Newswise — When it comes to judging politicians who commit transgressions, Americans have ditched the moral compass for a simple eye test.
A new study conducted during President Donald Trump's first year in office has found that voters have less of an issue with a politician from their own party who does something wrong; but become upset when someone on the other side of the aisle goes against their values.
Professor David Redlawsk, Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware, and Annemarie Walter of the University of Nottingham, recruited 2,026 adults and asked them to complete a questionaire that gauged their feelings about five moral issues: care, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity.
They found that, in general, voters responded with negative emotions to politicians’ moral violations. But not all voters answered in the same manner. Their view of moral violations was sometimes conditioned by their own moral values – even more so by their partisanship when partisan actors were involved.
"Partisans of both parties express more negative emotions when a politician of the other party violates moral foundations," they wrote in the study, published in the journal Political Psychology.
While the split along party lines isn't that surprising, Redlawsk and Walter did make one very interesting find: Democrats tended to respond more negatively to the set of moral violations than did Republicans.The candidacy and subsequent election of Trump seems to suggest that in the current American political environment, moral violations may be more rule than exception. Despite the many accusations of moral violations by the current president, none seem to shake his core Republican supporters, they said.
The study is the first to assess the role of voters’ moral values in their response to moral transgressions. A follow‐up study will examine the specific negative emotions to see whether these moral violations evoke specific discrete emotions, in particular so‐called moral emotions.
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