Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Albeit widely employed as a standard assumption in macroeconomic theories, the preeminence of self interest in individuals’ behavior has been repeatedly questioned and disproved in an array of microlevel studies. This study restores the rationality assumption, but inserts amendments to it by means of exploring conflicting values arising at the intersection of social justice and self interest, against the backdrop of sharpened economic inequalities stemming from economic globalization. Specifically, it is investigated how voters prioritize among normative and pragmatic values in casting their votes on political parties of different ideological affiliations, and thereby generate value hierarchies. Methodologically, in order to take into account the cross-country variability in terms of different normative values embedded in political culture, hierarchical random-effects models (with voters nested within countries) are estimated on random probability samples of voters in advanced welfare states using two datasets (ISSP 1996 and CID joint ESS-US dataset 2002(2005), respectively). Findings lend support to the notion that individuals are neither irrational ideologues nor strictly utility maximizers, exhibiting a higher propensity to act upon their self interest the weaker their normative beliefs and the higher the stakes involved. Consequently, the voting decision process is not deterministic, but stochastic. The results bear the expectation of significant between-country countries differences, self interest being to varying extents overridden by fairness considerations, and different types of normative beliefs in turn being to varying degrees dominant over self interest. One across-country commonality is that self interest is more sensitive to egalitarian concerns than to individualist values, the threshold levels at which self interest is overridden by social justice considerations being lower.