Extreme policy positions undermine public trust even in polarized times, while voters appear to respect politicians who talk in terms of right and wrong, according to researchers with The Bush School of Government and Public Service

BRYAN/COLLEGE STATION, TX – Leading up to the 2020 election, two Texas A&M University political scientists wanted to know how sincere voters considered Joe Biden. The researchers divided statements from the Biden campaign into two types: those that made a pragmatic argument, such as the campaign’s assertion that mass imprisonment hurts the economy; and declarations based in a moral appeal, such as an imperative to make the country’s justice system fairer. Voters then judged how convincing various statements were.

The results suggested what a series of related tests showed definitely: voters respond better to moral arguments than practical ones. Candidates who framed arguments in terms of right and wrong were judged more sincere, and thus trustworthy. Even moderation – often derided in today’s political climate – appeared to work if paired with a right-wrong argument.

But a surprising corollary emerged in those related tests: candidates who emphasized ideologically extreme positions were not seen as particularly sincere. Extreme positions actually appeared to hurt a candidate’s chances by making them seem less trustworthy to some voters, according to recent findings by Scott Clifford and Elizabeth Simas, a pair of Ph.D. professors with The Bush School of Government and Public Service. Their research was published recently in the journal Political Behavior.

“I think people often think of moralizing in politics as inherently polarizing, but we found that’s not the case,” Clifford said. “Casting politics in moral terms can even make politicians look more sincere to people who are skeptical of them.”

“But taking extreme positions,” Simas said, “can be extremely polarizing.”

TRUST: IT DOES A BODY (POLITIC) GOOD

Simas and Clifford examined an issue that seemingly every politician in history has dealt with but is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate: how to project sincerity, which engenders trust. Sincerity is necessary for a variety of reasons:

• Candidates need it. Voters tend to support candidates who seem more likely to follow through on their promises.
• Voters need it. Without trust, voters cannot rely on politicians’ policy platforms in the voting booth, which can lead to confusion and apathy, Clifford and Simas write.
• Society needs it. Without trust, voters will not support major proposals. Lack of support means politicians will not take the risk of working with opponents – and difficult issues become seemingly intractable problems. As Simas and Clifford write: “This deep level of cynicism threatens to break a fundamental link in representation and undermines the legislative process.”

Trust is important. But, according to Clifford and Simas, “We know relatively little about how candidates can use their campaign messaging to display sincerity.”

To that end, Simas and Clifford examined a pair of increasingly common, overlapping rhetorical tactics: emphasizing ideologically extreme positions and pronouncing those positions a matter of right and wrong. Both tactics appeal to the same basic psychology, Clifford and Simas write: to signal passion to voters, who often see that passion as reliability. The more passionate the belief, the more likely that a politician will stick to it.

The two tactics, extremity and morality, are deployed to achieve the same end: trust. But Simas and Clifford found that the tactics actually evoke very different responses.

VIRTUE SIGNALS, VICIOUS CYCLES

Extreme positions are becoming increasingly common in politics, according to Clifford and Simas. Even in places where moderation is generally considered the better tactic, candidates are emphasizing policy positions that run to the extreme end of their parties’ ideologies.

This dynamic was on full display in Florida’s 2018 gubernatorial race, according to Simas and Clifford. Florida for years was a place where statewide candidates tended to run centrist campaigns appealing to swaths of moderate and swing voters. But Republican candidate Ron DeSantis eschewed conventional wisdom, appearing on television showing his child how to build an immigration-preventing wall out of toy blocks, a position considered hard-right at the time. Democrat Andrew Gillum likewise deviated from the conventional political path, emphasizing his support for an assault weapons ban and $15 universal minimum wage, positions considered far left by Florida standards. DeSantis narrowly prevailed.

Why the deviation on both sides? Clifford and Simas did not study party primaries but write that primaries may play a factor. They tend to draw the party’s most passionate and ideologically driven members. Extreme positions can signal passion that might help a candidate appeal to those passionate voters and stand out in a crowded field.

But in surveying voters, Simas and Clifford found that, in general elections, extreme positions tend to be counterproductive. Candidates who emphasize such positions not only tend to repel voters who are not already strongly in favor of one party or another – such candidates even seem to diminish their standing among their own party’s voters.

Those candidates also contribute to political polarization.

That polarization is a growing problem. Clifford and Simas cite studies that outline a vicious cycle: voters of one party growing frustrated that the other side appears to ignore their priorities; those voters electing someone who promises to fight harder for their beliefs; that politician disregarding the other side’s priorities, frustrating that side enough to elect someone who promises to likewise fight rather than compromise; the views of the elected representatives growing further apart, until they cannot agree on anything important.

This happens not because politicians disregard their promises but because they keep them. After all, a litany of research shows that, contrary to popular belief, politicians actually do tend to follow through on their promises. The sincerity voters detected did translate to promises fulfilled.

Simas and Clifford found that there is another way to convey that sincerity, however – one that does not appear to alienate voters or erode the political process.

LEFT AND RIGHT, RIGHT AND WRONG

Clifford was surprised to find that framing issues as right and wrong did not result in more polarization, he said. After all, right and wrong are absolutes, while political accomplishment often involves bridging competing viewpoints through compromise.

Moral stances can also be risky for a politician, Simas said. She has led previous studies showing that voters are relatively forgiving on pragmatic matters, such as budgets and taxes, while voters are “more likely to punish parties and politicians for changing positions on issues with a greater tendency to be moralized” such as same-sex marriage. Going against what many voters consider universal, immutable truths is often seen not as an attempt to account for new circumstances or information, but a betrayal – suggesting the very inflexibility that tends to exacerbate polarization.

But moral convictions are also difficult to enflame or catch in a vicious cycle. They are stable, making them difficult to influence, according to Clifford and Simas. And voters, even skeptical ones, appear to respect politicians with whom they disagree if those politicians seem to firmly, sincerely believe an issue to be one of right and wrong. 

The Biden experiment conducted by Simas and Clifford was not definitive. Voters seemed to find the campaign’s moral arguments more persuasive than pragmatic ones but the correlation was weak enough that it was not statistically significant. The weak correlation might have been due to the difficulty of influencing perceptions of a politician such as Biden, whose reputation has solidified over decades in the public eye, according to Clifford and Simas. But their related experiments, testing the persuasiveness of arguments made by hypothetical candidates, were definitive. Candidates who framed issues as matters of right and wrong appealed to voters. And not just their party’s voters. Even voters from the opposition party tend to view candidates who cast issues in moral terms more favorably, perhaps seeing a right-wrong framing as an act of civic candor, according to Simas and Clifford.

Why do voters respond to this approach? It is rooted in sound psychology.

“When people moralize an issue, they are less likely to change their mind over time … less willing to compromise … and are more resistant to group influence,” Clifford and Simas write, citing various studies. Politicians who speak in moral terms are generally reliable, in other words.

And that reliability translates to trust.

“Some psychological research,” Simas and Clifford write, “suggests that when people view others as caring deeply about a political issue, they view them as more trustworthy – and this effect holds even when they disagree with that person’s position on the issue.”

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HOW THEY DID IT

Scott Clifford, Ph.D. and Elizabeth Simas, Ph.D., conducted four related studies in 2019 and 2020, combining the results into an over-arching paper. In that paper, they explain how voters’ opinions of candidates are affected by two types of campaign statements: those espousing extreme policy platforms and those explaining positions in moral (right and wrong) terms. Two studies polled respondents of varying political beliefs to gauge their opinion on hypothetical candidates and how different kinds of statements changed opinions. A third study did this using then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The fourth study, designed to measure political polarization, presented respondents with hypothetical candidates and asked each respondent how enthusiastic and how angry they would be about each of those hypothetical candidates winning election.