Studies of values around the world have revealed that a world at peace, social justice, and equality (universalism values) are ordinarily opposed motivationally to social order and national security ...(security values). We first establish that these sociopolitical values exhibit an unusual pattern of compatibility in East European samples from eight countries (N = 2770). This pattern suggests a shared meaning for the sociopolitical values similar to that of conformity values and opposed to that of self-direction values. We then hypothesize that this unusual meaning of sociopolitical values reflects the experience of living under East European communist regimes. Comparison of the value priorities of opponents and supporters of the communist regime in Poland supports this hypothesis. Implications for the nature and speed of value change are discussed.
Hayek's view of democracy as a process of forming opinion is taken as a starting point for inquiring into issues largely neglected by Public Choice and Constitutional Economics. In an Austrian ...perspective, fallible individual knowledge, political entrepreneurs and dissenting minorities attain a distinctive role in the process of political competition. Based on the observation that political opinions consist of preferences and theories, the concept of "opinion falsification" is introduced. It is a spontaneous result of social interaction creating "preference falsification" - the disguise of true feelings, but also "knowledge falsification" - the discovery of false beliefs. Democratic constitutions can limit the scope of preference falsification and increase the potential for knowledge falsification, thus supporting Hayek's view that "it is in its dynamic, rather than its static, aspects, that the value of democracy proves itself". PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Previous research has consistently shown that those on the political Right tend to prefer or use conventional or Stage 4 moral reasoning, while those on the political Left prefer principled or Stage ...5 reasoning (cf. Kohlberg, 1976). One interpretation of this finding is that developmental level of moral reasoning influences a person's political views, another that the moral ‘stages’ associated with contrasting political positions are in fact contrasting politico–moral ideologies and that people choose the form of moral reasoning which best expresses their own political identity. We report four studies to test aspects of these alternatives. Participants (N = 50) in Study 1 rated moral arguments representing different stages as differentially relevant to people of varying political persuasions. In Study 2, participants (N = 106), assigned to play the role of constituency political parties (either Labour or Conservative) selecting candidates to represent their party, evaluated imaginary candidates differentially as a function of the kinds of moral arguments the candidates expressed. In Study 3 (N = 61), principled and particularly conventional moral arguments were again found to express contrasting political identities. In Study 4 (N = 51) a manipulation of the salience of participants' political identity produced as predicted high correlations between moral reasoning scores and measures of political attitudes when political identity was salient but not when personal identity was salient. The findings overall, however, only partially support the view that political identity influences moral reasoning. We conclude that, although degree of preference for conventional or Stage 4 reasoning is a function of political identity, principled reasoning may be unrelated to political orientation. We also propose that these two forms of reasoning do not reflect successive developmental stages and that preference for one may be independent of preference for the other.
An enduring legacy for any president is achieved by appointing judges with similar policy preferences who then maintain those policy preferences during their tenure on the bench and long after ...leaving office. This process provides one of the few democratic checks on the judiciary. Some authors demonstrate that in the areas of social and economic policy, Supreme Court justices’ policy votes are concordant with their appointing presidents over time. We explore whether presidents are as successful at the courts of appeals level and find that they are. We also explore the influences on presidential success in nominating judges to these courts who then vote in concordance with their policy preferences; we find that the presence of a home-state senator of the president’s party substantially constrains presidential success. However, neither presidents’ appointment strategies, presidential popularity, nor the party composition of the Senate affected the degree of concordance between presidential policy preferences and judicial voting records.
