Do needs for security and certainty predict cultural and economic conservatism? A cross-national analysis.

Abstract

We examine whether individual differences in needs for security and certainty predict conservative (vs. liberal) position on both cultural and economic political issues and whether these effects are conditional on nation-level characteristics and individual-level political engagement. Analyses with cross-national data from 51 nations reveal that valuing conformity, security, and tradition over self-direction and stimulation (a) predicts ideological self-placement on the political right, but only among people high in political engagement and within relatively developed nations, ideologically constrained nations, and non-Eastern European nations, (b) reliably predicts right-wing cultural attitudes and does so more strongly within developed and ideologically constrained nations, and (c) on average predicts left-wing economic attitudes but does so more weakly among people high in political engagement, within ideologically constrained nations, and within non-Eastern European nations. These findings challenge the prevailing view that needs for security and certainty organically yield a broad right-wing ideology and that exposure to political discourse better equips people to select the broad ideology that is most need satisfying. Rather, these findings suggest that needs for security and certainty generally yield culturally conservative but economically left-wing preferences and that exposure to political discourse generally weakens the latter relation. We consider implications for the interactive influence of personality characteristics and social context on political attitudes and discuss the importance of assessing multiple attitude domains, assessing political engagement, and considering national characteristics when studying the psychological origins of political attitudes.

Are Cultural and Economic Conservatism Positively Correlated? A Large-Scale Cross-National Test

“…70 If citizens organize their attitudes differently, then this mismatch has potential implications for our understanding of the psychological origins of 64 E.g., Feldman and Johnston 2014;Johnson and Tamney 2001;Malka et al 2014. 65 E.g., Davis and Robinson 1996;Lipset 1966;Stenner 2005;Svallfors 1991. 66 Effects of needs for security and certainty on political attitudes within Wave 5 were reported in Malka et al (2014) using different model specifications. Analyses along these lines have not, to our knowledge, been reported yet for Wave 6.…”

“…As displayed in Figures 1 and 2, for each of these pairs, negative correlations with 95 per cent confidence intervals that do not include zero greatly outnumber positive correlations with 95 per cent confidence intervals that do not include zero. The percentage of nations for which the correlation was significantly positive (suggesting that right-wing cultural and economic attitudes more often go together) 54 See Malka et al 2014;Schwartz 1992. 55 Schwartz 1992. ranged from 7.4 per cent (Immigration-Business Ownership) to 20.8 per cent (Sexual MoralityBusiness Ownership) (see Table 1).…”

“…41 Federico and Schneider 2007;Jacoby 1991;Lupton, Myers, and Thornton 2015;Zaller 1992. 42 Kossowska and Van Hiel 2003;Malka et al 2014;Thorisdottir et al 2007. 43 E.g., Jost et al 2003.…”

“…It is quite clear that the right-left dimension is useful for characterizing elite policy differences in many countries: cultural traditionalism and free-market economic views are associated with the right, while cultural liberalism and redistributive economic views are associated with the left. 31 Also, within the American general public, traditional cultural attitudes 22 Malka et al 2014;Malka and Soto 2015. 23 E.g., Jost et al 2003;Wilson 1973.…”

Beyond Social Contagion: Associative Diffusion and the Emergence of Cultural Variation

“…The traditional association between high-brow music and intellectual sophistication, for example, has been challenged with the rise of cultural omnivorousness as a dominant logic of cultural consumption in Western societies (Peterson and Kern 1996). Similarly, the rationale that connects a belief in laissez-faire economics with an objection to legalized abortion is taken for granted in mainstream American political discourse but is not particularly prevalent elsewhere (Malka, Soto, Inzlicht, and Lelkes 2014;Baldassarri and Goldberg 2014). Though cultural clustering appears to be inexorable, the patterns it follows are not.…”