Electoral Politics and Party Identity and Ingroup Morality

Moral Foundation theory deals with inborn centers of morality in order to find commonalities between people of different cultures. There are five delineated areas of morality highlighted by this analysis and they are Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, In-group/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. These are universal, however what is found in research is that different cultures value them with different magnitudes. So, for instance (and this is a made up example), Japanese culture values loyalty most highly, whereas the culture of the United States values harm most highly, so people within the two are likely to behave differently overall.

In actuality, most cultures value Harm and Fairness highest above all others. An analysis of these traits was done on the two political parties in the US, and it found that while both parties value harm and fairness highly, democrats give much lower values to authority, in-group loyalty, and purity. This is consistent with the idea that democrats are more diverse, and that they are more socially liberal.

Other analyses have been done that find interesting results such as a split among democrats between Clinton and Obama that correlates to emphasis on loyalty=Clinton, whereas emphasis on fairness=Obama.

While either party can be seen as ascending or descending in relevance at any time, it seems quite unlikely that the democrats are more likely to fracture than the republicans.