This week we ask what drives ideological disagreement in politics? How far do people on left and right disagree with each other because they have fundamentally different moral intuitions or for other reasons?
Polarisation is a defining feature of contemporary politics, raising concerns among many observers. People on the left and right—liberals and conservatives—often seem to inhabit entirely different worlds, holding fundamentally distinct perspectives on reality and morality. But what underpins these divisions? Are they rooted in deep-seated moral intuitions that we are born with or develop in childhood? Or do they stem from our present circumstances and the media landscape that shapes our understanding of the world?
In this episode, we explore groundbreaking research by two scholars from the UCL Department of Political Science—Dr Jack Blumenau and Prof Ben Lauderdale. Their work offers fresh insights into the nature of political disagreement, challenging conventional wisdom about its origins. Jack join us to discuss these findings. (Jack Blumenau, Associate Professor of Political Science and Quantitative Research Methods.)
Mentioned in this episode:
Alan Renwick: [00:00:00] Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we ask what drives ideological disagreement in politics? How far do people on the left and right disagree with each other because they have fundamentally different moral intuitions? And what are the implications for how polarization can be addressed?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick, and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London. Polarisation is a feature of contemporary politics that worries many observers.
People on the left and right, or in US parlance liberals and conservatives, seem to live in different worlds with fundamentally different views on how the world is and how it should be. But what exactly is the nature of these disagreements? Are they grounded in fundamentally different intuitions about right and wrong that we're [00:01:00] born with or learn early in childhood?
Or are they more dependent upon the circumstances in which we live in the present and on the media through which we learn about the world around us? A series of new studies by two of my colleagues in the UCL Department of Political Science, Jack Blumenau and Ben Lauderdale, is challenging our understanding of these matters.
One of those authors, Jack Blumenau, who is Associate Professor of Political Science and Quantitative Research Methods, joins me now. Welcome, Jack, to UCL Uncovering Politics. It's great to have you on.
And could we address the overarching question you're asking in this work? What drives ideological disagreement in politics? What, for you, does that question mean, and why does it matter?
Jack Blumenau: Well, thank you very much for having me, Alan. This question means we must think about the sources of ideological disagreement, the things that make people come to disagree about political [00:02:00] issues.
And that's something that political scientists have spent a long time thinking about and have many different answers to. So there are lots of potential sources of polarization, like difference in material interests, differences in group identity or the socialization processes people go through in their early years the reason it matters to understand which of these things are at the root of ideological polarization is because it says something about how hard that polarization is to resolve.
If we're interested in trying to speak more productively to one another about political issues. Then it's helpful to know whether those sources of disagreement are malleable. And, as you said, there's this particularly prominent view that's been gaining traction in recent years that ideological differences might stem from deep-seated psychological factors, and particularly in factors that relate to people's morality. So, the differences, the moral differences with which they perceive the world. And that kind of moral view of political [00:03:00] disagreement seems quite troubling if it turns out that people have these entrenched views that guide their way of thinking, it might make it quite hard to reconcile political differences because they're coming from fundamentally opposed viewpoints.
Alan Renwick: What are you asking in the papers we're talking about today?
Jack Blumenau: We're going to talk about two papers today. The first one asks a straightforward, what we would call a descriptive question, which is “do people on the left and the right in fact have fundamentally different moral intuitions?” Our goal in that paper is to try and develop new ways of measuring the relationship between moral concerns or moral intuitions and voters’ political beliefs.
The way that we do that is by using a survey experiment of voters in the US and the UK, the whole approach is based on trying to design a new way of soliciting information about people's moral beliefs. Rather than asking people to theorise about their moralities, we're going to ask them more [00:04:00] concrete questions which aim to retrieve information about their moralities without asking about them directly.
And we're going to use that methodological approach to comment on some of the existing claims about moral divisions between people on the left and people on the right. The second paper, and this is partly a spoiler of the results of the first paper, is that if it turns out that political disagreement doesn't emerge from these kind of moral disagreements of the moral psychologies of people on the left and the right, so if people have fairly similar moral reactions on an intuitive level to political problems, then what is it that drives the political polarization particularly in the second paper we're interested in political polarization as it relates to the different views that people take about which issues are important in politics. So, we're going to be trying to understand, if it's not morality, what is it that determines which problems people see as important?
Alan Renwick: Right, so you've given us a little sweep through the various steps of the argument that we're going to talk about here, which is helpful to have at the [00:05:00] start.
Let's now go through those steps in turn and start off with the theoretical underpinnings of the work. And I guess your starting point is, this theory that political attitudes are rooted in deep-seated moral ideas, moral intuitions. Do you want to just develop that theoretical perspective a little bit further?
Jack Blumenau: This idea comes from a popular and important theory in social psychology called moral foundations theory, which was developed by Jonathan Haidt and some of his colleagues. That theoretical perspective suggests that people's moral values can be described according to different foundations. There are five foundations in the canonical expression of this theory.
The first being fairness, so the idea that people are motivated by concerns about whether things are fair or not, whether things are just, how trustworthy people are, conceptions like this. The second is concern for care related to ideas of kindness and attention to the suffering or needs of others.
Beyond fairness and kindness, there's also [00:06:00] authority, which is a concern for deference or obedience to social hierarchy. People could be concerned about conceptions like that. I feel like these should have a good acronym, but they don't, sadly. That's three of these foundations.
Number four is loyalty. A concern for things like loyalty to one's country. Patriotism or community. Also, the idea of loyalty is meant to capture ideas like self-sacrifice, so sacrifice to the collective group. Then, finally, the fifth concern is the sanctity foundation. Sanctity involves a concern for things like temperance, chastity, or religious conceptions like piety or even bodily cleanliness. The idea is that these five foundations are meant to underpin our moral sense of self. They are often described as our moral matrices. The things that lead to lots of other judgments that we might make about moral concerns.
Alan Renwick: Where do these come from? Why are those [00:07:00] five? It feels random just hearing it. Why those five in particular?
Jack Blumenau: The theory goes that these five concerns are all linked to evolutionary challenges that people have had to overcome historically. Things like a concern for loyalty to the group have arisen as people have had to face challenges that are best overcome by group-based interactions.
Similarly, the idea of sanctity concern is often rooted in the idea that, from an evolutionary perspective, being attuned to problems about cleanliness or problems about chastity will have had a real impact on our prospects for survival.
There's this evolutionary story that our moralities have come from these common challenges. One of the important ideas here is that morality isn't something entirely set in stone from the moment of birth but can evolve and adapt in response to environmental factors. People will display different levels of adherence to these different moral dimensions according to things like their [00:08:00] upbringing, education, cultural traditions, and so on.
Crucially for the argument that I'm going to make later, this perspective adopts the idea that moral judgments are made in a way that is very fast and automatic. They're psychological processes rooted in an intuitive view of morality.
When people are coming to moral judgments, they're not doing so consciously. Although they're not doing so necessarily deliberately, but rather they come to these judgments in a kind of quick and effortless way without being necessarily fully aware of why they are reaching those decisions.
That's something that we should remember for when we come back to talking about some of the methodological choices that we're making.
Alan Renwick: Shall we move on to talking about the methodological choices now?
Jack Blumenau: I think there's one other thing to say here first, which is that what I've just described is a way of thinking about individual moral psychology.
This is a very useful way of characterizing people's different adherences to these different foundations. There is an important political point, which is that there's this core political prediction of this theory that people on the right and people on the left of [00:09:00] politics will put systematically different weight on these different foundations.
The broad idea is that people on the left will tend to care mostly about individualizing foundations. That's the foundation of fairness and care, while people on the right will tend to put more weight on the binding foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity.
The idea is that people in different parts of the political spectrum put different weights on moral concerns. When considering political problems, their intuitive moralities inform their judgments of those political problems and provoke them to make different judgments about those issues. As a result, that will lead to a polarization in attitudes across the political spectrum. This argument's been made in very stark terms in the academic literature and seen as an important cause of political division on a wide range of issues, particularly those that are especially morally laden.
But I think this is also something we see in sort of popular discussions of politics. The idea that the reason why people talk past one another so [00:10:00] often in politics, and that's often seen to be caused by just these very, as you made the point in your introduction, people having very different sorts of worldviews, very different kinds of moral compasses. And that leads to this breakdown of productive democratic debate.
Alan Renwick: Great. Thank you for adding that. Really important point. Let's move on to the methodology of the studies that we're talking about here. It's interesting reading the papers that you very much emphasise that methodological innovation, measuring these things in new ways, is one of the important contributions of these papers.
How are these matters normally investigated? I guess we should start with that, and then what's different about the approach that you take?
Jack Blumenau: One approach would be for me to describe this, but I think instead of going through the methodological differences in a lot of detail, I thought it'd be useful to just illustrate by asking you some questions.
Alan Renwick: The normality of emoting.
Jack Blumenau: Yes, exactly. It makes me feel more comfortable in the questioning scene. That's good. These are questions that we put in front of a whole load of survey respondents. [00:11:00] I'm just going to ask you a couple of questions, and then we'll talk about why those questions might make sense or what they might teach us.
Alan Renwick: Listener, I warn you, this is unrehearsed.
Jack Blumenau: Yes, and well, people should also feel free to play along with this at home. So, I'm going to ask you a couple of questions and just give me a very quick answer. Don't spend too much time thinking about it. Which of these is more relevant to your moral thinking?
Whether or not someone was cruel, or whether someone did something disgusting.
Alan Renwick: Oh, the first one.
Jack Blumenau: Okay, so cruelty. Now I'm going to ask you a second question. Which do you think is worse? A girl making fun of her brother for getting dumped by his girlfriend, or an employee at a morgue eating her pepperoni pizza off a dead body?
Alan Renwick: Oh, that's tricky.
Jack Blumenau: Possibly revealing.
Alan Renwick: Yeah, I'm supposed to do this quickly. This is difficult. I think the first one, but I think probably society thinks the second, so I'm kind of feeling pulled towards the second one because that's what I ought to say.
Jack Blumenau: No that's fine. I don't think there's a right or wrong here, and in some sense our [00:12:00] difficulty in answering the second one is quite informative, I think.
Because, you know, there's a clear difference between these two sets of questions, in addition to one of them being slightly more gross than the other one. The important point here is that the first question is asking you to rate some abstract principles, and you gave a relatively quick answer to that question, in that care was more important to you than this idea of disgust, right?
That was your moral ordering of those different priorities. When it came to the second question, I asked you about specific manifestations of those two concerns. The one about the girl making fun of her brother, that's an issue that's related to care. It's some kind of violation of fairness.
And the second one was something about the idea of sanctity, like the idea of doing something a bit disgusting, it was hard to make that decision, right? For lots of people who are listening, their immediate reaction would have been to say, the pizza one is worse, right?
Because it just makes them feel very uncomfortable in some way. The important thing is that the preference ordering switched [00:13:00] between the first question and the second question, so when you're asked to
Alan Renwick: So, for those other people, not for me.
Jack Blumenau: Well, yours was also interesting because it became somewhere close to intermediate, or it wasn't quite so easy for you to say which was worse.
Alan Renwick: Yeah.
Jack Blumenau: But more generally, the important point to recognize is that when we ask people questions that ask them to explicitly reflect on their moral concerns, that will often lead to different sets of answers than questions that aim to elicit their more implicit moral attitudes.
Alan Renwick: The first of those things is what you referred to earlier as self-theorization. So, listeners might have been wondering, what does that mean? So that's when you're reporting on what your moral principles are rather than just responding to a particular case.
Jack Blumenau: That's exactly right.
When we're trying to think about what motivations are important to us, rather than just responding to prompts that tap those motivations. Why does this matter?
Most of the evidence base that exists currently for moral foundations theory and the relationship between people's moral values and their political values comes from [00:14:00] questions of the first type. Where you ask people to explicitly rate their moral principles. When you do that, it turns out that people on the left and people on the right give very different answers. People on the left tend to care about care and fairness, and people on the right tend to report caring more about loyalty and sanctity, and authority.
I think the thing that's important to note from a theoretical perspective is that those kinds of self-reflective questions, where you're asking people to self-assess their moral psychologies. Those are quite a long way away from the theoretical starting position of moral foundations theory, where people's moral judgments are meant to be rooted in this fast and intuitive process, where people aren't necessarily aware of the reasons why they're making their moral judgments. And so, it seems that there's something of a tension between having that as a theoretical starting point and then the main way of measuring that being more this kind of explicit self-theorization question that we just discussed.
What we do that is different is we ask more of these questions of the second type, where we're asking people about concrete scenarios and just asking them to rate which [00:15:00] one of these things is worse. I should add that we didn't write these violations, right?
The concrete example of pizza I gave just now, someone else wrote that, and you can blame them for the slightly gross examples. But the idea is that we're going to ask people many these types of violation questions, each of which is meant to represent a different foundation in moral foundations theory.
And then by asking people those questions from across the political spectrum, we're going to be able to understand whether people on the left and the right are polarized when asked about these concrete moral problems than when asked to self-reflect about the more abstract moral concerns.
Alan Renwick: Okay, so I'm very tempted to go straight on and ask, what do you find when you do that? But is there anything more that we should say about the methodology of the papers?
Jack Blumenau: There's one more example that I want to give you, which is from the second paper that we're going to discuss.
Again, here I'm going to ask you two sets of questions, which are slightly different from one another in form. Though the example that I just gave didn't have any politics in it. We didn't ask anything that was related to political issues. So, one thing that we want to know [00:16:00] are the findings that we're going to talk about in a second, do they generalize cases where the judgment that people are making is related to political affairs?
Here's question one. Which of these two things is worse? Rising prices reduce a person's standard of living. Or a mass shooting with many deaths.
Alan Renwick: The second one.
Jack Blumenau: This is an uncontroversial position to take, which is that the mass shooting is worse than the effects of inflation for a single person.
Consider it a second question, though, where I ask instead, which of these things is a worse problem in your country? Rising prices, reducing people's standard of living. Or mass shootings with many deaths.
Alan Renwick: Aha, the first one.
Jack Blumenau: So, why?
Alan Renwick: There aren't very many mass shootings in the UK.
Jack Blumenau: Exactly, right. So, the key difference between these two question forms is that the first one is asking how bad this problem is in its instance, whereas the second question is asking you to consider two things. Both the severity of the problem, how bad it is, but also the frequency of the problem, or the [00:17:00] prevalence of the problem as well.
In the second paper that focuses on problem prioritization, we use the variation in question form to understand where the polarization comes into the process. Is it that people disagree over how bad individual instances of problems are, or is it more that they disagree over how frequent these problems are, and therefore how big an issue they are for society as a whole?
If it turns out that people on the left and people on the right have very similar judgments of, the badness of individual problems, that suggests that the polarization we see is maybe not about political psychology so much as it is about people's perceptions of the scale of these problems for society as a whole.
Alan Renwick: Let's get to the findings, then. The first question was around the degree to which people's left-right attitudes correlate with the moral foundations. What do you find?
Jack Blumenau: Given the setup that I've just given, we find that the results depend on how you ask the question.
[00:18:00] When we ask questions that get people to reflect explicitly on their morality, to consider these abstract moral principles, we see large differences between people on the left and people on the right, and those are completely aligned with the traditional way of asking these questions.
So, people on the left tend to care more about care and fairness concerns, and people on the right tend to care more about authority and loyalty, and sanctity concerns. The important finding of that paper from our perspective is that when we ask people questions that aim to solicit these more intuitive moral responses, people on the left and the right give strikingly similar responses and moral intuitions. Those large differences that appear when you ask people about it explicitly diminish substantially when we're considering these more specific scenarios.
To the extent that all voters, regardless of their political persuasion, think that fairness, care, and sanctity violations are worse than or more severe than the authority and loyalty violations. We still see some evidence of partisan difference. People on the [00:19:00] left on average care a little bit more about care concerns, and people on the right put a bit more weight on loyalty concerns.
But those differences aren't large enough to change the overall rank ordering of which foundations matter most.
Alan Renwick: Let's dig into this just a little bit further because when I was reading through the paper it seemed to me, but tell me if I'm wrong, that the kind of biggest difference in your findings compared to the standard findings were on the sanctity elements and you were finding that people on the left care about the sanctity things in a way that the more traditional way of measuring these things suggests that people on the left don't care about sanctity.
Then I was looking at the specific wrongs, the specific behaviours that you include under sanctity. And we've already talked about one of them here, which is about eating the pepperoni pizza off a dead body. And that, I can see, very clearly relates to this idea of sanctity.
But then, quite a few of the others, one of [00:20:00] them, for example, is about a drunk person who offers to have oral sex with anyone in the bar. My intuition about this one was that it's a horrible thing to do, because it's horrible for the other people in the bar. So, it felt more like a care response to me, rather than a sanctity response.
I was just wondering if it’s the case that you're just picking up a lot of care stuff in some of the sanctity measures. And that's why you end up finding that people on the left also care about what you're calling sanctity.
Jack Blumenau: I think it's certainly possible that some of the vignettes confound sort of two or multiple different foundations, concerns within them.
They were written in a way that was attempting to isolate a single concern or a single moral foundation in each of the vignettes. I think one of the things to note here is that when we ask the more generic question or the more abstract question, we don't know what it is that people are thinking about, right?
We don't know how people are interpreting the idea of [00:21:00] sanctity when asked in abstract terms. Providing these concrete manifestations of that concern is quite difficult because it means you're trying to isolate the individual foundations. I do think it's possible that there are multiple concerns appearing in each one, but one of the advantages of our design is that we have a very large number of each foundation.
The example that you just gave about the person in the bar could certainly be interpreted as you just did, as a care concern. I don't think that's true for all of those examples, though. Another sort of weakness that we see in the existing literature is that there has been an over-reliance on a very small number of examples of concrete moral violations.
And so, what we're trying to do here is provide a broader set, which allows us to make statements about the degree to which people care about those foundations, rather than relying too heavily on any given instance. I think the other thing to say here is that although we do find an unusual pattern compared to the previous literature, where sanctity [00:22:00] is seen as more important by people on the left than is true when you ask them about their abstract concerns.
The other thing that we find is that for authority, loyalty, fairness, and care, we see a flattening out of the political relationship with those foundational concerns. We find that people on the left traditionally express much less adherence to the idea of authority than people on the right do.
And that relationship almost completely disappears when we ask about these sorts of concrete moral concerns rather than asking people the more abstract questions. The same is true for loyalty and fairness. Even though we get this difference in ordering of the foundation's importance, the fact that we just see a general diminishing of the political association with the importance of each foundation is also evidence that there may not be these ideological divides that have been such a feature of the previous literature.
Alan Renwick: Okay. I think I'm convinced on that point. And then I guess a second feature of this. You said the degree to which left-right ideology maps onto the moral foundations depends on how you measure things. [00:23:00] But I think you're implicitly arguing that your measure is better than the traditional measure. So, you're suggesting that people's moral intuitions are what drive their political attitudes rather than their more thought-through ideas about how they want to think morally.
So, you're kind of accepting that aspect of moral foundation theory?
Jack Blumenau: No, I don't think that we're accepting that people's moral beliefs drive their political attitudes. So, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that when you measure something that we think looks more like moral intuition, which again is what moral foundation theory is based upon, is this idea of intuitive moral responses. When you measure people's moral intuitions, the correlation between that measurement and political attitudes decreases. So, what we think is that there's just much less evidence that people on the left and people on the right do take fundamentally [00:24:00] different worldviews. They may articulate very different sets of moral priorities. But when confronted with specific moral comparisons, they make very similar moral judgments.
Alan Renwick: But you are saying there that it's those intuitions that are then driving people's real behaviour, not necessarily in the political world, but in their interactions with other people. Are those the moral intuitions you're suggesting that matter?
Jack Blumenau: I think that we don't have a strong view on whether moral intuitions matter. What we're trying to do is engage with an existing body of work that says that moral intuitions are important for downstream behaviours. Some of those are political, some of those will be other things.
We don't have a strong dog in this fight, but we do think that if you're going to claim that moral intuitions are important and there are important differences between different political ideologies concerning their morality, then you should try and measure those in a way that is close to soliciting [00:25:00] information on the intuitive nature of moral beliefs rather than asking people to explicitly self-theorize about their morality.
Alan Renwick: So, insofar as people have moral intuitions, those don't map very strongly onto left-right attitudes. So, it seems they are not what is driving polarization between conservatives and liberals in politics today.
Jack Blumenau: That's right.
Alan Renwick: Let's move on to the second paper.
Just remind us of what the question is in the second paper and what you found.
Jack Blumenau: Yeah, so in the second paper, we're trying to understand, given the results I've just described, what is driving political disagreement?
What are the other potential sources? In this paper, we provide a much harder test because we would naturally expect higher levels of political disagreement about questions linked to politics rather than questions that are concrete manifestations of moral concerns, but not necessarily political concerns.
We ask people to make comparisons between different political issues. Some are morally loaded political issues, like freedom of speech and abortion. Some of them are more economic questions about things like inequality and [00:26:00] inflation.
What we're interested in doing here is first asking very similar questions of the form that I described before. We can ask about these individual instances of a problem. What's interesting about the results that we find in this paper is that even when we're asking people to consider more explicitly political issues.
We find roughly the same pattern of results, which is that when people are prompted to think about the badness of individual instances of specific problems, the people on the left and the people on the right largely agree on which problems are worse and which problems are less bad. So, there is some disagreement on the severity of individual problems, and questions about things like illegal immigration, or questions about abortion, or questions about gender identity, we do see partisan-based or ideologically based differences between the left and the right.
But on average, the left and the right have highly correlated views about which problems are seen as worse. The ideological [00:27:00] disagreements on individual issues are not large enough to yield very different orderings of which problems are seen as more severe overall.
The conclusion is that voters see some problems as worse than others, but there's little ideological disagreement about the severity of problems at the individual instance level. What's more interesting than that, though, is that when we move from individual instances of problems to how important this problem is in your society, there we do start to see much more pronounced ideological disagreements, particularly in the US.
We see the correlation between the views of the people on the left and the people on the right start to break down, about which problems are most important. What does that imply? It suggests that while people might have similar judgements of how bad an issue is, they have very different judgments of whether that issue constitutes a serious problem in society.
And if you think back to the question, I asked you before about inflation versus a mass shooting, you said [00:28:00] mass murders are fortunately, very rare, and of course, inflation is very common. What we show in the paper is that the differences in ideological polarization between those two question forms can be explained by attitudes about prevalence, as people's views on how prevalent a problem is diverges from each other, people on the left and people on the right, there then is a greater degree of disagreement about how big those problems are for society as a whole.
And so, we think that it's not that people have some fundamental moral disagreement about how bad these issues are, it's that they have similar views on how bad those issues are, but they have very different views about how frequently they occur.
Alan Renwick: So, it's not that people on left and right disagree, or at least disagree very much about whether it's a bad thing that people can't afford to eat properly because of inflation, but people on the left are more likely to think that more people suffer that, are in that situation, than people on the right think is the case.
Jack Blumenau: Exactly, or to give an example [00:29:00] from the other side of the political debate, it's not that people on the right think that illegal immigration is a bad thing, and people on the left think that it's a good thing. It's that they both think that any individual immigrant entering the country illegally may not be a great thing.
But then they have very different perceptions on much illegal immigration there is.
Alan Renwick: So that then leads on to the question of what produces these different perceptions?
Jack Blumenau: I think that is the next natural question, and sadly, not one that we can fully answer in our paper, but I think the natural theory here is that it's something about the different sources of information that these voters have.
If you are exposed to very different sources of information about politics, that could lead to different perceptions about the prevalence of different problems. Newspapers, traditional media sources, are going to give you very different emphasis on different political problems, which may lead you to have different beliefs about how prevalent those problems are.
But similarly, things like social media as well, where we see sorting into different communities of voters. [00:30:00] Who may then share information about political problems at different rates and therefore develop different views about how prevalent those problems are.
So, for me, it makes sense that differential exposure media is a natural explanation of what's going on here. Again, that's quite a long way away from saying that what people are doing is having fundamentally different worldviews. It's that they receive different sets of information, and that's what drives the polarization, rather than some entrenched hostility towards the other person's morality.
Alan Renwick: What should listeners take away? What do we leave with based on all this fascinating analysis?
Jack Blumenau: I think the main thing I would want people to leave with is a note of optimism. This view that moral concerns determine political attitudes can be quite troubling because it suggests that the resolution of morally loaded political debate may be intractable.
Right, so moral disagreements, because the idea that morality is so deep [00:31:00] seated makes it hard to think that it's possible to easily overcome political division. But the results in these two papers present a more optimistic conclusion, one interpretation of the results that we have is that once you measure people's moralities, in this way, when you measure them more appropriately, then differences in intuitive morality of those on the left and the right are too small to be responsible for the level of political animosity or disagreement that we see.
I think that's more optimistic because it implies that polarization isn't attributable to fundamentally incompatible attitudes, but rather, political disagreement is more closely related to the ways people process information.
If that's true, then the information side is something we are more likely to be able to do something about and therefore may have an easier route to productive dialogue between groups on different sides of the political spectrum.
Alan Renwick: Well, it feels quite difficult sometimes now to find reasons for hope in the world of politics. But you've given us some there, Jack, so thank you so much. An incredible piece of [00:32:00] research both papers. And with real, practical implications, positive, hopeful implications as well.
We've been discussing two articles co-authored by Jack Blumenau and Benjamin E. Lauderdale. One is called Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Very Similar Sets of Foundations When Comparing Moral Violations. And it's currently available on Early View in the American Political Science Review on their website.
The other is called Polarization over the Priority of Political Problems. It's not available yet, but Jack, will it be published soon? Am I right in thinking that?
Jack Blumenau: It was published yesterday.
Alan Renwick: Oh, fantastic. Amazing. So, we will make sure there is a link to that. It’s in the American Journal of Political Science.
The full details will be in the show notes for the episode. Next week, we're exploring similar questions, but in a totally different way. We will be looking at what the Confucian value of harmony can teach us about how to communicate across deep disagreement. To make sure you don't miss [00:33:00] out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe.
You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts, or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment to rate or review us, too. I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell Banham and Kaiser Kang. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.