Political Belief Systems Are Not Singularly Rooted in Alliance Psychology

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This article refers to:

Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Azevedo et al. (2019) report a failure to replicate the reversal effect, but a close examination of their findings reveals numerous problems with this interpretation of their results. First, they mostly report associations between economic conservatism and other explicitly political measures (such as system justification, social conservatism, and right-wing authoritarianism), which are irrelevant to the reversal effect. Their one test of associations between economic conservatism and an indicator of needs for security and certainty used a child-rearing values measure of authoritarianism (consistent with prior work on the reversal effect; see Johnston et al., 2017). Correlations were reported separately for those high and low on a measure of ‘political sophistication’ (based on a median split), but the sophistication measure consisted of three politicized items that were highly likely to be subject to partisan motivated reasoning effects (i.e., correct awareness that under the Obama administration workers’ earnings increased, the proportion of Americans without health insurance decreased, and illegal border crossings decreased). Since this measure relies solely on factual items whose correct answer Democratic identifiers are less likely to deny for partisan reasons (as opposed to standard factual items querying ‘ideologically-neutral’ facts about government procedure and staffing; see Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996), we agree with Ollerenshaw and Johnston’s (2022) conclusion that “it is not clear how to interpret these results” (p. 371, footnote 1). See Ollerenshaw and Johnston (2022) for a pre-registered replication of the reversal effect and Malka et al. (2014) for evidence of this effect outside of the United States.