Moral Support: How Moral Values Shape Foreign Policy Attitudes

By Joshua D. Kertzer, Kathleen E. Powers, Brian C. Rathbun, Ravi Iyer. Journal of Politics, 2014

246 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although classical international relations theorists largely agreed that public opinion about foreign policy is shaped by moral sentiments, public opinion scholars have yet to explore the content of these moral values, and American IR theorists have tended to exclusively associate morality with liberal idealism. Integrating the study of American foreign policy attitudes with Moral Foundations Theory from social psychology, we present original survey data showing that the five established moral values in psychology—harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/sanctity—are strongly and systematically associated with foreign policy attitudes. The “individualizing” foundations of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity are particularly important drivers of cooperative internationalism and the “binding” foundations of authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/sanctity of militant internationalism. Hawks and hardliners have morals too, just a different set of moral values than the Enlightenment ones emphasized by liberal idealists.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d07735cbdb84d9cd6f8631056fec6b1cb44b3727

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Dustin Tingley
2. J. Alford
3. John R. Hibbing
4. Joshua D. Kertzer

In Social Psychology

1. Kevin B. Smith
2. Nicholas G. Martin
3. Dustin Tingley
4. J. Alford
5. John R. Hibbing
6. P. Hatemi
7. Joshua D. Kertzer

In Sociology and Political Science

1. P. Hatemi
2. Joshua D. Kertzer
3. Kevin B. Smith
4. Nicholas G. Martin
5. Dustin Tingley
6. J. Alford
7. John R. Hibbing
8. John T. Jost

Citations in the corpus

• Political Psychology in International Relations: Beyond the Paradigms (2018, background): “laboratory studies to show that participants who carry the low-activity allele of the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene who also experienced traumatic events in their early lives are more likely to respond aggressively to provocation. Rosen (2005) draws on work in evolutionary biology to explore how o”
• Intuitive Ethics and Political Orientations: Testing Moral Foundations as a Theory of Political Ideology (2017, background): “Indeed, a number of scholarly works explicitly use some variation of the phrase “moral foundations cause/explain/predict/shape political attitudes” (e.g., Haidt 2012; Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom 2012; Inbar et al. 2009; Kertzer et al. 2014; Koleva et al. 2012).”