The Political Values of Politicians: Stability and Change over Four Decades

How much do the political values of politicians endure throughout political careers? How much do they change? And how might the endurance and changes be explained? This Paper uses a unique longitudinal data set of face-to-face interviews to investigate the political values and ideals of members of the British House of Commons, both backbenchers and ministers, who completed Rokeach-type value ranking forms and mail-back questionnaires at the beginning of their political careers in 1971-73 and then again forty years later in 2012-14. Of the original 1971-73 sample (N=535, response rate 83%), 129 were still living in 2012-14, and 116 of them (90%) were successfully re-interviewed. Approximately 30% were still active in political careers in either the House of Commons or the House of Lords and most of the rest were still politically active. To measure and analyze these data we will apply a technique developed by Jacoby (2014). We will investigate three sets of hypotheses, each grounded in a theoretical context for explaining changes in political attitudes over the life span (Alwin, Cohen and Newcomb 1991). (1) The first theory addresses generational or cohort effects. (a) For political values and ideals, the key hypothesis is that they are crystallized through political activities and roles played during young adulthood and remain quite stable thereafter. To test this hypothesis we will compare our subject’s value rankings from 1971-73 with the rankings they did in 2012-14. For baselines, we will compare their stability with the stability of our subject’s policy beliefs and beliefs about institutional arrangements over the same period. (b) Some values are clearly political (free enterprise) while others are more personal (intelligence). Our expectation is that the personal values will be more stable because they are more likely to be embedded in stable personality characteristics. (c) We will work with Haidt’s moral foundations theory, which argues that political ideologies are grounded in five innate moral foundations. We have value measures for three of them: care/harm, loyalty/betrayal, and authority/subversion. These values should, on Haidt’s reasoning, be particularly enduring. (2) The second theoretical context addresses life cycle or aging effects. These effects may be biological or social as in established social roles (adolescence) through which people pass and to which they adapt. Organizational psychologists predict that as subjects progress through the organizations in which they work they become more conservative and less innovative. This perspective is reflected in the de-radicalization claims of political activists who accuse MPs of becoming less radical and more conservative the longer they serve in a national parliament. (a) It is difficult to separate this institutional adaptation hypothesis from the general biological/social life cycle claim that people become more conservative as they enter middle and old age. Both would predict that as our subjects moved through the four decades between 1971-73 and 2012-14, they would have become less radical in their party-political values and ideals. This is the hypothesis we will investigate. (3) The third theory addresses historical or period effects, which typically include fundamental changes in areas like technology or social organization that influence people from many different cohorts over long periods of time. The values and political ideals of political parties evolve over time. But occasionally new party leaders introduce dramatically new ideological perspectives, which rapidly take root and become a new orthodoxy. During our four decades, this happened with the advent of Mrs. Thatcher to the Conservative Party leadership (1975-90) and then on the Labour side with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour (1994-2010). Both cases introduced a new emphasis on free enterprise, freedom and individualism, and a de-emphasis on community and economic and social equality. (a) Our hypothesis is that the political values of most of our subjects will move in these directions between 1971-73 and 2012-2014 and that there will be similar movement in each party toward approving other values that were peculiar to the Thatcherism and New Labour projects. (b) We also hypothesize that those who have held ministerial or shadow ministerial office under these leaders will have changed the most, though we will not be able to determine whether they changed in order to be considered for appointment, or changed after they were in office working on the new ideological projects. Alwin, Duane F., Ronald L. Cohen and Theodore M. Newcomb. 1991. Political Attitudes Over the Life Span. Univ. of Wisconsin Press. Jacoby, William G. 2014. “Is There a Culture War? Conflicting Value Structures in American Public Opinion.” APSR, 108, 754-71.