Association between political ideology and health in Europe.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Subramanian SV
PROVIDER: S-EPMC2764955 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:BackgroundStudies on political ideology and health have found associations between individual ideology and health as well as between ecological measures of political ideology and health. Individual ideology and aggregate measures such as political regimes, however, were never examined simultaneously.Methodology/principal findingsUsing adjusted logistic multilevel models to analyze data on individuals from 29 European countries and Israel, we found that individual ideology and political regime are independently associated with self-rated health. Individuals with rightwing ideologies report better health than leftwing individuals. Respondents from Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics report poorer health than individuals from social democratic, liberal, Christian conservative, and former Mediterranean dictatorship countries. In contrast to individual ideology and political regimes, country level aggregations of individual ideology are not related to reporting poor health.Conclusions/significanceThis study shows that although both individual political ideology and contextual political regime are independently associated with individuals' self-rated health, individual political ideology appears to be more strongly associated with self-rated health than political regime.
| S-EPMC2908625 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Ecological and cross-sectional studies have indicated that conservative political ideology is associated with better health. Longitudinal analyses of mortality are needed because subjective assessments of ideology may confound subjective assessments of health, particularly in cross-sectional analyses.Data were derived from the 2008 General Social Survey-National Death Index data set. Cox proportional analysis models were used to determine whether political party affiliation or political ideology was associated with time to death. Also, we attempted to identify whether self-reported happiness and self-rated health acted as mediators between political beliefs and time to death.In this analysis of 32,830 participants and a total follow-up time of 498,845 person-years, we find that political party affiliation and political ideology are associated with mortality. However, with the exception of independents (adjusted HR (AHR)=0.93, 95% CI 0.90 to 0.97), political party differences are explained by the participants' underlying sociodemographic characteristics. With respect to ideology, conservatives (AHR=1.06, 95% CI 1.01 to 1.12) and moderates (AHR=1.06, 95% CI 1.01 to 1.11) are at greater risk for mortality during follow-up than liberals.Political party affiliation and political ideology appear to be different predictors of mortality.
| S-EPMC5893220 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveThe impact of cognitive function and decline on political ideology is unknown. We studied the relationship between cognition and both political orientation and political policy choices in a population of older persons.DesignLongitudinal investigation.SettingA retirement community and its surroundings in Southern California.Participants151 members of a longitudinal investigation of aging and dementia in the oldest-old (the 90+ Study), mean age 95 years.MeasurementsParticipants self-reported their political ideology (7-point scale from extremely liberal to extremely conservative) and policy preferences for federal spending on public schooling, aid to the poor, and protecting the environment, as well as on preferences on immigration rates, death penalty, and university admission. The same political survey was mailed to participants twice: at time one and 6-months later. Cognitive function based on neurological examination and cognitive testing was classified as normal (55%), cognitive impairment/not dementia (CIND) (33%), or dementia (12%). We calculated rank correlations between ideology and policy choices, stratified by cognitive status, and agreement between Surveys 1 and 2.ResultsPolitical ideology/orientation was highly consistent over a six-month period (84% agreement) among the 122 who returned the second survey, with no significant relationship to cognitive status. Among cognitively impaired (CIND and dementia), however, there was significant loss of consistency between an individual's political orientation and their policy choices. Level of political engagement was high for participants, with more than 90% voting in the 2016 presidential election.ConclusionIn this population of older persons, political identification on the liberal-conservative spectrum was resilient despite cognitive decline, but its meaning and function were changed. For the cognitively impaired it remained a self-defining label, but no longer operated as a higher order framework for orienting specific policy preferences. There appeared to be loss of coherence between the political orientation and political policy choices of cognitively impaired individuals. Given the high level of political engagement of these individuals, these results have substantial public policy implications.
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Project description:Emerging research has begun investigating the neural underpinnings of the biological and psychological differences that drive political ideology, attitudes, and actions. Here, we explore the neurological roots of politics through conducting a large sample, whole-brain analysis of functional connectivity (FC) across common fMRI tasks. Using convolutional neural networks, we develop predictive models of ideology using FC from fMRI scans for nine standard task-based settings in a novel cohort of healthy adults (n = 174, age range: 18 to 40, mean = 21.43) from the Ohio State University Wellbeing Project. Our analyses suggest that liberals and conservatives have noticeable and discriminative differences in FC that can be identified with high accuracy using contemporary artificial intelligence methods and that such analyses complement contemporary models relying on socio-economic and survey-based responses. FC signatures from retrieval, empathy, and monetary reward tasks are identified as important and powerful predictors of conservatism, and activations of the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus are most strongly associated with political affiliation. Although the direction of causality is unclear, this study suggests that the biological and neurological roots of political behavior run much deeper than previously thought.
| S-EPMC9291242 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This research demonstrates how promoting the environment can negatively affect adoption of energy efficiency in the United States because of the political polarization surrounding environmental issues. Study 1 demonstrated that more politically conservative individuals were less in favor of investment in energy-efficient technology than were those who were more politically liberal. This finding was driven primarily by the lessened psychological value that more conservative individuals placed on reducing carbon emissions. Study 2 showed that this difference has consequences: In a real-choice context, more conservative individuals were less likely to purchase a more expensive energy-efficient light bulb when it was labeled with an environmental message than when it was unlabeled. These results highlight the importance of taking into account psychological value-based considerations in the individual adoption of energy-efficient technology in the United States and beyond.
| S-EPMC3677426 | biostudies-other
Project description:Political ideologies summarize dimensions of life that define how a person organizes their public and private behavior, including their attitudes associated with sex, family, education, and personal autonomy. Despite the abstract nature of such sensibilities, fundamental features of political ideology have been found to be deeply connected to basic biological mechanisms that may serve to defend against environmental challenges like contamination and physical threat. These results invite the provocative claim that neural responses to nonpolitical stimuli (like contaminated food or physical threats) should be highly predictive of abstract political opinions (like attitudes toward gun control and abortion). We applied a machine-learning method to fMRI data to test the hypotheses that brain responses to emotionally evocative images predict individual scores on a standard political ideology assay. Disgusting images, especially those related to animal-reminder disgust (e.g., mutilated body), generate neural responses that are highly predictive of political orientation even though these neural predictors do not agree with participants' conscious rating of the stimuli. Images from other affective categories do not support such predictions. Remarkably, brain responses to a single disgusting stimulus were sufficient to make accurate predictions about an individual subject's political ideology. These results provide strong support for the idea that fundamental neural processing differences that emerge under the challenge of emotionally evocative stimuli may serve to structure political beliefs in ways formerly unappreciated.
| S-EPMC4245707 | biostudies-literature
Project description:From an early age, children are willing to pay a personal cost to punish others for violations that do not affect them directly. Various motivations underlie such "costly punishment": People may punish to enforce cooperative norms (amplifying punishment of in-groups) or to express anger at perpetrators (amplifying punishment of out-groups). Thus, group-related values and attitudes (e.g., how much one values fairness or feels out-group hostility) likely shape the development of group-related punishment. The present experiments (N = 269, ages 3-8 from across the United States) tested whether children's punishment varies according to their parents' political ideology-a possible proxy for the value systems transmitted to children intergenerationally. As hypothesized, parents' self-reported political ideology predicted variation in the punishment behavior of their children. Specifically, parental conservatism was associated with children's punishment of out-group members, and parental liberalism was associated with children's punishment of in-group members. These findings demonstrate how differences in group-related ideologies shape punishment across generations.
| S-EPMC9807775 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments to impose major restrictions on individual freedom in order to stop the spread of the virus. With the successful development of a vaccine, these restrictions are likely to become obsolete-on the condition that people get vaccinated. However, parts of the population have reservations against vaccination. While this is not a recent phenomenon, it might prove a critical one in the context of current attempts to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, the task of designing policies suitable for attaining high levels of vaccination deserves enhanced attention. In this study, we use data from the Eurobarometer survey fielded in March 2019. They show that 39% of Europeans consider vaccines to cause the diseases which they should protect against, that 50% believe vaccines have serious side effects, that 32% think that vaccines weaken the immune system, and that 10% do not believe vaccines are tested rigorously before authorization. We find that-even when controlling for important individual-level factors-ideological extremism on both ends of the spectrum explains skepticism of vaccination. We conclude that policymakers must either politicize the issue or form broad alliances among parties and societal groups in order to increase trust in and public support for the vaccines in general and for vaccines against COVID-19 in particular, since the latter were developed in a very short time period and resulted-in particular in case of the AstraZeneca vaccine-in reservations because of the effectiveness and side effects of the new vaccines.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11077-021-09428-0.
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Project description:Individuals often face dilemmas in which non-cooperation serves their self-interest and cooperation favors society at large. Cooperation is often considered the moral choice because it creates equality and fairness among citizens. Accordingly, individuals whose political ideology attaches greater value to equality than to agency and self-reliance should not only cooperate on more rather than less efficient public goods, but also more on public goods from which individuals benefit equally rather than unequally. We examine this possibility by comparing ideologically left-leaning and right-leaning individuals' cooperation on multiple public goods that varied in efficiency and (in)equality in returns. We find that left-leaning individuals cooperate more than right-leaning ones, but only on public goods that benefit everyone equally, and not more on public goods that generate inequalities. Left-leaning individuals also trust and expect others to cooperate more on equal- versus unequal-returns public goods, while self-identified right-leaning individuals do not differentiate between these. Interestingly, ideology does not predict which public good is deemed more morally appropriate to cooperate on. Results combined specify when and why self-identified leftists can(not) be expected to cooperate more than rightists and reveal how moral decision-making depends on structural elements of the public good provision problems that citizens face.
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Project description:The political divide between liberals and conservatives has become quite large and stable, and there appear to be many reasons for disagreements on a wide range of issues. The current research sought to explain these divides and to extend the Uncertainty-Threat Model to intergroup relations, which predicts that more dispositional, perceived-threat and uncertainty-avoidance will be related to more political conservatism. Given that conservatism is also often related to more negativity to low-status groups such as immigrants, the relationship between political ideology and negative attitudes toward immigrants may be mediated by more threat and uncertainty-avoidance. Study 1 tested this mediational hypothesis in a correlational design and showed that both uncertainty-avoidance and perceived realistic and symbolic threat significantly mediated the relationship between political ideology and attitudes toward immigrants, and that perceived threat was the more influential mediator. Study 2 extended threat management to perceived threats from unspecified outgroups, as opposed to the immigrant outgroup, and it replicated all significant mediations. Study 3 replicated the mediations observed in Studies 1 and 2 for political ideology to attitudes toward immigrants with uncertainty-avoidance and perceived threat from immigrants as mediators; it further replicated the mediations to the negative attitudes measure that had been used in Study 2 and it extended it to an objective and indirect bias measure [i.e., Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP)]. Overall, almost all of the results supported the idea that perceived threat and uncertainty-avoidance both mediate the relationship between political ideology and attitudes toward immigrants, and that threat management, as opposed to negativity bias, may be a central concern separating liberals and conservatives. Within all three studies, we also observed more evidence for the Uncertainty-Threat Model predictions than we did for the alternative Extremity Hypothesis, which predicted a quadratic relationship between political ideology and threat and uncertainty, and between political ideology and attitudes toward immigrants.
| S-EPMC6587119 | biostudies-literature