The driving values of people’s political preferences are hardly known and yet, are imperfectly understood. The origin of political preferences can be explained by the ‘archetypical economist’s presumption’ – is that voting preferences come from economic ‘class’ of an individual and are made out of self-interest and ‘then come embroidered in the mind with the form of moral rhetoric’. Throughout history, the possible explanations for the economic side of the argument really evolved and presented a broad variation: in the middle of the 19th century, Karl Marx introduced the idea that individuals’ political interests are determined by their relationship to economic production, in the early 20th century, Max Weber said that individual’s political interests are determined by their relationship to economic consumption, and in the late 20th century Herbert Kitschelt further elaborated by saying that preferences are determined by the type of jobs that people do.
Across time and cultures, strong correlations exist between ethical views that are influenced by culture, upbringing and political preferences. Although culture appears to be a critical factor influencing political preferences, it is important to take under consideration other factors such as economic background, self-interest, ideology and early experience of an individual in the labour market. Therefore, culture is not likely to be a primary factor driving the political preferences of an individual; instead, all these factors affect political views collaboratively as socialisation is both economic an ideological in nature. Cultural and ideological values clearly have some impact on determining political preferences.
Elias Dinas argues that children tend to adopt their family’s political views when their parents are interested in politics, and children who come from a more politically opinionated family tend to be more politically engaged. Parents’ political engagement is important in the formation of political preferences of the child as boosts the intensity of political learning, thus giving higher chances that the child will be a politically engaged adult. Children develop a partisan identity as they are raised by their families and party identification has its origin in pre-adult political socialisation. One of the first political messages that a child gets from his family is that ‘we’ are Democrats or ‘we’ are Republicans meaning that the child is influenced by his parents’ opinion long before they can understand politics and form their own opinion about it.
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This is likely to form a ‘base’ for their political preferences. The importance of culture and upbringing is shown by the political research that highlights that children tend to have an almost photographic reproduction of their parents’ views meaning that culture is an influencing factor for the formation of political preferences. Later, political learning is stimulated by other outside factors which might contradict the parental views. Political stimuli may come from a variety of sectors as can be prompted by mass media communications, peers and learning environment such as a university. Moreover, research in social psychology also presents us with a view that the child’s personality is shaped by their parents. This highlights the importance of self-interest of an individual shaping their political preferences.
It is also interesting to consider the other perspective on this matter: Dinas’s research proved the opposite as his study challenged the common claim in the political literature that political preferences are more likely to stick to the child when parents are engaged in politics. He argues that parental politicisation influences an individual’s political involvement but rather that boosting intergenerational partisan similarity, they are more likely to revise their partisan affiliations when they experience politics as adults. This, therefore, shows that although culture plays some role in the formation of political preferences, there are also other factors of influence. A more common argument is that political preferences are determined by economic circumstances. Andrew Gelman says that rich people tend to lean right politically. In Oswald’s and Powdthavee’s paper, the researchers propose a new empirical investigation in which they compare how does winning a lottery change political preferences of an individual.
The results show that the larger is the lottery win, the greater an individual tends to move their preferences more towards the right-wing. This also results due to the fact that lottery winners have less sympathy for redistribution and social policies, thus political views are shaped by economic circumstances. Additionally, Tom O’Grady argues that material interest drives political preferences, however, this is only seen in the long run. Low-income workers and unemployed are always seen as drivers towards an increase in social support and redistributive policies, such as progressive taxation system. O’Grady states that if political preferences are shaped by economic circumstances, then a change in those circumstances should result a change in political preferences. Following this logic, it should mean that less economically developed countries (LEDCs) are more likely to have high level of support for redistribution policies.
The author says that voters clearly responding to a change in their materialistic interests under certain circumstances and provides us with five different hypotheses to test the correlation between materialistic circumstances and political views. O’Grady’s investigation is made of the two sets of studies: studies from the first group show that income determines political views and that higher income inequality tends to move people for higher support for redistribution and other social policies. The second group of studies presents a contrasting view that preferences are usually formed in life through family upbringing and early steps of socialisation and fairly can be affected by materialistic changes. The investigation shows that most people tend to rely on longer-run values ‘as a heuristic guide’ to their political views and materialistic changes are unlikely to change in short-term.
However, it is important to highlight that long-run values that form in the early stage of socialisation are not entirely shaped by ideology and culture, but are affected by economic circumstances and early experiences in the labour market. Therefore, although it can be argued that a change in economic circumstances only affects political views in the long-run, it is important to consider that cultural and ideological values formed in the early socialisation are based on the materialistic values of the family, meaning that the political preferences of an individual are highly based on the economic views formed in the childhood and later throughout life, thus economic views determine political preferences more than culture as affect ideology and shape long-run preferences. Another factor driving political preferences is self-interest: economics and sociology research proves that parents tend to choose what is best for their children. The sociologist Rebecca Warner and the economist Ebonya Washington argue that the gender of a child shapes parents’ political preferences.
Additionally, Warner and Steel found out that parents in the US and Canada are more likely to support gender equality when having daughters. Further research from Britain, documented that having daughters tends to shift parents tend to be more sympathetic to left-wing parties. The data that Powdthavee and Oswald use is longitudinal, thus giving an opportunity to observe a change before and after an individual has a child of any particular gender. The authors say that due to the fact that parents are very attached to their children, and invest a considerable amount of themselves in their offspring, the social issues that matter and affect their children affect the parents as well, thus resulting a change in political preferences.
This result emerges especially strong for fathers: people who parent only daughters are more likely to share more feminist views. Contrastingly, having sons makes individuals to prefer more right-wing parties. This, therefore, shows that parental preferences change according to the gender of an offspring, meaning that a critical factor driving political preferences is self-interest. However, a problem with this theory is that many families have a gender mix thereby creating a form of reverse causality. Additionally, Oswald’s and Powdthavee’s research fails to compare long-term patterns, nevertheless, self-interest is evidently playing a major role in determining one’s political preferences.
The results of these investigations also prove that despite the cultural values of an individual, one’s self-concern has dominating importance over culture as the idea of causality following from the gender of an offspring, alter parents’ political opinions, therefore, self-interest is likely to be a more important factor determining political preferences. Indeed, media bias provides a mechanism through which it can influence voting preferences and political polarisation can affect the outcome of an election. While voters try to be rational, it is complicated to understand the news updates appropriately and get important information despite bias, resulting misunderstanding that causes inefficient electoral outcomes. Behavioural theories by De Marzo, Vayanos and Zwiebel and cognitive linguistics theories by Lakoff suggest that polarization increases the chances of slanting news thus influencing political preferences.
Media can be easily blamed for the factors that it influences voters’ beliefs on key policy issues. If media bias occurs, its listeners are incompletely informed about their preferred candidate and this missing information can later lead to a misinformed decision. Deeper political cleavages and increased polarisation makes it more profitable for the media company to provide biased news for its audience, therefore, in a more polarised society voters are more misinformed; not only the location of the median voter is shifted but the polarisation affects the political preferences. Filtering the information efficiently is also highly dependent on the education and ideological values of an individual that are mainly formed at the early socialisation, therefore, there is a strong link between the cultural values and perceiving the media information correctly.
Undoubtedly, strong political propaganda can dramatically change the views of the voter formed throughout lifetime and therefore has dominating importance in affecting political preferences over culture as can completely challenge voters’ perspective; for instance, in Putin’s Russia Putin’s approval rating was 57% in 2000 and then skyrocketed to 86% after the decision to annex Crimea due to efficient propaganda. Long-run political preferences are affected by political views of the family and the period of early socialisation which is not simply a cultural or ideological process but also involves the long-lasting effect of materialistic circumstances. In short-term, preferences tend to be quite stable and unresponsive to changes in economic circumstances, although large changes in circumstances tend to affect political views.
To evaluate the influence of economic factors, more analysis is needed to test how an individual reacts to a change throughout the history dependent on the stage the economy is in. Also, to determine what is the main factor shaping political preferences is hard due to lack of political research regarding this matter; however, it is clear that a range of different factors rather than an individual cause should be considered when answering this premise. This shows that although culture is relatively important for the formation of political views, the range of factors: ideological, cultural and economic determine political preferences collaboratively, thus culture alone cannot be the major factor driving political preferences.
