I have only seen such a paper at a conference. The finding was that younger people tend to get more of their preferred policies (if I remembered correctly). Perhaps it was only the preliminarily finding. Haven't seen the paper published yet.

ecpr.eu/Events/Event...

Our study thus speaks against the "electoral explanation" of unequal opinion-policy congruence. @annakurella.bsky.social @nathaliegiger.bsky.social and @janrosset.bsky.social found evidence pointing in a similar direction in an interesting study last year: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

No worries, thank you for sharing yours! :)

I agree!

I should say that this seems likely to be the case. Unfortunately, it is not really possible to control for everything, and I don’t think that an experimental setting can solve this problem.

I think that you are correct to point out that the relationship between variables at the individual level is never one-to-one. In that sense, it is possible that if we could control for every other possible factor, then left-wing individuals would always be at least slightly more egalitarian.

The example you bring up is exactly what I am talking about. It’s important to consider because when individuals vote for the Left, they often take on the left-wing label, no matter the reason for why they voted for the Left.

… whether egalitarian arguments in favour of vegetarianism has a larger effect on left-wing individuals than right-wing individuals. Feel free to email me about any of this if you would like to discuss it more in detail! Very interesting indeed.

If you want to study this (which I think that you should because it sounds fascinating!) then how about using an experiment for very politically interested individuals to see …

So inducing salience for individuals at the individual level does not really create a new left-right scale for them and therefore does not solve the issue in my opinion (if I understand you correctly).

People learn about the left-right dimension and take side depending on the salience at the national level, i.e., what divides the Left and the Right in parliament (or between parties, or between elite members).

Regarding experimentally inducing salience, I don’t know if you can in the way that you are describing it, but that does not matter (I think) because I’m thinking of salience in a different way. The most important part of salience is at the national level, where the left-right scale is “created”.

This is most likely in cases where there is less ideological conflict (such as in new democracies).

and we know that they are not consistently egalitarian (see Malka el al. 2019, BJPS). That means that at the voter level (general population), you could see instances where left-wing individuals are not more egalitarian than right-wing ones.

… (we need more research in more cases but it seems to be true). At this level they are also more likely to be consistently egalitarian. However, at the voter level I’m not sure that this is necessarily true because a lot of voters choose their L-R position for some other reason than egalitarianism,

When it comes to being left- or right-wing, it seems likely that for very politically interested individuals and political activists, your idea holds and there is no need for salience really. Left-wing individuals at this level are probably more egalitarian in all contexts …