Overview
Politics is sometimes (increasingly perhaps) portrayed as a bare struggle for power. But that is only half the story. Judgements about right and wrong and pursuits of some normative values (such as liberty, equality, and inclusion) or a vision of better society are as much part of politics. Normative political theory explores the realm of abstract values and distant social ideals. One limitation, however, is that such theoretical discussion tends to be detached from how ordinary people think about political issues or even the real-world practice of policy making. So, I hope to answer the question: How can we create a theoretical framework where our normative judgements can effectively be used as resource for thinking about desirable economic institutions and policies? Roughly speaking, my proposal is to use empirical findings about how people think as an input, from which robust normative perspectives are developed through theoretical reasoning. Those robust normative perspectives are then used as epistemic resources for constructing evaluation of policy options that can inform the real-world policy making.
In the past half-century, most of the affluent capitalist democracies seem to have become increasingly “neoliberal,” by which I mean an orientation emphasizing the role of the market and associated ideas of the economic right, such as efficiency, personal responsibility, and autonomy. (NB: Throughout this article, the main context of my discussion is affluent capitalist democracies.) Most people do not necessarily identify themselves as adhering to a coherent set of beliefs like libertarianism. Rather, many tend to hold beliefs that are loosely defined and not always coherent, which I refer to as “neoliberal folk justice”.
One theme of my research is this loosely defined set of attitudes that seems to have a hold on the public psyche. Popular support for the left, on the other hand, has been rare and short-lived. Despite the rise of poverty and economic hardship in the affluent democracies for the past few decades, people have largely kept cheering for the right, which is somewhat puzzling (to me, anyway).
As a political philosopher, I am primarily interested in theories of justice and equality. But in analysing the neoliberal trend, I wished to start with what folk neoliberals on the street believe. Clarity and coherence are extremely important for theories, but people’s beliefs and attitudes can often be unclear and incoherent.
Methodology
It has been relatively rare to study normative values through that empirical methods such as opinion survey compared to other adjacent topics such as party affiliations and political leanings (i.e., whether you consider yourself right wing or left wing etc.). This is not least because normative values tend to be abstract, and the literature of normative political theory (or political philosophy), due partially to increasing sophistication of the field, does not help making sense of those values in lay person’s terms. The abstract nature of normative values is a problem because, in order for an opinion survey to work, words in the questionnaire need to be understandable to the respondents. It has been pointed out that the ordinary people do not have a stable and widely shared understanding of even relatively simple political terms such as the right wing and the left wing. So, the empirical researchers of politics take a great care in constructing opinion surveys in unambiguous terms that are also easy to understand and not too long. That’s hard enough, but it becomes even harder with normative concepts.
I do think the complicated language of political theory is necessary to pin down what a normative concept entails in a precise manner. But, if you are interested in bridging such philosophical account of normative values and what people on the street think, you face a challenge.
I use the methodology that combines opinion surveys with normative political theory. I conduct opinion surveys focusing on relatively basic and stable normative values and use the findings as a starting point for more abstract philosophical discussion. Some experimental features are used for testing if the findings of the surveys are robust to slight changes in the wording of questionnaire. Results of the surveys are used as inputs to further analyses of normative intuitions that are widely held in the affluent democratic societies today. The output, or what I aim to provide at the end, is a mapping of how different normative reasons support different sets of distributive policies. The map would show possible coalitions of normative perspectives that support specific sets of policies that do not presuppose a prior commitment to any theoretical perspective or political ideal.
Some Findings from Surveys
I have conducted a few rounds of survey in the UK and Japan. Here are some findings from the opinion surveys that I conducted with the focus on the values of neoliberal folk justice in the UK. The four values of neoliberal folk justice had been identified through review of existing empirical literature about popular attitude towards economic inequality and economic justice mostly in Europe and the US.
In May 2023, I conducted an online survey of 2,065 adults in Great Britain which tested four core values of neoliberal folk justice—procedural fairness, responsibility, reciprocity, and autonomy—along with two dummy values, solidarity and efficiency. After each value was explained, participants rated how important they considered it for thinking about fair economic policy, choosing from “very important,” “fairly important,” “not very important,” “not at all important,” or “don’t know.”
The results supported my selection of the four values. Comparing the percentages of those who answered “very important” or “fairly important,” the four values all scored 70% or higher, while the dummy values scored much lower. Further analysis revealed clear political differences: in both the 2015 and 2019 general elections, Conservative voters rated the four values significantly higher than Labour voters, with gaps ranging from 10 to 30 percentage points. These findings confirm that the four values resonate particularly strongly with folk neoliberals.
Two years later, I conducted a follow-up survey with a new sample drawn from the same population pool maintained by YouGov. This time, an experimental feature was built in to the survey so that two different sets of questionnaire were randomly assigned to the respondents. The control group is given the identical survey to the one used in the first round. The treatment group is given the questionnaire with somewhat different explanations of the six values.
This is to test the stability of people’s answers to different characterization of the normative values. For example:
-Reciprocity (control): Everyone should contribute, and no one should live off the work of others
-Reciprocity (treatment): Everyone should contribute, and society has a role to enable everyone to contribute
-Responsibility (control): Policies should encourage people to be careful with their money and take responsibility for their own welfare
-Responsibility (treatment): People should be responsible for their choice but not for the things that happen due to good/bad luck
-Efficiency (control): It should be a top priority for government to minimise spending
-Efficiency (treatment): Cost-effectiveness is an essential consideration when it comes to public services
The differences may appear small, but it is the lessons of philosophical studies of normative values that seemingly small differences may have important consequences in what each value mean or imply. Also, psychologically, some specific word or phrase may have disproportionate effect on how people respond. For example, with the original wording, you may question whether “reciprocity” is described in a way too congenial to the right wing view, eliciting a strong support from the right; similarly, the term “top priority” in the original explanation of “efficiency” is too strong such that even people on the right may feel shy about expressing a support. The treatment questionnaire was designed to test if those suspicions are on to something.
The survey result shows some difference between the control and treatment groups, but the variations are relatively small. So, the second round of survey largely confirmed the findings from the first round. One notable difference between the control and treatment is that in the treatment group, support for “reciprocity” is slightly higher (“very important” and “fairly important” amounting to 94%) among those who voted Labour in 2024 General election than Conservative voters (92%) in the same election. This is expected because the explanation in treatment reflected comparatively more left-leaning understanding of reciprocity. But, since the Conservative voters still overwhelmingly support reciprocity with that description, the overall trend remains unchanged.
Future Research Directions
Additional opinion surveys are planned on other sets of prominent normative values (such as liberal egalitarian values and feminist values). Also, based on the survey findings, I will conduct theoretical analyses that will offer repertoires of theoretical arguments regarding the values of neoliberal folk justice (plus other values), each of which represents a potentially salient political position that citizens may adopt. As a final output, I aim to describe potential areas of policy consensus between those different arguments, showing that reaching an agreement on desirable and feasible social welfare policies for the twenty-first century is within the realm of realistic possibility.
