Morals as Luxury Goods and Political Polarization.
This paper develops a theory of political behavior in which moral values are
a luxury good. This idea both generates new testable implications and ties
together a broad set of empirical regularities about political polarization in
the U.S. The model predicts (i) the emergence of economically left-wing elites;
(ii) that more rich than poor people vote against their material interests; (iii) that
within-party heterogeneity is larger among Democrats than Republicans; (iv) that
the correlation between people’s economic and social policy views increases both
in income and over time; and (v) realignment patterns that reflect an increased
relevance of moral rather than class-based divisions: rich moral liberals who
switch to the Democrats, and poor moral conservatives who swing Republican.
Assuming that parties set policies by aggregating their supporters’ preferences,
the model also predicts increasing polarization on social issues over time. We
relate these predictions to known stylized facts, and test our new predictions
empirically.