Moral Support: How Moral Values Shape Foreign Policy Attitudes

Joshua D Kertzer,Brian C Rathbun,Ravi Iyer,Kathleen E Powers

doi:10.1017/s0022381614000073

Abstract

Although classical international relations theorists largely agreed that public opinion about foreign policy is shaped by moral sentiments, public opinion scholars have yet to explore the content of these moral values, and American IR theorists have tended to exclusively associate morality with liberal idealism. Integrating the study of American foreign policy attitudes with Moral Foundations Theory from social psychology, we present original survey data showing that the five established moral values in psychology—harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/sanctity—are strongly and systematically associated with foreign policy attitudes. The “individualizing” foundations of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity are particularly important drivers of cooperative internationalism and the “binding” foundations of authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/sanctity of militant internationalism. Hawks and hardliners have morals too, just a different set of moral values than...

Highlights

What role do moral values play in shaping foreign policy preferences?1 morality has been at the center of a number of vigorous debates in International Relations theory—from descriptive disputes about the role that moral norms play in international politics (Tannenwald 1999) to prescriptive arguments about the role moral considerations should play in the study and practice of IR (Carr 1939; Price 2008)— classical IR theorists held as self-evident the assumption that American public opinion has moralistic tendencies
Integrating the study of foreign policy attitudes with the reigning theoretical framework in moral psychology, we find that the classic foreign policy orientations studied by political scientists rely on distinct profiles of moral foundations: hawks and hardliners have morals too, just a different set than those emphasized by liberal idealists; hard-headed considerations of the national interest have cultural bases (Johnston 1995) but moral ones as well
We begin with Models 1, 4, and 7 of Table 1, which estimate the impact of the five moral foundations on cooperative internationalism (CI), militant internationalism (MI), and isolationism, respectively, operationalized using factor scores to obtain more precise estimates of

Summary

Introduction

A few have questioned the existence of this ‘‘moral majority’’ in foreign policy issues (Drezner 2008; Kertzer and McGraw 2012), but it is largely accepted that American public opinion has moral underpinnings, whether for good (Wilson 1998) or for ill (Morgenthau 1951). We argue that this conventional wisdom suffers from two important flaws. The social psychology literature, emphasizes how liberals and conservatives alike rely on moral

Methods

Results

Conclusion