Yesterday, I linked to an analysis that says voting in the US Senate is almost entirely driven by the senator’s position on economics – not on social issues.
I want to unpack that a wee bit more, because just pointing at it and saying Oh! doesn’t get us very far.
If we assume that the analysis is correct (and I suspect it is), does this mean that senators campaigning for election on the basis of their stance on social issues are being disingenuous? Or even, deceitful?
It is known that a lot of voting behaviour is based on perceived moral congruity between the voter and the candidate. (The book ‘What’s The Matter With Kansas’ says as much in its investigation of why Kansas keeps voting in people whose economic policies are disastrous for the state.)
Isn’t it, therefore, crucial for the legitimacy of the democratic process that voters understand their candidates will almost entirely be voting economically, not morally?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
I suspect the key to this behaviour isn’t ignorance, it’s in the weighting assigned to different senatorial decisions. Sure, only 1 in 10 senate roll calls will turn on the candidate’s moral opinions – but if the voter believes these are the roll calls that matter, then that voter will be largely satisfied with their candidate even if the candidate acts against their interest on the other 9 roll calls.
A secondary factor driving this is economic confusion. Check out the logic :
- Economic issues are seen as complex. (And, let’s face it, it isn’t just perception – economic issues are complex.)
- On issues perceived as complex, all voters tend to accept the word of trusted authorities.
- All voters tend to place trust in authorities who share their moral outlook.
- Therefore, voters entrust their economic welfare to morally congruent authorities.
Thus we have the powerful US right wing. They have married conservative morality to a wealth-entrenching economics, knowing that one provides unthinking support for the other.
Yet there’s a further step. Some analysts think it’s no mere strategic positioning that has led to this marriage. The claim is that conservative morality goes hand-in-hand with this economic approach. Lakoff, for example, argues compellingly that every aspect of conservative policy is ultimately derived from a unified metaphor of morality.
Does this mean that conservative morality creates its own economic punishment? Is the economic extrapolation of conservative morality inevitably to the massive detriment of the very people who hold that morality?
I suspect this is so. Which puts us in a very odd position indeed.
I’m not sure where to go with this – it’s a shallow analysis, because I have a bunch of other stuff on my plate, and I’m uncomfortable pushing further without checking to see if I’ve messed up some crucial step along the way. But the logic seems clear to me right now at least.
This analysis says that everything is economic; I believe that forces us more into the realm of morality than before.
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Stephanie has done some further reading and provided a good link explaining the assignment of senators to positions on that chart. It’s jargon-heavy at the start but gets a lot clearer as it goes along, so stick with it. Thanks Steph!