The Moralization of Politics: Causes, Consequences, and Measurement of Moral Conviction

Conflicts in politics often stem from different perspectives about what is right and wrong, and recent work in moral psychology sheds light on this phenomenon. People develop unique moral convictions, or perceptions that something is a moral concern, and these convictions trigger powerful psychological processes that influence political attitudes and actions in a myriad of ways. Despite all we know about the political effects of moral conviction, important questions remain to be answered about where it comes from, how it affects partisan division, and how we measure it. Each empirical chapter of this dissertation sheds light on one of these puzzles.;The first empirical chapter, "The Moral Roots of Partisan Division", points to moral conviction as a driving force of the partisan bias and hostility that increasingly characterize segments of the American electorate. Using data from a nationally representative sample, I show that partisans who tend to moralize politics are more likely to express polarized evaluations of in-party and out-party leaders, even after I control for partisanship and ideology.;The second empirical chapter, "The Physiology of Moral Conviction", supports the previously untested assumption that moral conviction measures actually assess a distinctly moral way of thinking. Using a lab experiment designed to capture self-reported moral conviction and physiological arousal, I find that arousal positively predicts conviction about political objects, but not other dimensions of attitude strength.;The third empirical chapter, "Emotion and the Moralization of Politics", identifies affect as a key factor that encourages attitude moralization. Using a survey experiment embedded in a lab study, I show that prompts designed to heighten emotion evoke stronger moral conviction and physiological arousal about the issue of human trafficking than prompts designed to trigger deliberation or appeal to moral foundations.;Together, these results help explain where moralized attitudes come from and why they are so deep-seated and divisive. They also raise important normative questions about strategies to moralize and demoralize politics. Finally, they invite further research about how moral convictions develop and persist in close social relationships.