Beyond ‘Liberals’ and ‘Conservatives’: Complexity in Ideology, Moral Intuitions, and Worldview among Swedish Voters

Abstract

This research investigated the congruence between the ideologies of political parties and the ideological preferences (N = 1515), moral intuitions (N = 1048), and political values and worldviews (N = 1345) of diverse samples of Swedish adults who voted or intended to vote for the parties. Logistic regression analyses yielded support for a series of hypotheses about variations in ideology beyond the left–right division. With respect to social ideology, resistance to change and binding moral intuitions predicted stronger preference for a social democratic (vs. progressive) party on the left and weaker preference for a social liberal (vs. social conservative or liberal‐conservative) party on the right. With respect to political values and broader worldviews, normativism and low acceptance of immigrants predicted the strongest preference for a nationalist party, while environmentalism predicted the strongest preference for a green party. The effects were generally strong and robust when we controlled for left–right self‐placements, economic ideology, and demographic characteristics. These results show that personality variation in the ideological domain is not reducible to the simplistic contrast between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, which ignores differences between progressive and non‐progressive leftists, economic and green progressives, social liberal and conservative rightists, and nationalist and non‐nationalist conservatives.

Moral Foundations Theory and the Psychology of Charitable Giving

“…The empirical data from past research (e.g. Davies, Sibley, & Liu, 2014; Graham et al, 2011; Nilsson & Erlandsson, 2015; Nilsson et al, 2020) are consistent with a hierarchical model with two superordinate foundations (individualizing and binding intuitions) with underlying facets (harm and fairness; loyalty, authority, and purity/sanctity). At the same time, a recent cross‐cultural analysis of the structure of moral foundations across 27 nations indicated that there is substantial overlap between the specific facets of each superordinate factor (i.e.…”

“…Further research is needed also for elucidating more fine‐grained aspects of the relation between moral foundations and charitable giving (and political ideology, see Nilsson et al, 2020). In the current research, we focused on the superordinate distinction between binding and individualizing moral foundations.…”

“…On the broadest scale, left–right divergences in political orientation can be described in terms of a distinction between resistance to (vs. advocacy of) social change and preference for social and economic equality (vs. acceptance of inequality; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). This distinction converges with the distinction between binding and individualizing moral foundations, in the sense that preference for equality entails an impartial concern for the well‐being of all individuals while resistance to change involves protection of in‐group traditions and norms (Federico, Weber, Ergun, & Hunt, 2013; Nilsson & Erlandsson, 2015; Nilsson et al, 2020).…”

Rediscovering Tomkins’ polarity theory: Humanism, normativism, and the psychological basis of left-right ideological conflict in the U.S. and Sweden

“…The goal of this article is not to present a comprehensive theory of all political belief systems but rather to provide an account of the potential clashes between generalized worldviews on the left and right. Some scholars have argued that political ideology is not reducible to a single dimension [35,[43][44][45]. Nevertheless, the left-right distinction is an extremely prominent one that is readily observable in a wide range of historical, cultural, and political contexts [42], and the incompatibility between the left and the right is what Tomkins set out to explain ( [28], p. 105).…”

“…Although the U.S. and Sweden are both Western, post-industrial democracies, there are critical differences between them. Sweden has a long history of Social-Democratic rule, and the left-right dimension is primarily structured according to attitudes that are supportive or critical of the economic system, which may be characterized as "welfare capitalism" [44,58,59]. Given this social and historical context, it is at least conceivable that system justification tendencies and resistance to change would be more prevalent among Social Democrats (on the Swedish left) than among "Liberals" and libertarians (on the Swedish right)-as Jost, Federico, and Napier [60] suggested.…”