The notion that political differences boil down to differences in values gained steam with the publication of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. According to Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, political identity is based primarily on the relative strength of five core moral intuitions: Protection from Harm, Loyalty, Sanctity/Purity, Respect for Authority, and Fairness. Relying mostly on Haidt’s Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ), numerous studies have found that Liberals, Conservatives, and Libertarians tend to favor different moral intuitions, on average . That is, the MFQ reveals group differences only - and rather modest ones at that. You can’t actually predict an individual’s politics simply by giving them the MFQ.

But there’s a lot more to political differences than values or moral intuitions. For one thing, people have different understandings of how the world works: what is and what leads to what. And our intuitions are not independent of how we interpret situations. That is, how we feel about things requires some understanding of “what the hell is going on here”. In other words, emotion requires appraisal and appraisal includes a take on the causal dynamics of whatever we’re reacting to. The same holds for values and moral intuitions, which are infused with emotion (a point Haidt stressed with his “Elephant and Rider” metaphor). Put another way: emotions and values are part of a cognitive team that includes appraisal of the situation at hand, embedded in a wider understanding of how the world works in general.

How people understand the state and dynamics of the world they inhabit is sometimes called their “worldview”. So… how do people of various political persuasions differ in their worldviews, especially in their understanding of what is likely to lead to what? One way they differ is in the appreciation of scarcity and the implications of scarcity. By scarcity, I mean limited resources to achieve goals and satisfy desires, resources such as time, money, labor, skill sets, materials, the goodwill of others, and so on. As for the implications of scarcity, I mean how the realization that you can’t have everything you want exactly when you want it forces people to find ways to stretch their resources and prioritize their goals - although sometimes rather ineptly, as in the case of consumers:

“When consumers perceive that a resource is limited and may be insufficient to accomplish goals, they recruit and enact plans to cope with the shortage. We distinguish two common strategies: efficiency planning yields savings by stretching the resource, whereas priority planning does so by sacrificing less important goals… However, the shift to prioritization is often insufficient, and consumers tend to react to insufficient prioritization dysfunctionally, making a bad situation worse. Budgeting helps consumers behave more adaptively. Budgeters respond to constraint with more priority planning than nonbudgeters, and they report fewer dysfunctional behaviors, like overspending and impulsive shopping.” Fernbach, Kan and Lynch, Jr. (2015) Squeezed: Coping with Constraint through Efficiency and Prioritization

Some political consumers have a greater appreciation of scarcity than others. They want their leaders and policy-makers to be mindful of budgets and future financial obligations and to prioritize goals and spending accordingly. They instinctively mistrust politicians who promise lots of goodies at little cost. Or who promise a lot and say Other People will pay for it. These consumers tend not to be on the left side of the political continuum.

References:

Gigerenzer, G. (2008). Moral intuition: Fast and frugal heuristics? In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Moral psychology—Vol. 2. The cognitive science of morality: Intuition and diversity (pp. 1–26). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided By Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books. pp. 9–11. ISBN 978-0-307-37790-6.

Iyer R, Koleva S, Graham J, Ditto P, Haidt J (2012) Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians. PLoS ONE 7(8): e42366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042366

Pearl, J.  (2018) The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. Basic Books, New York.

Philip M. Fernbach, Christina Kan, John G. Lynch, Jr., Squeezed: Coping with Constraint through Efficiency and Prioritization, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 41, Issue 5, 1 February 2015, Pages 1204–1227, https://doi.org/10.1086/679118