Welfare state literature commonly assumes that voters’ attitudes towards welfare policies are “sticky”, which is considered a major obstacle to reform. However, from a moral foundations perspective (Haidt, 2000), this assumption oversees that individual attitudes may change over time and differ between individuals, while moral foundations apply universally. According to Haidt, social persuasion should enable discursive preference re-calibration. To explore this link, I use data from an online debate triggered by an article on the unconditional basic income (UBI). Upon publication on Zeit Online, the online version of Germany’s largest weekly paper, in January 2012, 230 commentators left 1441 comments; an incidence of online participation without precedent for Zeit Online. Using content analysis and quantitative textual analysis, my findings are three-fold. First, commentators can be clearly separated in opponents and supporters of the UBI who do not change position throughout the debate. Second, opponents and supporters vary as to the issues they discuss: while supporters discuss the UBI largely with regard to work motivation, happiness, citizen relations and fiscal reform, opponents stress potential abuses of the UBI, human idleness and risks to the supply of low-quality jobs. Third, I apply Ertel’s (1972, 1981) method to assess cognitive closure calculating dogmatism coefficients that indicate the proportion of dogmatic (e.g. always, must) to non-dogmatic lexemes (e.g. sometimes, could). Both groups’ argumentations are characterised by a medium degree of dogmatism. This finding shows that despite shared morals - an on-going study within our research group demonstrates that UBI opponents and supporters do not differ on Lerner’s (1974) ‘belief in a just world’ - possibilities for preference re-calibration remain untapped. This hints to deficits in the culture of debate around welfare issues, a lack of discursive engagement and cognitive versatility.
