient way tocreate social bonds than the grooming that is observed in primate societies. Consequently, vocal foldsbegan being selected for in human populations to allow for more nuanced communication.

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Religion from a cultural/biological perspective

It is relatively easy to identify the physiological and neurological systems involved

in speech, but it is less obvious how such a synthesis could be successfully applied to

politics. It will be helpful to review how the cultural-biological perspective has been

applied to other complex social behaviors and institutions. A great many psychologists

have studied religious feeling, and in recent years, scholarly attention has been increas-

ingly turned toward the biological systems that are involved in religious sentiment. As

with politics and political attitudes, religions and religious attitudes are complex and

heavily influenced by culture and history. In spite of the daunting analytical challenge,

psychologists and anthropologists have made significant advancements in understanding

the cultural and biological systems that are related to religious development.

One plausible account of the origins of religion is found in Scott Atran and Ara Noren-

zayan’s (2004) synthesis of their own and others work on the psychological foundations

of religious sentiment. By their accounting, religious feeling is more properly considered

a byproduct of other adaptive systems. They identify two factors implicated in religious

feeling. First is what some have termed an “agency detection device” or (somewhat

inscrutably) “innate releasing mechanism” (Barrett and Johnson 2003). This module

accounts for the tendency for humans to assign agency to inanimate objects and ambigu-

ous phenomena. The second is the ease with which “minimally counter-intuitive con-

cepts” are transmitted. Studies of story-telling and memory have generally concluded

that stories that feature characters that violate some but not all of our expectations

about the working of the world are most likely to persist and be passed along (Harris

et al. 1988; Norenzayan et al. 2006). When we combine the ways in which humans are

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inclined to assign agency and find patterns in random phenomena with the tendency

to transmit and latch on to the minimally counterintuitive concepts of gods and other

supernatural phenomena, we can see the building blocks of religion.12

Given the fundamental psychological mechanisms that are responsible in some sense

for religious sentiment, we can turn our attention to the institutionalization of religious

ceremony and practice. Teehan (2010) makes the case that religious institutions evolved

and persisted for their ability to facilitate cooperation and social cohesion. An omniscient

god makes an excellent enforcer of socially desirable behaviors. Recent studies have

shown that priming religious feeling has the potential to decrease cheating (Johnson and

Bering 2006) and increase prosocial behavior (Shariff and Norenzayan 2007). We can

see similar patterns in the observational data on charitable giving by religious persons

(Putnam and Campbell 2012). If true, religious societies might have been selected for

their ability to cooperate.13

The fact that religious sentiment is so regularly channeled through institutions makes

religion a closer analogy to politics. In the case of human language (with the exception,

perhaps, of a few institutions of dubious effectiveness such as L’Acadmie franaise), formal

institutions are almost entirely absent. In the study of religion, institutions introduce a

new set of considerations. While it might be appropriate to lump them together with

“culture,” it will be useful to consider them separately, as institutions often take on a

12It is important to note the distinction between explaining or accounting for a thing (such as religioussentiment) and explaining it away or discounting it. The new atheist movement has taken much of thisevidence as somehow proving the folly of religious belief. This reading of the evidence is unwarrantedand generally unhelpful. See Barrett (2007a) for a more extensive discussion.

13This kind of group selection is somewhat controversial among evolutionary theorists. Indeed, itis almost antithetical to the “selfish gene” theorizing that has dominated the field (Dawkins 2006).However, E. O. Wilson and others have recently made a compelling case that evolutionary theoryshould attend to several levels of organization, especially when it comes to highly sociable animals(Wilson 2012; Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson 2010).

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life of their own as much political science scholarship has shown us (Hall and Taylor

1996; March and Olsen 1983; Peters 2011).

As with language, human religious life shows an enormous amount of diversity, but

there also seems to be an identifiable set of human universals undergirding its variable

cultural expression. Understanding these universals allows us to trace out the limits

of what religious leaders and institutions can do “independent” of their biological con-

straints.14

Politics from a cultural/biological perspective

After outlining how considering both cultural and biological factors helps to paint

a more complete picture of other social phenomena, we are ready to turn to the study

of politics. The first task is to identify the raw materials of politics – the fundamental

biological and cultural factors that shape the political life of the individual. At the

biological level, I focus on two related systems. The first is an affective system that

facilitates social interaction in groups. Psychologists have made great progress in recent

years in understanding the functioning and origins of our “moral emotions” (Sinnott-

Armstrong 2008; Giner-Sorolla 2013). These emotions help regulate social life, and

some have argued they form the basis for our ethical systems (Prinz 2007). The second

system is an innate group affiliation mechanism that has been described widely in the

psychology (Tajfel and Turner 1979a) and political science literatures (Green, Palmquist,

14Religious institutions are responsible in some sense for a great many problems in the world. However,many of these social-ills seem to directly stem from the capacity of religious institutions to harness thedarker elements of human nature. For example, religiously-motivated violence is an amped up versionof intergroup violence that has always been with us. Far from causing people to do harm as is the claimof many anti-religious activists, religions simply magnify a latent human capacity for harm that existsquite independent of the institution itself.

20

and Schickler 2004; Groenendyk 2013).

As in the case of language, the raw materials of political life (especially in its contem-

porary form) have been drawn from other preexisting systems. Just as the tongue, teeth,

and lungs have been recruited to perform a new role in communication, the cognitive

and affective processes that we rely upon to make evaluations of new situations and ideas

in political life originally developed to serve other purposes. To the best of our under-

standing, our species evolved to live in relatively small groups consisting almost entirely

of kin relations (Hatemi and McDermott 2011; Fukuyama 2011; Gintis, van Schaik, and

Boehm 2014). Navigating the rich web of social relationships that exist in even a small

group requires an array of social and emotional tools, and it is not difficult to see the

utility of a set of innate predispositions that would facilitate social life (Wilson 2012).

These prehistoric cognitive and emotional tools have to be adapted to new contexts.

These innately prepared predispositions that enable social interactions have the effect

of canalizing human moral, ethical, and political systems. They leave a great deal of

common ground (the importance of caring for one’s children, basic concepts of fairness,

a relatively common set of emotional cues, etc.), but they also set the stage for some of

the biggest and most enduring political problems that human societies have always had

to confront. At some level, the “big” questions that philosophers, ethicists, politicians,

and others have spent millennia pursuing are fundamentally unsolvable because they boil

down to a fundamental difference in preferences.15 The fact that we are “hard-wired”

15None of this is to say that the project of thinking about these “big questions” is somehow unworthyof our attention. It is the simple observation that it will be impossible to solve the fundamental questionsthat boil down to pre-rational differences in preferences. Indeed, it is somewhat ironical that the meta-ethical debate over the “Disagreement Thesis” — the existence of “deep moral disagreements thatappear persistently resistant to rational resolution” (Gowans 2013) — seems itself irresolvable. Well-intentioned, fully rational and equally intelligent people will continue to disagree about these questionsbecause they see the world in different ways.

21

for these kinds of disagreements goes a long way toward explaining their persistence.

Pre-political Dispositions and Moral Foundations

As reviewed above, political scientists have often appealed to the idea that some set

of extra-political factors bear some role in explaining individual-level attitudes. This

has often taken the form of “values.” The discipline’s continual return to this concept is

reflective of the intuitions that many of us share about political life. In our day-to-day

interactions with family and friends who are not as immersed in the political minutia as

are we, we notice that people have a “gut-level” sense about political matters. What we

have lacked so far is an overarching theoretical framework that can reign in our intuitions

about what should and should not be included in systematization of these values. Can

we really say that, for example, “support for the free enterprise system” is a “core”

value, or is it composed of other more fundamental predispositions? What are the a

priori criteria we can use to understand what should and should not be included?

While political science has been less focused on the project of systematizing values

research under one theoretical paradigm, many psychologists have proposed theoretical

frameworks that might serve the purpose. Rokeach (1973) pioneered the empirical study

of values as a system, and a great deal of research followed in his footsteps. Shalom

Schwartz (1994), suggests that there are ten types of universal values. Schwartz’s careful

theoretical framework details the relationship between the different values, and it has

been applied successfully to political settings (Barnea and Schwartz 1998; Schwartz,

Caprara, and Vecchione 2010; Goren 2012). Richard Shweder’s (Shweder et al. 1997)

work on the Big Three takes a more anthropological approach to unifying the study of

human value systems. Jonathan Haidt’s (Haidt and Graham 2007; Haidt and Joseph

22

2004; Haidt 2012) work builds from Shweder’s. Haidt’s theorizing is most closely aligned

with the evolutionary model outlined above, and it forms the basis of my empirical

investigation of the role of basic moral dispositions in political life.16

I rely on Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory rather than the viable alternatives for

several reasons. First, Haidt’s theorizing closely adheres to the framework that I have

outlined concerning the interaction between culture and biology. In his theorizing, moral

foundations, in order to qualify as such, must be rooted deep in human nature with evo-

lutionary and biological origins (Haidt and Joseph 2008). Culture guides the expression

of these innate traits, and there is room for reasoning and deliberation in understand-

ing how innate predispositions are applied to particular situations (Haidt 2001a). In

addition to its theoretical grounding, Moral Foundations Theory has received exten-

sive empirical support in psychology (Haidt and Graham 2007; Graham, Haidt, and

Nosek 2009; Haidt 2012; Koleva et al. 2012) and increasingly in political science jour-

nals (Clifford 2013; Clifford and Jerit 2013; Weber and Federico 2013; Federico et al.

2013; Kertzer et al. 2014), and its measures have been thoroughly tested (Graham et al.

2011).17 Pragmatically, the Moral Foundations Questionnaire has been administered to

a large cross-section of individuals making some of the empirical analyses that will follow

possible (especially those found in Chapter 4).

16At least two other systems have been proposed in the psychology literature. Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh,and Baldacci (2008) focus on the “approach” and “avoidance” motivations as structuring elements inhuman moral values. Rai and Fiske (2011) place more emphasis on the nature of the relationships thatare involved in different situations. There is a great deal of conceptual overlap between these differentattempts at categorizing and systematizing human value systems, and I suspect that substantivelysimilar conclusions could be reached by replicating the analyses herein with any of them.

17Moral Foundations Theory is not without critics. As I have mentioned, several alternative frame-works have been proposed, and there are those who object — sometimes pointedly — to the claimsmade by Moral Foundations Theory. See, for example, the robust discussion in Psychological Inquiry,vol. 20, issues 2–3.

23

In Haidt’s accounting, five moral domains18 describe a great variety of human con-

cern. Haidt and his colleagues arrived at these five foundations of human moral concern

by appealing to the literatures in cultural and evolutionary psychology, anthropology,

philosophy, and primatology. The foundations are listed, along with brief descriptions

and associated concepts from the political science literature in Table 1.1.

18Haidt’s most recent work (2012) proposes a sixth foundation, “Liberty/Oppression.” However inmost of the data that I have access to, I only have reliable measures of the five foundations mostfrequently associated with Moral Foundations Theory in the literature. Well-tested measures of thissixth foundation do not yet exist, and I remain somewhat skeptical that it qualifies as a moral foundationin its present incarnation.

24

Domain

Description

Sim

ilarco

nce

pts

Care

/Harm

Related

toou

rlongevolution

asmam

malswith

attachmentsystem

san

dan

abilityto

feel

(and

dislike)thepainof

others.

Itunderlies

virtues

ofkindness,gentleness,an

dnurturance.

”NurturantParentMorality”

(Lakoff

2010;Barkeran

dTinnick

2006);Post-materialism

(Inglehart

1997)

Fairness

/Cheating

Related

totheevolution

aryprocess

ofreciprocalaltruism.Thisfoundationgenerates

ideasof

justice,

righ

ts,an

dau

tonom

y.

“Equalityof

Opportunity”

(Feldman

1988b;

Jacob

y2006b),

fairness(H

ochschild1986)

Resp

ect

/Subversion

Shap

edbyou

rlongprimatehistory

ofhierarchical

social

interactions.

Thisfoundation

underlines

virtues

oflead

ership

and

follow

ership,includingdeference

tolegitimate

authorityan

drespectfortrad

itions.

“StrictFather

Morality”(Lakoff

2010;Barkeran

dTinnick2006),

Authoritarianism

(Feldman

and

Stenner

1997;Stenner

2005b)

Loyalty/Betrayal

Related

toou

rlonghistory

astribal

creatures

able

toform

shiftingcoalitions.

This

foundationunderlies

virturesof

patriotism

and

self-sacrifice

forthegrou

p.It

isactive

anytime

that

people

feel

that

it’s“oneforall,an

dallfor

one.”

Minim

algrou

ptheory

(Tajfel

and

Turner

1979b),Nationalism

(Roccas,Schwartz,an

dAmit2010;

Lian

dBrewer

2004)

Sanctity/Degra

dation

Shap

edbythepsychologyof

disgu

stan

dcontamination.Thisfoundationunderlies

religiou

snotionsof

strivingto

live

anelevated,

less

carnal,morenob

leway.It

underlies

the

widespread

idea

that

thebodyisatemple

whichcanbedesecratedbyim

moral

activities

andcontaminan

ts(anidea

not

uniqueto

religiou

strad

itions).

Disgu

st(Inbar,Pizarro,an

dBloom

2009;TerrizziJr,Shook

,an

dVentis2010;Inbar

etal.2012)

Tab

le1.1:

Description

sof

each

moral

foundationan

dsomeassociated

concepts.Thedescription

sweretakenfrom

www.m

oralfoundations.org.

25

Critically, the measures of the different moral foundations were designed to tap into

basic predispositions and orientations. These measures are largely devoid of overtly

political content that might raise questions about the causal relationship between the

measures and political attitudes and orientations. Karen Stenner makes a similar case for

her choice of measures of authoritarianism (2005a, 21–24). By relying on a set of items

about child-rearing,19 Stenner makes a compelling case that we can consider her measure

of authoritarianism causally prior to political attitudes. In a similar way, measuring

moral concepts that are removed from expressly political considerations allows us to be

more confident that individuals’ responses to the moral foundations questionnaire are

not informed by their political issue positions.

To review, Moral Foundations Theory synthesizes and imposes some theoretical dis-

cipline upon a sometimes unruly values literature. Its central claims are consistent with

a more complete model of human social behavior that accounts for both biological and

cultural factors. For these reasons, the moral foundations make ideal candidates as

pre-political dispositions.

Groupishness

The other major psychological system that I focus on in this project is a group

affiliation mechanism. Psychologists have long studied and remarked upon the set of

affective and cognitive tools humans employ to create and maintain group affiliations. As

powerfully demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments, humans will build group

distinctions from the most trivial differences (Tajfel 1982). In experimental settings,

19The spirit of some of these items appears in Haidt’s measurements of the “Respect/Subversion”domain.

26

even when participants are informed that the groups have been randomly assigned on

other basis, individuals show favoritism toward their ingroup members and prejudice

against their outgroup (Pinter and Greenwald 2011).20

Although I will argue that pre-political dispositions inform our group affiliations

(see Chapter 3), we still might expect an independent effect of group membership on

the attitudes and behaviors of individuals over and above the effect of being in a like-

minded group.21 Indeed, political scientists have long known that partisan identification

affects individual-level thinking about politics. The authors of The American Voter

described a “perceptual screen” (1960, 133) that filters out unfavorable messages about

one’s own party. More recently, Carsey and Layman (2006) show how partisans will

change their issue positions over time in some areas to align with their party.22 Jessee

(2009a) quantifies the degree to which party affiliation shifts individuals away from their

policy preferences. Goren (2005) shows that even “core” values can be shaped by party

affiliation. The strength and direction of party affiliation plays a central role in almost

every model of individual-level political attitudes and behavior.

Group affiliation and our moral emotions are inseparable (Giner-Sorolla 2013; Rai

and Fiske 2011). Given the fact that moral emotions exist to help us navigate and

20There do appear to be interesting differences between groups that are randomly assigned and groupsthat exist for non-random reasons (Goette, Huffman, and Meier 2012). There is also some evidencethat the “minimal group” effect is affected by cultural differences (Falk, Heine, and Takemura 2014).However, the persistent causal effect of group identification is the important thing.

21There is an analogy here to the largely settled debate among congressional scholars about therole of party organizations in government as meaningful organizations that exert an independent effect(Cox and McCubbins 2010) or just groupings of like-minded legislators with similar goals (Krehbiel1993). At the institutional level, this party effect seems to manifest itself less as a psychological bias(although legislators and other elites are not immune to psychological biases) and more as a functionof the incentives of the various actors within the institution.

22Of course, Layman and Carsey also show that people are willing to change their partisanship if theyfind themselves out of alignment on key issues. This finding is consistent with my claim that people’spredispositions guide their party identification.

27

balance the tension between group and individual interests, I expect to see interac-

tions between group affiliations (especially partisanship) and individual predispositions.

These interactions are expected to emerge for several reasons. First, we know that par-

tisanship is very stable at the individual level (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2004).

For many reasons, people are hesitant to change their partisan affiliations and are most

often motivated to preserve and defend their own identity (Groenendyk 2013). Second,

political matters are far from the top of the list of concerns of a great proportion of the

mass public. As reluctant as political scientists have been at times to admit it, most

people are not constantly engaged in the process of rationally updating their beliefs

about political matters (Converse 1964). Individuals’ party affiliations are profoundly

affected by early life experiences, and inertia seems to be a dominating factor in the

stability of partisan attachments (Ghitza and Gelman 2014). Finally, in the United

States, structural and historical factors lead to a two-party system. Consequently, the

parties are composed of sometimes uneasy coalitions of individuals who do not agree

on everything. Due to the this reality, individuals often find themselves at odds with

their parties on one or more important issues (Hillygus and Shields 2014). Under these

conditions, it will not always be obvious from an individual’s predispositions to which

party he or she should “naturally” belong. Politicians can be expected to find the large

cleavages in the electorate and shape their moral arguments accordingly (see Chapter

5), but there is too much heterogeneity in individual predispositions to ever settle on a

stable divide (Sundquist 1983).

28

Process Labels a Hot Cogni�on g Argument Construc�on b Affect Priming h Construc�on of Evalua�ons c Spreading Ac�va�on/Memory Retrieval i Ra�onaliza�on d Affect Contagion j A�tude Upda�ng e Mo�vated Bias k Belief Upda�ng f Affect Transfer

Figure 1.1: Adapted from Lodge and Taber (2013), Figure 1.4.

29

A Revised Model of Political Evaluation

In an important synthesis of decades of research, Lodge and Taber’s Rationalizing

Voter outlines a compelling model of political evaluations. Their schematic representa-

tion of the model is reproduced in Figure 1.1. In their model (for which they provide a

good deal of compelling evidence), individuals’ reasoning about political issues is pro-

foundly influenced by subconscious, affective reactions. The figure is arranged so that

the earliest events are placed on the left side of the diagram and time progresses from

left to right.

Using this theoretical perspective, Lodge and Taber present the results of several

experiments to show that political evaluations are primarily driven by “hot” affective

processes rather than “cold” reasoning. As Lodge and Taber note, most of our theorizing

about political evaluations follows the “c-g-h” path. Under this idealized picture of

political cognition, individuals first more or less rationally come up with a variety of

considerations (perhaps from the “top of the head” as Zaller suggested). An individual’s

political sophistication and her motivation will determine how many considerations are

activated. The next step in the process involves weighting the various considerations in

order to come up with some evaluation of the issue.

Consider an example of the rare, “c-g-h” path. If I hear a political speech about gay

marriage, the various concepts associated with it are expected to come to the forefront

of my mind (the framing of the particular story, memories of a gay friend, my religious

background, the attitudes of my colleagues, previous arguments that I have heard for

or against, etc.). I sort through these considerations and weigh them appropriately to

determine how I feel about the speech. This cool and deliberative process of tallying

30

up the pros and cons consciously and rationally is how many of us would like to believe

we come to political evaluations. In practice, this kind of reasoning seems exceptionally

rare. Motivated reasoning, Lodge and Taber argue, is far more common. In political

matters, we often start with the conclusion and work backwards.

While not dismissing the possibility of of “cold” information processing, Lodge and

Taber’s findings suggest that there is a lot more going on beneath the surface of a

political evaluation. Their research suggests that my prior attitudes (path “e” in the

diagram) have a direct bearing on the kinds of considerations that are activated in my

mind in the first place. This isn’t a random sampling from the things that are associated

with gay marriage. Rather, it is biased by the “affective tags” that are associated with

each consideration in my memory. Before I am consciously aware of thinking about the

issue, its mere mention creates an affective response that colors the rest of my thinking

on the issue.

Even factors that are not logically related in any way to the evaluative target can

exert a significant effect on the final evaluation. To use the example of the speech, my

response to the argument might be vary significantly depending on whether or not the

hall in which it is given is comfortable, or whether I have had enough to eat.23 These

incidental affective states (path “d”) have been shown to exert measurable effects on

evaluations.

Lodge and Taber’s experimental tests of their model focused on manipulating inci-

dental affect and individuals’ cognitive capacities (i.e. requiring subjects to hold a long

23For a fascinating but troubling examination of the role of irrelevant considerations in a real setting,see Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso (2011). The authors discuss how judges might be effected byfatigue and hunger by showing that their punitiveness seems to increase as the lunch hour approachesand reverts to the baseline immediately following the lunch break.

31

number in memory) and observing the downstream consequences on individuals’ ability

to access different considerations and the ultimate evaluation. These kinds of labora-

tory experiments that can provide a critical test of certain aspects of their model and

contribute greatly to our understanding of the construction of political evaluations, but

there are many components of the model that are nearly impossible to test experimen-

tally. In my dissertation project, the pre-political dispositions that are my focus in this

project might be considered as affecting the “Hot Cognition” path (“a”).

It is difficult to imagine experimental interventions that could successfully manipu-

late an individual’s pre-political dispositions.24 Their usefulness in some ways depends

on them being un-manipulable. Variation in the pre-political dispositions helps us to

understand the different starting places of different individuals. In Lodge and Taber’s

model, these variable starting positions were taken as given.

Figure 1.2 visualizes the ways in which pre-political dispositions can be incorporated

into Lodge and Taber’s model. This is accomplished largely by inserting them as a

mediating factor between the stimulating event and the prior attitudes.

In the new version of the model, the event sets off a cascade of emotional reactions

that are filtered through an individual’s predispositions. These reactions are causally

prior to any conscious deliberation on the part of the individual (represented by path

“i” in the diagram). Variation in predispositions accounts for variability in individual

responses to the same event. I will present some evidence on this score in Chapter 5.

24This is perhaps the “holy grail” of morality research, and it ends up being very difficult to crediblypull off. Wheatley and Haidt (2005) use hypnosis to induce disgust in a treatment group and observesignificant effects on their subsequent moral judgments. Crockett et al. (2010) saw significant effectsof serotonin in moral judgments. Young et al. (2010) use strong magnetic fields to temporarily impairselective parts subjects’ brains and observe significant effects on moral judgment. Each of these studiesgives some support for the idea that individual differences in biological factors explains differences inmoral judgment, but it is much more difficult to manipulate specific moral domains.

32

Figure 1.2: Incorporating the pre-political dispositions into a model of political evalu-ation. The pre-political dispositions are causally prior to specific attitudes (path “i”).These basic predispositions influence thinking about which attitudes are relevant to anyparticular situation, and they do so in variable and sometimes competing ways repre-sented by the multiple arrows (path “ii”). It is possible that individuals can be persuadedto apply their predispositions in a different way — analogous to the attitude updatingpath (“j”) from the original diagram (path “iii”).

33

Path “ii” represents the connection between individual predispositions and prior

attitudes. I am proposing that it is an individual’s predispositions that are largely

implicated in the direction of the affective tags (positive or negative) that are attached to

attitudes in memory. These hypothetical tags are the primary components of evaluations

under the Lodge and Taber paradigm, but their source is left largely unstudied.

Path “iii” allows for individuals to change the ways in which their predispositions

are applied to particular issues. Individual predispositions play a large role in attitude

construction, and they provide some stable basis from which models of politics at the

individual level can build. This is not to say, however, that there is no room for genuine

attitude change and persuasion. Under the model that I am proposing, individuals can

change the bases on which they apply their predispositions to particular political issues.

We are witnessing something like this in public attitudes about gay marriage. Opinion

has shifted remarkably quickly in this domain, and while generational replacement goes

part of the way toward explaining Americans’ changing attitudes, it is not sufficient.

It seems more likely that people have shifted the grounds on which they evaluate the

issue away from notions of Sanctity and Degradation and more towards the domain of

Fairness.

The Plan for the Dissertation

In the remainder of the dissertation, I will approach several different aspects of po-

litical life from the perspective of the model developed in this chapter. I begin at the

individual level by showing how variation in the pre-political dispositions introduced in

this chapter help to explain variation in political attitudes. From there, show how these

34

basic dispositions in the mass public constrain elite action. Variation in the predispo-

sitions in the mass public explains variation in the behavior of members of Congress.

After discussing how the predisposing factors constrain the scope of political action, I

turn my attention to the ways in which politicians use argumentation and rhetoric to

mobilize different concerns at the mass level.

The individual in the political world

Chapter 2 addresses the critical issue of measurement. Throughout this project, I

rely upon indicators of individual pre-political dispositions derived from responses to a

questionnaire. Combining the items from the questionnaire into valid measures of the

constructs I am trying to measure is no trivial task, and Chapter 2 seeks to explore the

best means of doing so.

Chapter 3 uses individual-level measures of the moral foundations developed in Chap-

ter 2 to test hypotheses about the axes of conflict both between the two major parties

and within them in contemporary American politics. My measures of individual pre-

political dispositions do a good job of distinguishing between members of the two major

parties, but I also show that there exists considerable heterogeneity within each party.

This variation helps us to understand variation in issue positions beyond what we could

understand by just looking at comparable intraparty differences on abstract ideological

scales or strength of partisan attachment. I examine how the moral foundations mea-

sures explain variation in political identities, attitudes, and behavior. Throughout the

chapter, I pay close attention to the ways in which group identity serves as a prism

through which other political realities are experienced.

35

How political elites are constrained by the pre-political disposi-

tions

In Chapter 4, I turn to the question of how predispositions in the mass public function

to constrain political elites. Some of the research on political representation has ascribed

too much agency to elite actors. We are left with the troubling conclusion that the mass

public is almost endlessly manipulable into whatever shape that elite politics drives it.

Contrarily, I argue that the basic building blocks of politics constrain political actors

and limits their capacity to craft political coalitions.

After developing a set of measures of the moral foundations at the level of the con-

gressional district, I show how variation in moral concern explains variation in elite

behavior. Variation in the moral concerns of constituents seems to exert a real influ-

ence on elite behavior. As we saw at the individual level, these constituency factors are

important at explaining variation within each of the parties beyond the what can be

gained by considering other measures of congressional ideology.

How political elites navigate the dispositional landscape

Finally, I turn to the question of how political elites work within the constraints of the

predispositions of the mass public. As others have noted, “Words do the work of politics”

(Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009, 1038). Chapter 5 uses data from individuals recruited

from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to show that variation in individuals’ predispositions

is related to their emotional and moral reactions to political texts. Here again there

is an interaction between partisan identity and individual predispositions. Individuals

seem to be more receptive to the moral messages of co-partisans, and they are generally

36

less receptive to messages from the other team. However, regardless of the source cue,

individuals were sensitive to the actual moral content of the texts to which they were

exposed.

The concluding chapter of the dissertation explores the implications of my findings.

Taken all together, the evidence that I present points toward real and enduring differ-

ences in fundamental value orientations within the mass public. If this is the case, we

need to change the ways we think about political disagreement. Rather than a focus

on educating the “wrong” side, I hope that my findings suggest the need for a kind

of moral humility. We all see through a glass darkly in political matters, but perhaps

through genuine engagement with others who share divergent moral positions, we can

find greater understanding. Paradoxically, coming to terms with the deep nature of

disagreement can serve to diffuse some of the more heated emotions that sometimes

characterize political conflicts.