It’s More Complicated Than That—Alliances Are One of Many Factors Shaping Political Belief Systems

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This article refers to:

Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Note that this can be the case regardless of whether most people can identify these abstract moral values. Claessens et al., (2020) liken this to the fact that most proficient speakers of a language cannot articulate its grammar.

2 In fact, since winners in a 2-party system like the US receive more than half the vote, a simple prediction model in which everyone is expected to vote for the winning party will already lead to out-of-sample accuracy a few percentage points above 50%.

3 One might argue that perhaps genetic or personality differences determine group membership (e.g., religion, income or education) and that it is alliances between these groups that generates what looks like heritable ideology. No doubt this causal pathway plays some role, but remember, as noted above, group membership itself is not a particularly good predictor of ideology.

Additional information

Funding

NR is supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and by the Leverhulme Trust. This work is also supported by a Royal Society of New Zealand Catalyst Leaders Grant [#ILFUOA2002] to QA and NR.