Economic Conservatism Research Articles

Conservative Worldviews and the Climate Publics of New Zealand and Australia

Abstract Public opinion on climate change is complex, comprising aspects such as belief, support for policies, and issue salience. This multidimensional nature of climate opinion can be accounted for by identifying “publics,” each comprising people with similar climate attitudes. Climate opinion has also been found to relate strongly to political worldviews, with people holding conservative attitudes tending to have low levels of engagement with climate change. However, few studies have investigated how political worldviews relate to membership of climate publics. The current study therefore identifies climate publics in New Zealand and Australia and investigates how they relate to economic and social aspects of conservative worldviews. Using an original online survey, I find no clear link between economic conservatism and membership of climate publics. Social conservatives, however, are more likely to be members of publics with low levels of climate engagement and of “middle” publics, which accept the science of climate change but are “lukewarm” on climate action. Climate opinion appears to be more polarized in Australia than New Zealand. These results provide insight into the worldviews of people in the “mainstream” of climate opinion and suggest that only a minority of the public are demanding ambitious climate action.

How and why aversive personality is expressed in political preferences.

Political orientation reflects beliefs, opinions, and values that are, at least in part, rooted in stable interindividual differences. Whereas evidence has accumulated with regard to the relevance of basic personality dimensions, especially concerning the sociocultural dimension of political ideology, less attention has been paid to the more specific dispositional tendency to assign a higher weight to one's own utility above others' (i.e., socially aversive personality), which is likely to play a pivotal role concerning the economic dimension of political ideology in particular. In three studies with over 66,000 participants from 38 countries, we show that individuals with elevated levels in aversive personality tend to endorse more right-wing political orientations in terms of a single left-right dimension, hold relevant ideological beliefs tied to both sociocultural and economic conservatism, and report corresponding electoral voting behavior. We further provide support for the idea that this overlap between a dispositional tendency toward aversive behavior and a right-wing political orientation can be attributed to shared belief systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Social and political correlates of adult and dependent-child COVID-19 vaccination behavior in rural America

ObjectiveThis paper describes the individual-level correlates of self and dependent-child COVID-19 vaccination behavior among adults in rural America. MethodsWe draw on the data from a large-scale survey of rural Americans conducted in 2022, after most Americans had the opportunity to receive the vaccination easily and freely. The survey yielded an analytic sample of 841 adults and 530 adults with dependent children. We fit a series of linear probability models predicting vaccine refusal and full vaccination for adult respondents and vaccine refusal and full vaccine coverage among their dependent children. Predictors of interest include political party, social and economic conservatism, race and ethnicity, age, education, and workplace vaccine requirements. ResultsWe find political party, ideology, education, and work requirements were significant (p <.05) drivers of rural adults’ vaccination behavior, and that the correlates of vaccine refusal and full vaccination largely mirrored one another among adults. For dependent children, few of our focal predictors are associated with vaccination. Politics played a lesser role in children’s vaccination than for adults, and older parents were the least likely to refuse vaccines for their children. Race and ethnicity had inconsistent associations across outcomes and model specifications. ConclusionThis analysis presents important evidence on the drivers of COVID-19 vaccine behaviors among rural American households. Documentation of vaccination behaviors in settings when vaccines are widely available can isolate demand- from supply-side factors and thus inform future public health crises.

EFFECTS OF CONSERVATIVE VALUES AND AGING KNOWLEDGE ON YOUNG ADULTS’ AGEISM AGAINST OLDER ADULTS

Abstract Ageism – the stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination of individuals solely based on age – is an unfortunately prevalent phenomenon for older adults to experience from young adults, and increased ageism among young adults has been associated with more conservative values and beliefs. Previous interventions to reduce ageism in young adults have focused on increasing knowledge about aging and contact between generations, since greater aging knowledge is associated with decreased ageism. However, recent studies identify multiple forms of ageism, including negative ageism (e.g., beliefs about older adults’ lack of cognitive and physical ability) and positive ageism (e.g., stereotypes of older people as warm and reliable). This study therefore examined the relationships between young adults’ conservative values, aging knowledge, and both negative and positive ageism about older adults. Participants were young adults (N = 459), ages 18 to 25 years (M = 20.10, SD = 1.76), who completed the Relating to Older People Evaluation, Social and Economic Conservatism Scale, and Palmore’s Facts on Aging Quiz in an online survey. Results showed that conservatism was positively associated with negative and positive ageism, while aging knowledge was only negatively associated with negative ageism. Hierarchical regressions found that aging knowledge explained significant variance in negative ageism when controlling for conservatism, but only conservatism explained variance in positive ageism. These findings suggest that interventions including education on aging for young adults may be able to overcome the negative ageism associated with conservative values, but that positive ageism may not be meaningfully addressed by such education-based interventions.

Corporate Decision on Digital Transformation: The Impact of Non-Market Factors

This multiple regression study investigated the relationship between the political network and the adoption of digital transformation strategy and if moderated by perceived corruption and political ideology of top managers among diverse enterprises in China. The aim of this study is to contribute to strategic management research on non-market factors of digital transformation. The instruments used for the study were political network relationships, digital transformation strategies, perceived corruption, economic conservatism, cultural conservatism, social conservatism, and meritocracy of top managers. A basic regression model is a causality test between the political network and digital transformation. In addition, moderated multiple regression analysis with factor analysis to analyze moderator variables perceived corruption and political ideology and their interaction with the political network and effect on digital transformation. The study included 214 firms as a convenience sample. Practical significance indicates that the firm with a higher level of political network relationships is more likely to conduct digital transformation and the higher level of top manager’s perceived corruption and economic conservatism mitigates the positive impact of the political network on digital transformation, while the higher level of top manager’s meritocracy tendency strengthens the positive impact of the political network on digital transformation.

Challenges and Opportunities of Islamic Economics in Facing Modern Economic Conservatism in Indonesia

Islamic economics is presented as an alternative that offers the principles of justice, sustainability, and balance in facing the conservatism of modern economics dominated by capitalism and socialism. This study aims to identify the main challenges faced by Islamic economics in Indonesia, such as lack of literacy, supporting infrastructure, and limited regulations, and explore opportunities to expand its application in the public and private sectors. With a qualitative approach based on literature review and policy analysis, this study finds that Islamic economics has great potential to create a just economic balance

Exceptional Times for an Exceptional People: How the Prosperity Gospel, Christian Nationalism, and Race Affect Americans’ Economic Attitudes and Behavior

Abstract How does identifying with the Prosperity Gospel or as a Christian Nationalist affect political attitudes? Religion has long been a key factor in explaining public opinion, partisanship, and political ideology, though recently scholars have turned to these two theological worldviews to explain support for Donald Trump, conservative political activism, and political extremism. But these theological identities have varying effects based on race, often cutting against the direct effects of race and religion on politics. Further, while scholars have analyzed these identities on attitudes such as immigration, social/moral policies, and foreign policy, less attention has been paid to the relationship with attitudes toward spending, debt, and the economy. This paper uses two national surveys to connect the Prosperity Gospel and Christian Nationalism with race in predicting economic values and beliefs. In general, both are found to predict economic conservatism, though mostly among whites, while Prosperity Gospel adherence decreases personal economic conservatism. Both theological identities also help to explain agreement with nationalist and populist policies, helping to make sense of the relationship between (white) Christianity and support for Donald Trump.

Study on the Purchasing Intention of Consumers Under Generation Z to Domestic Cosmetics Brands

This project explores the mechanism of country-oriented consumer's influence on domestic cosmetics consumption intention and its mediating role between brand identity and overall product effectiveness, taking "Era Z" as the research object. The research results will reveal the interaction mechanism of "national identity" on "Era Z" customers' social emotion and domestic cosmetics consumption intention, and explore the mediating effect of "brand self-identity" and "overall product effectiveness". According to the actual situation of state-owned enterprises in China, the corresponding management countermeasures are given. The findings of this study are as follows: (1) Patriotism and trade protectionism have a positive promoting effect on brand social sentiment, but have no positive impact on it. (2) Patriotism and trade protectionism positively affect consumers' consumption intention, but in this process, social and economic conservatism has no significant effect on consumers' consumption intention. (3) In the consumption behavior of "Generation Z", the social emotion of enterprises has a positive impact on their purchase intention, and the social emotion of enterprises regulates the moderating effect on consumption intention.

Inconsistent and very weak evidence for a direct association between childhood personality and adult ideology.

We add depth and breadth to the study of the childhood personality-adult ideology link with additional data, measures, and measurement approaches. Past research in (political) psychology has put forward that individual differences in psychological needs shape ideology. Most evidence supporting this claim is cross-sectional. Two previous longitudinal studies showed preliminary evidence that childhood personality traits linked to negativity bias correlate with political ideology in adulthood, yet these studies have limitations. We report the results from two longitudinal studies (combined N = 13,822) conducted in the United Kingdom that measure childhood personality (5-11 years old) and political ideology from puberty (age 16) to early (age 26) and middle adulthood (age 42). We find very weak and inconsistent evidence that childhood personality traits related to negativity bias are directly associated with general conservatism, social conservatism, or economic conservatism across different stages of adulthood. Across the board, Bayes Factors most often indicate strong evidence for the null hypothesis. We offer evidence that the results of previous research are not as robust or as consistent as scholars in the extant literature presume. Our findings call for more, not less, research on the link between childhood personality and political ideology.

How Neoliberal are You? Development and Validation of the Neoliberal Orientation Questionnaire

We created a novel instrument to assess individual orientations toward the neoliberal capitalist system, the Neoliberal Orientation Questionnaire (NOQ), which is comprised of four dimensions: competitiveness, individual self-regulation, relational detachment, and public divestment. The instrument was intended to complement existing scales by (a) adopting a European perspective, and (b) incorporating personal as well as societal values, including lifestyle considerations. We sought to validate the NOQ in a European country with a strong history of public investment and social welfare provisions, namely France. In three nationally representative French samples, and one US student sample we assessed the internal consistency and construct validity of long and short versions of the scale. In terms of convergent and divergent validity, NOQ scores were positively correlated with scores on the Neoliberal Beliefs Inventory (NBI), general and economic forms of system justification, social dominance orientation, social and economic conservatism, internal locus of control, belief in free will, future-orientation, and a tendency to look on the ‘bright side’ in the face of hardships. The NOQ should prove useful for understanding the antecedents, concomitants, and consequences of attitudinal support versus opposition to the neoliberal capitalist system that dominates contemporary Western societies.

Revisiting the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis: A meta-analytic review.

The rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis (RRH), which posits that cognitive, motivational, and ideological rigidity resonate with political conservatism, is an influential but controversial psychological account of political ideology. Here, we leverage several methodological and theoretical sources of this controversy to conduct an extensive quantitative review with the dual aims of probing the RRH's basic assumptions and parsing the RRH literature's heterogeneity. Using multilevel meta-analyses of relations between varieties of rigidity and ideology measures alongside a bevy of potential moderators (s = 329, k = 708, N = 187,612), we find that associations between conservatism and rigidity are tremendously heterogeneous, suggesting a complex-yet conceptually fertile-network of relations between these constructs. Most notably, whereas social conservatism was robustly associated with rigidity, associations between economic conservatism and rigidity indicators were inconsistent, small, and not statistically significant outside of the United States. Moderator analyses revealed that nonrepresentative sampling, criterion contamination, and disproportionate use of American samples have yielded overestimates of associations between rigidity-related constructs and conservatism in past research. We resolve that drilling into this complexity, thereby moving beyond the question of if conservatives are essentially rigid to when and why they might or might not be, will help provide a more realistic account of the psychological underpinnings of political ideology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Retraction

Previous articleNext article FreeRetractionEugene Y. Chan, Gavin Northey, and Sylvie BorauEugene Y. Chan Search for more articles by this author , Gavin Northey Search for more articles by this author , and Sylvie Borau Search for more articles by this author Original articleRetracted: Economic Conservatism Predicts Preference for Automated ProductsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreOriginal article: “Economic Conservatism Predicts Preference for Automated Products” by Eugene Y. Chan, Gavin Northey, and Sylvie Borau.The authors hereby retract the article “Economic Conservatism Predicts Preference for Automated Products,” published in the July 2022 issue (vol. 6 [1], 10–20) of the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. After publication, the first author identified significant errors in the experimental procedure for study 1, as well as an error in the analysis, for which he apologizes. Given this, the findings can no longer be considered reliable. All the data in this article were collected and analyzed by the first author. The second and third authors joined the research after study 1 was completed and after completion of the first round of reviews. We regretfully retract this article. The authors apologize for any problems that the publication of this article may have caused. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of the Association for Consumer Research Volume 8, Number 2April 2023The Pandemic Transformed EconomyGuest Editors: Xiaoyan Deng, Xiaojing Yang, Yuwei Jiang, and Selin Malkoc Sponsored by the Association for Consumer Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723896 Views: 345Total views on this site HistoryPublished online February 15, 2023 © 2023 Association for Consumer Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.Related articlesRetracted: Economic Conservatism Predicts Preference for Automated Products13 Apr 2022Journal of the Association for Consumer Research

Harmonious management for sustainable development

The article shows that the concepts of harmonious and evolutionary management have significant heuristic potential in the development of institutional engineering, design and management of complex self-organizing systems, as well as contribute to sustainable economic development. The purpose of the article is to identify the mechanisms of conservatism and liberalism synthesis through the tools of harmonious and evolutionary management for productive sustainable economic development. Methodology: An interdisciplinary and systemic methodology is used, the logical and semiotic nature of economic genes and the genotype of the economic system determining characteristics, its orientation and content of the stability of its development are revealed. Results and novelty: basic genotypic concepts and their frames are identified, which determine the motives of economic growth and strategic directed development, mechanisms for implementing the synthesis of economic conservatism and liberalism, the principles of superposition, complementarity, interaction of individual and collective, parts and the whole, management of the economic genotype of the system with its structure − genotypic concepts forming the processes of harmonization, and its sustainable development.

Correction to: Discrimination driven by variation in social and economic conservatism: evidence from a nationwide field experiment

Correction to: Discrimination driven by variation in social and economic conservatism: evidence from a nationwide field experiment

Discrimination driven by variation in social and economic conservatism: evidence from a nationwide field experiment

Abstract We examine how contextual variation in aggregated political attitudes shapes ethnic discrimination. Using a field experiment with national coverage we identify ethnic discrimination in the Swiss housing market (N = 7,533 queries for viewings from fictitious persons who vary by name to signal ethnic origin). We use referendums and popular initiatives to identify the aggregated political attitudes at the municipality level in two dimensions: social conservatism and economic conservatism. We show that although aggregated levels of discrimination are low, discrimination varies spatially – higher levels of discrimination are found in municipalities that are both socially and economically conservative. Municipalities that are economically conservative, but socially liberal also tend to exhibit ethnic discrimination. By contrast, we find no evidence of ethnic discrimination in municipalities that are socially conservative, but economically liberal. Considering how the literature highlights social conservatism when discussing the role of political ideology on attitudes and ethnic discrimination, this result highlights how differentiating different forms of conservatism helps better understand the relationship between ideology and behaviour – in this case ethnic discrimination.

The Role of Ethical Ideologies and Economic Conservatism on Corporate Social Responsibility Attitudes

The Role of Ethical Ideologies and Economic Conservatism on Corporate Social Responsibility Attitudes

The changing association between political ideology and closed-mindedness: Left and right have become more alike

Evidence suggests that politically right-leaning individuals are more likely to be closed-minded. Whether this association is inherent or subject to change has been the subject of debate, yet has not been formally tested. Through a meta-analysis, we find evidence of a changing association between conservatism and facets of closed-mindedness in the U.S. and international context using 341 unique samples, over 200,000 participants, and 920 estimates over 71 years. In the U.S., data ranging from 1948 to 2019 revealed a linear decline in the association between social conservatism (SC) and closed-mindedness, though economic conservatism (EC) did not vary in its association with closed-mindedness over time. Internationally across 18 countries, excluding the U.S., we observed a curvilinear decline in the association between SC and closed-mindedness over that same time, but no change in ECs association. We also tested variation over time for attitudinal measures of conservatism ranging between 1987 to 2018. In the U.S., we observed a linear increase in the association between right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and closed-mindedness, with a similar linear increase in the association between social dominance orientation (SDO) and closed-mindedness. Internationally, there was a curvilinear increase in the association between RWA and closed-mindedness, but no change in the association with SDO. We discuss the changes to the political landscape that might explain our findings.

Political bullshit receptivity and its correlates: A cross-country validation of the concept

Philosophers conceptualized bullshit as persuasive communication that has no regard for truth, knowledge, or evidence. In psychology, research mostly investigated pseudo-profound bullshit, but no study has examined bullshit in the political context. In the present research, we operationalized political bullshit receptivity as endorsing vague political statements, slogans, and political bullshit programs. We investigated the relationship of these three measures with pseudo-profound bullshit, ideology (political ideology, support for neoliberalism), populism, and voting behavior. Three pre-registered studies conducted in early 2020 in the U.S., Serbia, and the Netherlands (total N = 534) yielded medium to high intercorrelations between political bullshit measures and pseudo-profound bullshit, and acceptable construct validity (hypothesized one-factor solution). A meta-analysis on these three studies showed that all political bullshit measures positively correlated with support for the free market, while only some positively correlated with social (political statements and programs) and economic conservatism (programs), and populism (programs). In the U.S., the Netherlands, and all countries combined, increased receptivity to political bullshit was associated with a higher probability to vote for right-wing candidates/parties (e.g., Trump in the U.S.). Overall, political bullshit receptivity showed to be a useful construct that opens avenues for research in broad and meaningless political communication.

Attitudes Toward Civil Liberties and Rights Among Politically Charged Online Groups

Abstract. Civil liberties and rights such as freedom of expression, press, thought, religion, association, lifestyle, and equality against the law are being subjected to controversies in Western countries. We developed two hypotheses aimed at explaining divergent attitudes toward civil liberties among politically charged online communities on each side of the political spectrum. A study using a cross-sectional sample of social media users ( N = 902) suggests that, as expected by our hypotheses, support for civil liberties tend to be higher among online groups of rightists – with economic conservatism being the only direct positive predictor and left-wing authoritarianism being a strong negative predictor. These results are discussed in relation to polarization over civil liberties and perceived power imbalances between online groups.

Retracted: Economic Conservatism Predicts Preference for Automated Products

Retracted: Economic Conservatism Predicts Preference for Automated Products