Morality as Cooperation, Politics as Conflict

What is the relationship between morality and politics? If morality is a collection of cooperative rules, and politics is conflict over which cooperative projects to pursue, then we should expect the two to be related. People who expect to benefit from a particular type of cooperation will be likely to endorse the corresponding moral values and political policies. Here we examine the relationship between moral values and political liberalism-conservatism, with data from the Morality-As-Cooperation Questionnaire and the Social and Economics Conservatism Scale in samples of participants from the USA (N = 518), Denmark (N = 552), the Netherlands (N = 353), and an international online population (N = 1,337). We found that political conservatism was consistently related with deference values. We also found some support for the hypotheses that political orientation has different associations with family values versus group values and has different associations with fairness values versus reciprocity values. However, for most of our hypotheses, the results showed no support or did not reach statistical significance, largely due to poor model fit or measurement error associated with the political scales. We conclude that improved measurement of political preferences is needed to illuminate the relationship between morality and politics.