Is this a surprise to anyone? Selfishness and Altruism and Politics.

[Angrboda]

This paper investigates – in a large heterogeneous sample – the relationship between social preferences on the one hand, and socioeconomic factors and political references on the other hand. Socioeconomic factors correlate with social preferences, and social preferences robustly shape political attitudes and voting behavior in a particular way: Selfish subjects are the extremists on one side of the political spectrum – they are more likely to vote for a right-wing party, they are less inclined to favor redistribution and they are more likely to self-assess themselves as right-wing than all the other types. Inequality-averse subjects, altruists and maxi-min sit at the opposite end of the political spectrum, while all the other types behave less systematically and in a less extreme fashion. Overall, our evidence indicates that elicited social preferences are externally valid as a predictor for political attitudes, and that social preferences are fairly stable across contexts and over longer periods of time.

Social Preferences and Political Attitudes:: An Online Experiment on a Large Heterogeneous Sample

One might be tempted to argue that the extremists are, well, extremists, and their views are not representative of the majority. Unfortunately that falls down in two areas. First, it has been the tendency of conservatives and conservative movements to be led and heavily influenced by extremists. One only has to draw attention to things such as the Moral Majority and the growing acceptance of conspiracy theories and science denialism among the right to see this. The other area is that, while extremists do hold a lot of sway among conservatives and Republicans, the left is far more divided on the impulses of the extreme leftists, as evidenced by the mixed results in the 2018 midterms between centrist Democrats and more extreme progressives. The left still engages conciliation and moves toward the center to some extent, while the right continues to become more extreme.

Is there something I'm missing in this analysis? Am I wrong to be worried that national policy is being led by the nose by people likely motivated by selfishness?

---

Our experiment delivers several important insights. First, we find that an impressing majority of participants reveals benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality and malevolence in the domain of disadvantageous inequality and are hence classified as inequality averse. Moreover, more than 80% of our subjects can be classified as one of just four types: inequality averse, selfish, maxi-min and altruistic (efficiency-seeking). Second, distributional preferences vary systematically with gender, age, income and education – females tend to be more inequality averse than males; older subjects tend to be more inequality averse than younger ones; richer subjects tend to be less inequality averse than poorer subjects; and more educated participants tend to be more altruistic than less educated ones. Third, regarding our main research question of how social preferences shape political attitudes and voting behavior, we find that selfish subjects are the extremists on one side of the political spectrum – they are more likely to vote for a right-wing party than all the other types, they are less likely to favor redistribution and they are more likely to classify themselves as right-wing. Inequality-averse subjects, altruists and maxi-min – all characterized by benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality – seem to sit at the opposite end of the spectrum. The remaining types behave less systematically and in a less extreme fashion. Our results not only survive the inclusion of a large range of covariates but also a battery of different robustness checks. Overall, our evidence indicates that elicited social preferences are externally valid as a predictor for political attitudes and pro-social behavior, and that social preferences are fairly stable across contexts and over longer periods of time.

- ibid.

---

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

So...nice people tend to be on the left, mean people on the right?  Hold on, I'll need to write this down so I don't forget it...

Boru

[Anomalocaris]

So...nice people tend to be on the left, mean people on the right?  Hold on, I'll need to write this down so I don't forget it...

Boru

Just remember, right = wrong.