2022/01/12 by Charlotte Cavaillé, Anja Neundorf · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Gender Politics and Representation #Political Influence and Corporate Strategies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s11109-021-09768-w
openalex publication_date 2022/01/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Abstract Do voters update their attitudes toward economic issues in line with their material self-interest? The consensus among students of public opinion is that material self-interest plays a very limited role and that competing non-material factors, such as partisanship or ideological predispositions, do most of the heavy lifting. This paper moves beyond comparing the role of material and non-material factors. Instead, we examine how these factors combine to shape policy preferences. Specifically, we propose a friendly amendment to Zaller’s influential model according to which attitudinal change results from the interaction between changes in elite messaging on the one hand and individual political predispositions on the other. In Zaller’s model, partisanship and ideological predispositions help explain why some resist and others embrace new elite messaging. We hypothesize that material self-interest also conditions the effect of elite messaging. Using British individual-level panel data collected over more than a decade, we show that material hardship predicts who, among left-wing voters, resist new right-wing partisan cues. Our results highlights the incremental impact of material self-interest on economic attitudes.