These trends manifest, the authors continue, “in two ways: first, in any given survey year, rich people report being less materialist than the poor. Second, as average incomes increased over time, the U.S. population as a whole became less materially oriented.”
In a separate 2020 paper, “Moral Values and Voting,” Enke found that
starting in the 1960s, Republicans and Democrats polarized in their moral appeal: for more than 30 years, Democrats increasingly placed a stronger emphasis on universalist moral concepts, a trend that was considerably weaker among Republicans. Thus, today the Democratic Party has a substantially more universalist profile than the Republican Party.
Enke measured the level of support for universalist values by using what he calls “a moral foundation questionnaire” that “elicits respondents’ agreement with moral value statements,” including such “universalist statements” as “Compassion with suffering is a crucial virtue,” “Laws should treat everyone fairly” and “Justice most important requirement for society,” in contrast to such “communal values” statements as “Be loyal to your family even if they have done something wrong,” “Be a team player, rather than express oneself” and “Soldiers must obey even if they disagree with an order.”
Analyzing the speeches of recent presidential candidates, Enke contends that Donald Trump stood apart for his focus on the world of his followers:
Trump’s moral language is less universalist, or equivalently, more communal, than that of any other presidential nominee in recent history. Trump is also more communal than his 2016 primary contenders. Moreover, the difference in moral appeal between Trump and Hillary Clinton is particularly pronounced.
In their paper on morals as luxury goods, Enke, Wu and Polborn contend that it is the most affluent and best-educated citizens who propel the contemporary political emphasis on moral and cultural issues, stressing that “the cultural or moral conflict is between different subsets of the elite. This conflict among elites induces party polarization, which then propagates into changes in voting behavior among the poor.”
In a joint email, Enke and his co-author elaborated on this process:
As the rich become richer over time, they place a higher weight on their moral values relative to their material incentives. As a result, some voters who are both rich and morally liberal who used to vote Republican swing to the Democrats. The Democratic constituency becomes more morally liberal on average, while the Republican constituency becomes more morally conservative, on average. To make these new constituencies happy, the Democratic Party moves to the left on social issues and the Republican Party to the right.
White voters who are low-income, morally conservative and formerly Democrats, the authors continue,
can now swing Republican because of the change in party positions. Now that the parties are polarized socially, it becomes more relevant for people to vote based on their values, simply because the stakes have increased. As a result, in our model, poor moral conservatives can swing Republican over time even though they don’t become richer and even though economic inequality increased to their disadvantage. In our model, this is all driven by the fact that the parties partly accommodate the changing priorities of the rich, which are now more moral in nature.
In “Identity, beliefs, and political conflict,” Giampaolo Bonomi, a doctoral candidate in economics the University of California-San Diego, and Nicola Gennaioli and Guido Tabellini, professors of economics at Bocconi University in Milan, make a similar argument:
Economic shocks that boost conflict among cultural groups can also trigger a shift to cultural identity. We offer two examples: skilled biased technical change and globalization. If these shocks hurt less educated and hence more conservative voters, and benefit more educated and hence more progressive voters, they make cultural cleavages more salient and can induce a switch to cultural identity. As a result, economic losers become more socially and fiscally conservative.
In support of their argument, Bonomi, Gennaioli and Tabellini cite the work of David Autor and of Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig to “show that, both in the U.S. and in Europe, losses from international trade foster support for right-wing and conservative parties.”