It might seem as though altruism is a fundamental human characteristic, but research from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca suggests that it is instead strongly linked to one’s political orientation.
The researchers show that left-leaning people are more likely to be altruistic, especially in the international community, whereas conservative individuals are more likely to target their altruism internally to those in their own country.
They analyzed data collected from over 46,000 participants across 68 countries during the period of April and May 2020. The study aimed to explore the association between political ideology, which reflects one’s beliefs and values about society, and generosity.
Political leaning
To measure political ideology, participants were asked to identify their political orientation on a scale ranging from 0 (very left-leaning) to 10 (very right-leaning). Meanwhile, researchers utilized participants’ donation decisions in a task featuring a national and international charity to assess generosity. Participants were asked to indicate what percentage of a given sum of money they would keep for themselves and how much they would donate to a national or international charity working to combat COVID-19.
The study analyzed three types of generosity: national generosity, which is rooted in localism; international generosity, which is more universalistic and oriented beyond national boundaries towards the international community; and a combination of the two, representing overall generosity.
“Analyzing the answers, we found that more left-leaning individuals are more likely to donate in general and also more likely to be generous internationally. More right-leaning people are more likely instead to donate nationally. These findings are very consistent and have been checked to exclude other factors that might have influenced the answers,” the researchers explain. “For example, since the survey was realized during the COVID-19 pandemic, right-leaning people could have shown to be less generous towards COVID-19 charities just because they were less likely to believe COVID-19 to be a big threat. But this was not the case.”
Robust findings
The breadth of the dataset used in this study enabled researchers to draw broad conclusions about the interplay between political ideology and altruism, while also utilizing country-level factors to explore the underlying mechanisms.
“We discovered that a significant driver of cross-country variation is the quality of governance, as measured by the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicator,” the researchers explain. “Our analysis demonstrates that the quality of governance modulates the three correlations between political ideology and the various measures of generosity.”
To put it differently, the inclination to be charitable toward domestic and international communities, regardless of political leaning, is inextricably linked to the efficacy of national institutions. Specifically, in countries with robust institutional quality, individuals tend to exhibit heightened self-interest (with this shift occurring more rapidly among those on the right end of the political spectrum) and decreased national generosity (although right-leaning individuals experience this shift more gradually).
Conversely, as the quality of governance improves, right- and left-leaning individuals demonstrate contrasting attitudes toward international philanthropy: right-leaning individuals tend to donate less, while left-leaning individuals tend to donate more.
“These apparently counterintuitive results suggest that, in countries with high quality of governance, left-leaning people may shift towards different values: they can tend to embrace either universalistic or individualist values that are typically brought forward by countries with high quality of governance,” the researchers conclude. “Both these values put little emphasis on local boundaries. On the other hand, in countries with high quality of governance, right-leaning people may react negatively to universalist values through a cultural backlash, and therefore embrace only the individualist values. And this is reflected on the fact that they increase only in their individualism.”
