Abstract: Politicians’ moral behaviors affect how voters evaluate them. But existing empirical research on the effects of politicians’ violations of moral standards pays little attention to the heterogeneous moral foundations of voters in assessing responses to violations. It also pays little attention to the ways partisan preferences shape responses. We examine voters’ heterogeneous evaluative and emotional responses to presumably immoral behaviors by politicians. We make use of moral foundation theory’s argument that people vary in the extent to which they endorse, value, and use the five universally available moral intuitions: care, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. We report on a 5 × 3 between‐subjects experiment asking a random sample of 2,026 U.S. respondents to respond to politicians’ violations of different moral foundations. We randomly vary which of the five foundations is violated and the partisanship of the actor (Republican/ Democrat /Nonpartisan). Results suggest that partisanship rather than moral foundations drives most of U.S. voters’ responses to moral foundations violations by politicians. These foundations seem malleable when partisan actors are involved. While Democrats in this sample show stronger negative emotional response to moral violations than Republicans, partisans of both parties express significantly greater negativity when a politician of the other party violates a moral foundation.
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Immoral behavior by politicians is nothing new. The candidacy and subsequent election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency seems to suggest that in the current American political environment, moral violations may be more rule than exception. During his campaign, Trump was accused of sexual misconduct as a tape surfaced where he talked about “grabbing them by the pussy,” while a number of women came forward accusing Trump of inappropriate and sexually harassing behaviors that in other times would have doomed his candidacy. Trump routinely verbally violated a wide range of moral norms during his campaign, for example, mocking a reporter for his disabilities and referring to a former Miss Universe contestant campaigning for Hillary Clinton as “Miss Piggy.” Even after the election, Trump continued to violate basic moral positions that might have sunk other presidents. Recently, Stormy Daniels, a pornographic movie star, alleged that she had had an affair with Trump and he paid her to cover it up just before the November 2016 vote. Unlike John Edwards, the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate whose campaign was doomed when an affair came to light, Trump continues with little obvious impact on his favorability ratings.
Each of the above would be considered clear moral violations by moral foundation theorists, in particular, violations of the foundations of “care” and “sanctity” (Graham et al., 2011; Haidt & Graham, 2011). Among Trump’s most consistent supporters are religious conservative voters who generally perceive themselves as high in morality in everyday life, while identifying as strong Republicans when it comes to politics. This apparent conflict between moral values and partisan preferences suggests a need to examine the link between voters’ endorsements of moral foundations and their responses to moral transgressions of those foundations by politicians. If moral foundations are, in fact, innate and foundational, voter’s moral values should dominate when a foundation is violated. A voter who strongly cares about a particular moral foundation should react negatively to its violation, regardless of the party of the politician involved. And yet, as the Trump example makes clear, there is reason to question this belief. Over 90% of Republican voters supported Trump in 2016, despite his continual violations of moral foundations, and presumably in opposition to their own support of those same foundations.
We wish to examine the extent to which underlying moral values subscribed to by American voters condition responses to violations of moral foundations by politicians. We consider whether the extent to which people care about moral foundations like care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity influences their negative emotional responses to violations. Alternatively, given the partisan nature of American politics in the early twenty‐first century, it may be that partisan agreement is more important than moral foundations. We seek to answer the question of whether partisanship in America also extends to the point of overriding, or at least reducing, the effect of underlying moral values.
Partisanship is a core feature of the American political system. It acts as a perceptual screen (Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960) coloring how partisans view all aspects of politics. More recent research on motivated reasoning (Lodge & Taber, 2013; Redlawsk, 2002; Taber & Lodge, 2006) provides a mechanism for this process, as existing affective evaluations—such as partisan preference—influence the cognitive processing of relevant information. As a result, in an era of increasing partisan and social sorting, partisan preference may provide a great deal of cover for politicians who violate moral foundations. Mason (2018) documents how American social and political identities have recently aligned so that previous crosscutting cleavages have all but disappeared. As a result, partisanship is now reinforced by other social identities, including religious identities. There may be good reason to think that moral foundations themselves can become subsumed within partisan identity, so that violations of foundations by the “other side” are much worse than violations by “our side.”
At the same time, studies have shown that exposure to scandals depresses voters’ candidate evaluations (Bhatti, Hansen, & Olsen, 2013; Carlson, Ganiel, & Hyde, 2000; Doherty et al., 2011) and reduces trust in political institutions and the political process (Bowler & Karp, 2004; Maier, 2011). Politicians’ moral transgressions are extensively covered by the media (Fogarty, 2013). This does not appear to have changed in recent years; the allegations against Trump were certainly front and center in media reports during the 2016 presidential campaign. Moreover, following Trump’s election, allegations of sexual harassment against other powerful men in and out of politics spurred the #metoo movement, as women recounted their experiences. Former Sen. Al Franken, thought to be in the mix for the presidential campaign in 2020, was forced to resign, while others have also lost positions of power. Yet the very same kinds of claims against Trump did not, in the end, derail his candidacy, nor so far, his presidency.
Emotions play an important role in moral foundations theory (Haidt, 2003) and are key factors in voters’ moral judgments about politicians and institutions (Ben‐Nun Bloom, 2014; Bowler & Karp, 2004). Emotions not only often guide moral judgments, but also shape voting behavior. Emotions have been found to underpin political campaigns generally (Marcus et al., 2000; Redlawsk, 2006) as voters both think and feel about politics. Negative emotions can be especially important. Among the many aspects of politics that might trigger emotional responses, we would expect violations of moral foundations by politicians to be central, with voters expressing negative emotions about violators, but only to the extent that the voters themselves care about any given foundation that has been violated.
Despite the prominent role of emotions in explaining political behavior and numerous studies examining effects of politicians’ violations of moral standards, little attention has been paid to the intersection of the two, that is, how voters respond emotionally to politicians’ moral violations (the notable exceptions are Halmburger, Rothmund, Schulte, & Baumert, 2012 and Jiang et al., 2011). In addition, to our knowledge, no study has examined how heterogeneous preferences for moral foundations condition how voters respond to politicians’ moral transgressions.
This study thus aims to answer three research questions: (1) How do American voters respond emotionally to violations of moral foundations by politicians? (2) Are voters’ emotional responses conditioned by their own moral values? and (3) Does partisanship influence the negative emotional responses voters have to violations of moral foundations? To examine these questions, we conducted a 5 × 3 between‐subjects experiment with an online random sample of about 2,000 U.S. voters. We manipulated the moral foundation violated by a politician (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity) and the partisanship of the politician involved (Republican, Democrat and no partisan label).
We find voters express negative emotional responses to politicians’ moral transgressions, but the level of negativity is strongly conditioned by partisanship. Democratic voters have stronger negative emotional responses to many of these moral violations than do Republicans. At the same time, partisans of both parties express more negative emotions when a politician of the other party violates moral foundations, all else equal, while responding more similarly to a nonpartisan actor. Finally, while we anticipated that a voter who endorses the values of a particular foundation to a greater degree would be more negative when it is violated, this effect was and clearly less than the effects of party when partisan actors were involved.
The remainder of this article proceeds as follows. First, we discuss moral foundation theory and the role of emotions. Second, we summarize the literature explaining individual variance in response to politicians’ immoral behaviors and develop hypotheses from this literature. Third, the experimental design, analysis strategy, and operationalization of the variables are discussed. Finally, results are presented and conclusions are drawn.
Moral Violations and Emotions
We build on two strands of literature: the scandal literature from political science and literature on (moral) emotions and moral political judgements from social psychology. Moral judgment is the evaluation of an act as morally wrong or right (Ben‐Nun Bloom, 2014). Moral transgressions, that is, harm to others’ welfare, are thought to be inherently wrong since they have an intrinsic effect on the well‐being of others (Ben‐Nun Bloom, 2014). Moral transgressions by politicians can become scandals, although the word “scandal” itself does not refer to the moral transgression, but to the communicative event surrounding the moral transgression becoming public (Lee, 2015).Moral foundation theory (MFT) sees moral judgment as an intuitive process characterized by automatic affective reactions to stimuli (Clifford, Iyengar, Cabezzam, & Sinnott‐Armstrong, 2015). This is in line with the social intuitionism model of morality (Haidt, 2001) which argues that people know intuitively whether acts are right or wrong. They are capable of swift judgment of an (im)moral act, but they take considerably more time to come up with a rationale when asked to explain their judgment (Haidt & Hersh, 2001). Haidt and Hersh (2001) argue that intuitions and emotions most often precede and guide moral emotions.
MFT categorizes moral intuitions into five foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity (Haidt & Graham, 2011). Care refers to the dislike for the suffering of others; fairness to a commitment to fairness and justice. Loyalty is seen as a commitment to one’s own group. Authority refers to respect for authority and tradition, and sanctity refers to concerns with purity and contamination. People differ in the extent to which they endorse these five values, and thus MFT also provides an understanding of moral diversity (Graham et al., 2011). MFT extends most scales used in moral psychology as it does not limit the moral domain to concerns about individuals harming or unfairly treating other individuals (Graham et al., 2011). Moreover, MFT is meant to cover the full range of moral concerns, including those found in non‐Western cultures, in religious practices, and among political conservatives (Graham et al., 2011). Studies have found that political liberals and conservatives differ in the weight that they place on the various moral foundations (Graham et al., 2009; Haidt & Graham, 2007). Specifically, liberals have been found to rate considerations of care and fairness as significantly more important moral values than loyalty, authority, or purity. To liberals, acts are perceived as immoral primarily to the extent that they harm others or treat people unfairly.
There appear to be only two studies that have examined people’s emotional responses to moral transgressions by politicians (Halmburger et al., 2012; Jiang et al., 2011). Both studies report that exposure to a political scandal generates negative emotions towards the politician involved. Halmburger et al. (2012) incorporates specific moral emotions in their study, reporting higher levels of anger and shame when subjects are exposed to a news report including a politician’s moral transgression. They also find that negative moral emotions stimulate need for retribution versus need for restoration of the moral transgressing politician (Halmburger et al., 2012). But these studies are of limited generalizability since they do not effectively account for the role partisanship plays in conditioning responses when partisan actors are involved.
Although moral foundation theory is a prominent theory, it is not uncontroversial. Various scholars criticize the assumptions underlying MFT, such as the innateness and stability of moral foundations (Smith, Alford, Hibbing, Martin, & Hatemi, 2017), the existence of five or six distinct moral foundations underlying moral judgment (Schein & Gray, 2018), and the strength and direction of the relationship between moral foundations and political predispositions (Ciuk, 2018; Smith et al., 2017). Most recently, Connors (2019) reports that political values—like moral foundations thought by most scholars to be core beliefs—are readily influence by the social environment. Even with this, the theory is well enough established with key implications for politics that call for testing it in the political context we do here, following work by Clifford et al. (2015).
Heterogeneous Responses to Politicians’ Moral Transgressions
Moral transgressions by a politician should signal to voters that he or she is an immoral candidate, which should negatively affect the candidate’s electoral prospects. If it were that simple, we would have little to examine here: Voters would simply punish those who violate moral standards, with those feeling more strongly about a given moral foundation responding more negatively. However, politicians embroiled in scandals are not always electorally punished for their moral transgressions, and individual voters’ responses to such transgressions differ in strength (Fernández‐Vázquez, Barberá, & Rivero, 2016). This has puzzled scholars and stimulated research trying to understand the psychology of the public’s heterogeneous reactions to scandals (e.g., Fischle, 2000; Halmburger et al., 2012; Lee, 2015).Numerous factors are mentioned as potential sources for this variance in voters’ responses. Voters may respond differently to different types of scandals (Bhatti et al., 2013; Carlson et al., 2000; Doherty et al., 2011; Fernández‐Vázquez et al., 2016). Thompson (2013) distinguishes three types of scandals, namely sex scandals, financial fraud scandals, and corruption scandals. Financial scandals are punished more severely than sex scandals (Brenton, 2011; Carlson et al., 2000, Funk, 1996), although Doherty et al. (2011) notes this holds only as long as the sex scandal does not involve abuse of power. The identity of the politician involved matters as does the politician’s response to the moral transgression (Lee, 2015; Tiedens, 2001). Gender appears related to voters’ judgments (Brenton, 2011), but probably in combination with the type of scandal (Carlson et al., 2000; Smith et al., 2015).
Other research has shown that trait impressions and prior affect for the politician influence voters’ responses (Fischle, 2000; Funk, 1996). In judging a politician’s moral transgression, Funk (1996) argues that perceived competence matters more than perceived warmth, but only for the more politically knowledgeable voters (Funk, 1996). Recently, Laustsen and Bor (2017) have shown in an electoral context that warmth is the most influential candidate trait on which people judge politicians, perhaps challenging Funk. It also matters how credible voters perceive the information about a scandal—especially when there are claims that the politician committed the transgression intentionally (Anduiza, Gallego, & Munoz, 2013; Lee, 2015). The relevance and importance of the transgression also influences voters’ responses (Anduiza et al., 2013; Lee, 2015). These perceptions are also affected by how their news sources and the media in general frame the scandal (Peterson & Vonnahme, 2014; Shah, Watts, Domke, & Fan, 2002).
Finally, and especially relevant for our study, political identity in the form of partisanship may influence voters’ perceptions of politicians’ immoral behavior (Anduiza et al., 2013; Bhatti et al., 2013; Blais et al., 2010; Fischle, 2000). Partisan preferences can engage motivated reasoning processes that lead voters to discount or otherwise accept behavior from politicians who share those preferences, that they would not for politicians from another party (Kunda, 1990; Redlawsk, 2002). People selectively process information in ways that enable them to arrive at conclusions congruent and congenial to their prior beliefs, including political beliefs (Fischle, 2000). This process can readily lead to partisans rejecting information about immoral behavior by a copartisan politician as not credible. Even when they acknowledge the moral transgression, partisan voters might still bear a less negative judgment about their party’s candidate. While partisanship may not affect perceptions of the facts of the scandal, it may still affect political judgment (Blais et al., 2010).
The usual assumption is that partisan bias works both ways, so partisans perceive their own party more positively and other parties more negatively. However, Blais, Gidengil, and Kilibarda (2017) argue that the partisan effect is asymmetrical, although they note there has been little systematic investigation of how symmetric (or asymmetric) it might be. They find that partisans view their own parties as less corrupt than do nonpartisans, but they do not necessarily view other parties as more corrupt. Anduiza et al. (2013) also find an asymmetrical effect, arguing that moral transgressions are judged differently by voters depending on whether the politician involved is a member of the respondent’s party, rival party, or of an unknown affiliation. However, not all studies find this partisan effect when it comes to how voters process politician’s moral violations (Halmburger et al., 2012). Some find that political sophistication interacts with this partisan bias, and the partisan bias is absent among the more politically sophisticated.
Hypotheses
Considering the prominence that MFT has gained in social psychology, it seems surprising that political scientists have not used it yet to try to explain voters’ responses to moral violations by politicians. Certainly, moral violations occur, and voters historically have seemed to care about them, even if responses might be tempered for one’s own party. While there is evidence that partisans on different sides of the aisle see different moral foundations as salient (Haidt & Graham, 2011), examining all five foundations should let us get a better understanding of how voters respond to their violations and in particular, the extent of negative emotions generated by violations. Thus, the literature we have reviewed above leads us to propose the following four hypotheses:H1 (Partisanship and Negative Emotions Hypothesis): Across parties, respondents will have negative emotional responses to politicians committing moral violations, all else equal. But based on work by Haidt and Graham (2011), Democrats (typically liberals) will show stronger negative emotions in response to violations of care and fairness specifically, compared to Republicans. Given no prior evidence of partisan effects, we do not have specific expectations about partisan responses to the other three foundations: loyalty, authority, and sanctity.This leads to a testable hypothesis: Respondents will express a lower level of negativity toward co‐partisans violating a given foundation, compared to a nonpartisan or other party actor, at all levels of moral values strength. That is, even though voters with stronger moral values should be more negative to violations of the corresponding moral foundation (H2), partisan‐motivated reasoning should moderate these effects. However, for a nonpartisan actor, respondents who more strongly support a given moral value will be more negative about its violation than those for whom the value is less important.
H2 (Moral Values Hypothesis): Negative emotional responses to violations of moral foundations by politicians will be conditioned on voters’ own endorsements of particular moral values. The more that respondents endorse a particular moral value, the stronger their negative emotional response will be when a politician violates that particular moral foundation.
H3 (Partisanship Interaction Hypothesis): Partisan respondents will be less negative about violations of moral foundations by politicians of their own party, compared to violations by out‐party and nonpartisan politicians committing the same violation.
H4 (Moral Values by Partisanship Interaction Hypothesis): Moral foundations are thought to be based on innate, evolutionarily developed intuitive ethics, where “moral judgment is caused by quick moral intuitions” (Haidt, 2001, p. 817). At the same time, in politics, we know that partisanship acts in many ways as a perceptual screen (Campbell et al., 1960), conditioning how voters respond to partisan information. Thus, when partisanship is not invoked in a moral foundation violation, we expect the strength of a given moral value to drive emotional response to it. However, when the actor is a partisan and so is the voter, we expect that partisan preference will moderate these effects.
Discussion and Conclusions
This study set out to answer three questions, namely (1) How do American voters respond emotionally to violations of moral foundations by politicians? (2) Are voters’ emotional responses conditioned by their own moral values? and (3) Does partisanship minimize the effects of violations of moral foundations by politicians of the voter’s own party compared to the other party? We find that in general voters respond with negative emotions to politicians’ moral violations. However, not all voters respond in the same manner; we find that Democrats tend to respond more negatively to this set of moral violations than do Republicans. We might speculate that the political environment in which our study was done could have played a role in this unexpected result. As we detailed at the beginning of the article, there have been many accusations of moral violations by President Trump, none of which seem to shake his core Republican supporters. One impact of this may have been to lessen Republican voters’ sensitivity to moral violations by politicians more generally. Unfortunately, we have no way to test this speculation. We do find that voters’ responses to these moral violations can be sometimes conditioned by their own moral values, but they are more so by their partisanship when partisan actors are involved. Partisans of both parties express more negative emotions when a politician of the other party violates moral foundations.While we do not have a direct test of the mechanism by which partisanship conditions the effects of moral violations on emotional responses to politicians, a lengthy literature on partisanship in American politics makes clear that partisans see the political world through a very specific perceptual screen (Campbell et al., 1960). Motivated reasoning (Lodge & Taber, 2013; Redlawsk, 2002) likely becomes engaged when a voter sees a copartisan politician violating a moral foundation, leading to biased processing of the event, and the reduction of negativity about the event. But when the other party commits the violation, partisans are more than willing to express negative emotions about the event. Brain imaging studies reinforce the potential of this mechanism as distinct differences are seen between Democrats and Republicans in their processing of political information (Schreiber et al., 2013). Note that while we started this article with a brief discussion about moral violations by U.S. President Trump and his seeming imperviousness to them, it is worth recalling that it is generally only his Republican supporters who accept his behavior.
This study contributes to the literature in various ways. First of all, it is among a handful studies (Halmburger et al., 2012; Jiang et al., 2011) to study emotional responses to moral violations. 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 (Haidt, 2003). However, our main interest here is to see how partisanship and the importance of moral values for the voter affect emotional responses more generally.
Second, this study is the first to assess the role of voters’ moral values in their response to moral transgressions, as the results show they do matter. However, partisanship, more often than not, overrides the effects of moral values. This is a very interesting finding and suggests that moral foundations are maybe not as innate and foundational as might be supposed (see also, Connors [2019] on political values). The partisanship effect in this study is asymmetrical, showing that voters judge the opposing candidate more harshly for moral transgressions than their own candidate. This is in line with the trend of negative partisanship in American politics (Mason, 2018). Research has shown that while the feelings Democrats and Republicans have about their own party have not changed, their feelings about the opposing party have become much more negative (Abramowitz & Webster, 2016).
As with any research, this study is not without its shortcomings, one being the time frame in which it was conducted, namely following the 2016 presidential elections, which led to the election of a politician with frequent moral transgressions. It is not unthinkable that in a different time period we might find differences with respect to the strength of partisan responses to violations of moral foundations. Thus, we must consider that aspect of our results to be conditional, warranting further study in a different context.
Another limitation is that the vignettes used were specific. That is, the politician referred to in a vignette took a specific action. There is probably heterogeneity in people’s responses to these actions, and by the necessity of the research design, each study participant saw only one action representing one moral foundation. It is possible, for example, that a different vignette representing the same foundation might have a different impact on participants’ emotions. However, we are less interested here in the specific reactions to specific vignettes than we are in the larger story, that moral foundations appear to be readily ignored in the face of partisan actors. Across all of the vignettes we use, partisan voters were far less negative about a same‐party actor violating a foundation than they were an opposite‐party actor. At the same time, although extensively pretested, the authority vignette had the lowest homogeneity coefficient and resulted in the weakest findings. Apparently American voters did not find that specific example to be compelling.
Finally, as described in Footnote 2, new research by Montgomery et al. (2018) suggests that appropriate care must be taken in measuring moderating variables in an experimental context. We were concerned that measuring our moderators—partisanship and moral values—before the experimental treatment would prime participants as to the purpose of our study and thus influence their responses to the treatment. Thus, we measured them at the end of the study. While the very small shared variance we report between the moderators and treatment provides some confidence that our results are not biased, future studies should consider ways to separate these measures, such as the use of multiple waves. If the work by Montgomery et al. (2018) is sustained through additional research, experimentalists in general will need to consider whether the potential costs of such strategies outweigh the risks of biasing results by measuring moderators after an experimental treatment.
While recognizing the potential bias suggested by Montgomery et al. (2018) may be present in our analyses, notwithstanding the very small shared variance between our measures, any such bias would matter more if we were making inferences about the direct effects of specific coefficients in our models. But, instead, we are more interested in the patterns that we see in the data when different moral foundations are engaged across partisan voters. To the extent that these patterns of differential response by partisan voters and those who more or less adopt the moral values of the foundation are biased, we would not expect the bias to eliminate the differences we see across groups. Thus, while the effects of any given treatment may be more or less than we find here, we expect any bias would be unidirectional across the treatments, and thus the patterns we find would remain.
Notwithstanding these limitations, this study makes a significant contribution to the moral foundations literature. For the first time, we examine the intersection of partisanship and moral foundations and find that, as with so many other things in American politics in the early twenty‐first century, responses to moral violations by politicians are subject to partisan preferences. This holds even when voters themselves feel strongly about a given moral foundation. Put simply, when the effects of partisanship and strength of support for moral values are tested against each other in predicting emotional responses to violations of moral foundations, partisanship usually comes out the winner. This provides new insight into the role of moral violations in politics and helps us understand perhaps why some American politicians are able to continue to receive strong support from their own party voters even after violating what are thought to be basic moral values.
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