"Post Darwinian Societies Seminar " #14

Santiago LOPEZ CANTOR (AMSE) 

The Impact of Morality on the Political Support for Public Policies: A Theoretical Analysis

Individual attitudes toward the environment are commonly motivated by moral imperatives, I study the implicit effect of such morality on the prevalence of public policies. This paper investigates the influence of morality on the political support of public policies, with a focus on redistributive policies, under the context of private provision of a public good, i.e. the environment. The theoretical framework employs a modeling approach where agents' behavior is characterized as a convex combination of the rational self-interest of a standard economic agent (homo oeconomicus) and the moral universalization of actions akin to the Kantian categorical imperative (homo kantiensis). By examining how the degree of morality among agents affects societal choices in policy-making, particularly regarding redistributive policies, key insights are revealed. As expected, a larger degree of morality among agents leads to an overall increase in the provision of the public good. However, this heightened morality also results in a reduction in the scale of redistributive policies within equilibrium. These findings shed light on the complex interplay between individual morality and public policy preferences, offering implications for understanding the dynamics of political support and the pursuit of collective welfare in modern societies.