Morality and the Political Process

Abstract

The premise of this paper is that morality has a significant effect on voting, where morality is defined by the source of its returns: what others think about one’s trustworthiness or its internalization conscience. We will show that morality leads people to advocate more interferences with the market than if simple self-interest dominated their decisions. Many aspects of voting are inconsistent with simple self-interest, where voters are only concerned with the consequences of the policies on which they vote. But self-interest models have been virtually the only fruitful models in the social sciences. Hence, we use an expanded self-interest model where we focus on the returns to trustworthiness in addition to the miniscule returns to policy consequences.