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Do political parties influence opinion when citizens have a personal stake in policy? With an experimental design that exploits a naturally occurring, sharp variation in party cues, we study the effects of party cues during a collective bargaining conflict over the salary and work rights for public employees in Denmark. Even in this context—where the self-interest of public employees was strongly mobilized and where their party went against it—we find that party cues move opinion among partisans at least as much as in previous studies. But party cues do not lead citizens to go against their self-interest. Rather, we show that party cues temper the pursuit of self-interest among public employees by moderating the most extreme policy demands. These findings highlight an unappreciated potential of political parties to moderate—not fuel—extreme opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How important is self-interest in people's opinions about public policy? If a policy proposal exempts a subset of the target group from costs that others will have to pay, or denies them benefits that others will enjoy, do they respond according to self-interest? This experimental study distinguishes between true self-interest and affinity for one's in-group by exploiting a common feature of policy proposals: age-based "carve-outs" that prevent otherwise similar subgroups of a population from being affected by the benefits or burdens of a new policy (e.g., cuts to an old-age program that exempt people above a certain age). I find self-interest effects for older Americans exempt from cuts to Medicare and younger people too old to benefit from a hypothetical student debt relief program. These effects vary in ways that are consistent with extant theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When does self-interest influence public opinion on contentious public policies? The bulk of theory in political science suggests that self-interest is only a minor force in public opinion. Using nationally representative survey data, we show how financial and spatial self-interest and partisanship all shape public opinion on opioid treatment policy. We find that a majority of respondents support a redistributive funding model for treatment programs, while treatment funded by taxation based on a community's overdose rate is less popular. Moreover, financial self-interest cross-pressures lower-income Republicans, closing the partisan gap in support by more than half. We also experimentally test how the spatial burden of siting treatment clinics alters policy preferences. People across the political spectrum are less supportive when construction of a clinic is proposed closer to their home. These results highlight how partisanship and self-interest interact in shaping preferences on public policy with concentrated burdens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents Saul Alinsky's theory of community organizing as a democratic alternative to political realism's fixation on the coercive authority of the state and the ethical problems of statesmanship. Alinsky shows how the organizer can be used as a paradigmatic political actor in developing an approach to political ethics that treats power and self-interest as ethical concepts on which to construct a radical vision of democratic politics. His “morality of power” consists of learning how to use relational power and thick self-interest to develop democratic forms of deliberation and action. In contrast to the aim of the statesman, the organizer's goal is not simply to acquire power and learn how to wield it: An organizer helps the powerless learn how to use and think about power for themselves. Organizing is realist, pedagogical, and democratic, and Alinsky's ability to hold these ideas together makes him an important theorist of democratic agency in undemocratic times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Departing from accounts of minority group politics that focus on the role of group identity in advancing group members’ common interests, we investigate political decisions involving tradeoffs between group interests and simple self-interest. Using the case of black Americans, we investigate crystallized group norms about politics, internalized beliefs about group solidarity, and mechanisms for enforcing both through social pressure. Through a series of novel behavioral experiments that offer black subjects individual incentives to defect from the position most favored by black Americans as a group, we test the effects of social pressure to conform. We find that racialized social pressure and internalized beliefs in group solidarity are constraining and depress self-interested behavior. Our results speak to a common conflict—choosing between maximizing group interests and self-interest—and yet also offer specific insight into how blacks remain so homogeneous in partisan politics despite their growing ideological and economic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most scholarship on the moral dimensions of Tocqueville's analysis of democracy focuses on the doctrine of enlightened self-interest. Surprisingly little has been written about his account of the underlying moral shift that makes this doctrine necessary. Drawing principally on Volume II of DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, but also on Tocqueville's letters and notes, I unearth his fascinating and compelling account of why modern democratic man loses his admiration for devotion and embraces self-interest. That account begins from individualism, but also includes democratic man's intellectual and aesthetic tastes, his low estimation of his moral capacities, and weakening religious belief. After examining what Tocqueville saw as the causes of the new moral outlook, I consider what he saw as its most profound implications. Departing from recent trends in Tocqueville scholarship, I argue that is in Tocqueville's account of the modern democratic condition as such that he has the most to offer us today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We argue that large elections may exhibit a moral bias (i.e., conditional on the distribution of preferences within the electorate, alternatives understood by voters to be morally superior are more likely to win in large elections than in small ones). This bias can result from ethical expressive preferences, which include a payoff voters obtain from taking an action they believe to be ethical. In large elections, pivot probability is small, so expressive preferences become more important relative to material self-interest. Ethical expressive preferences can have a disproportionate impact on results in large elections for two reasons. As pivot probability declines, ethical expressive motivations make agents more likely to vote on the basis of ethical considerations than on the basis of narrow self-interest, and the set of agents who choose to vote increasingly consist of agents with large ethical expressive payoffs. We provide experimental evidence that is consistent with the hypothesis of moral bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first extant play of Aristophanes, Acharnians, contains an eerily modern thought-experiment: what if justice is self-interest, rightly understood? The drama examines evidence for the hypothesis in three contexts: international relations; relations between the citizen and the polity; and a special case of the latter, relations between the artist and the polity. The drama shows how rudimentary justice can be secured by promoting economic interests over citizenship and artistic dissent over loyalty. Historically, these thoughts on justice—as refined in Aristophanes' later works—constitute an ancient analog of early liberal thought with its derivation of justice from interest. They represent a pre-Platonic position on justice that differs from both Sophistic and conventional Greek thinking. Normatively, Aristophanes' thought sheds light on weaknesses in modern justice theory. By making the artist's political function the linchpin of a vision of justice, Acharnians suggests a new way to view justice in relation to self-interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rational choice theorists have not clearly articulated their epistemological positions, and for this reason, their arguments in favor of rational choice theory are inconsistent, contradictory, and unpersuasive. To. remedy this problem, I describe how two of the main positions in the philosophy of science, instrumentalist-empiricism and scientific-realism, act as competing epistemological foundations for rational choice theory. I illustrate how these philosophical perspectives help political scientists (1) understand what is at stake in the theoretical debates surrounding the rationality assumption, selfinterest, and methodological individualism, (2) identify inconsistencies in the epistemological positions adopted by rational choice theorists, and (3) assess the feasibility and desirability of a universal theory based on the rationality assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades of participation research show that political activity increases with income, but the participation of senior citizens specifically with regard to Social Security poses an exception to this pattern. Social Security-oriented participation decreases as income rises, in part because lower-income seniors are more dependent on the program. The negative income-participation gradient is especially pronounced for letter writing about the program, but even Social Security-related voting and contributing are less common among higher-income seniors. This is an instance in which self-interest is highly influential: Those who are more dependent are more active. It is also an example of lower-class mobilization with regard to an economic issue, something quite unusual in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]