Partisanship and the trolley problem: Partisan willingness to sacrifice members of the other party

Partisanship and the trolley problem: Partisan willingness to sacrifice members of the other party. Michael Barber and Ryan Davis. Research & Politics, October 28, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/20531680221137143

Abstract: Do partisans view members of the other party as having lower moral status? While research shows that partisans view the out-group quite poorly, we show that affective polarization extends to expressing a willingness to sacrifice an out-partisan’s life. We report the first study to consider partisanship in the classic “trolley problem” in which respondents are asked whether they would sacrifice an individual’s life in order to save the life of five individuals. We explore this issue with a nationally representative survey experiment in the United States, inquiring about politicized variants of the trolley problem case. First, we vary the political affiliations of both the group of five (to be saved by turning the trolley) and the single individual (to be sacrificed by turning the trolley). We find that individuals are less willing to sacrifice a co-partisan for the sake of a group of out-partisans. These findings go beyond earlier work by suggesting that partisans not only hold negative attitudes and judgments toward political out-groups but also they will at least signal approval of differing moral treatment. We take stock of how these results bear on normative questions in democratic theory.

Discussion

Our findings offer evidence that partisan loyalties do extend to moral judgments. Negative partisan attitudes appear reactive—directed toward opposing partisans themselves, rather than merely targeting circumstances of inter-partisan interaction. Finally, these attitudes appear quite serious. People treat out-partisans comparably to other dehumanized and denigrated groups. Partiality to co-partisans cannot explain the comparison between out-partisans and the most extreme outgroups we considered. Congruent with other findings affirming the pervasiveness of negative partisanship, our results appear driven at least in part by negative attitudes toward political opponents. In our case, these negative attitudes include not only affect but also the judgment (at least, the expressed judgment) that out-partisans occupy a lower moral status.

Our result considers the total effect of partisan identity. Because stereotypes about opposing partisans are unreliable (Ahler and Sood, 2018) and negative affect may be partly driven by partisan misperception (Lees and Cikara, 2021), further work would be needed to determine how much the result results from partisanship alone—independent of overlapping identity categories.

Partisan violence is not a new phenomenon in American politics (e.g., Kalmoe (2020)). What, if anything, might justify political violence (or threats of such violence) is, of course, a further normative question. At the outset, we noted a normative aspiration to civic friendship as an ideal of shared citizenship. Our results tend toward pessimism about this normative ideal. There is little indication that partisans invest much positive value in shared citizenship. The idea that co-citizens, even of opposing political tribes, share a common project of ruling together, and further that this common project gives them special obligations to each other, is absent from our picture (Scheffler, 2010; Kolodny, 2014). Insofar as they require that opposing partisans share a valuing relationship (Scheffler, 2005; Rawls, 2005; Viehoff, 2014), normative theories of citizenship look untethered from political reality.

However, other normative theorists affirm a distinctive normative value to partisan attachment. These theorists see partisanship as an expression of a political commitment that makes ongoing political action possible (Ypi, 2016). Our results offer grounds for a more sanguine perspective on this value; however, our findings also offer a cautionary note for proponents of partisan loyalty. Such bonds appear not to be constituted merely by partiality to one’s political allies or ideas. They include, as well, a willingness to compare opponents with disliked and even reviled groups. This may extend to seeing them as less deserving of moral concern. The partisan ideal may be one about which one might be appropriately cautious—and not only when approaching a trolley crossing.