15:30 - 17:45
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Ana Weeks
Discussant/s:
Christopher Wratil
Meeting Room O

Ana Weeks, Hilde Coffé, Sparsha Saha
Quotas or Parity? How the Framing of Positive Action Measures Affects Public Legitimacy

Anne Rasmussen, Stefanie Reher
(When) Does Citizen Engagement affect the Legitimacy of Policy-making? Evidence from a conjoint experiment

Aliza Forman-Rabinovici, Itai Beeri
Connecting descriptive representation in elected bodies to citizen satisfaction with public services

Jae-Hee Jung
Voters' Preferences for Moral Representation

Zachary Greene, Lauren Toner
Observing more, but doing less? Evaluating voters’ attitudes towards intra-party deliberation using a conjoint survey experiment.
Voters' Preferences for Moral Representation
Jae-Hee Jung
University of Oxford

Why do parties use moral rhetoric to explain and justify their policy positions to voters? Conceptualizing moral rhetoric as parties' attempts to represent voters' moral values, I argue that parties use moral rhetoric because it is a type of argumentation that is appealing to a broad set of voters, including both copartisans and non-copartisans. Specifically, I posit that preference for moral rhetoric is high among not only supporters of the party using moral rhetoric, but also among non-supporters who hold highly morally convicted attitudes about politics. Using original survey data from six countries (Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US), I present evidence in support of my argument. The finding that moral rhetoric is attractive to voters beyond the party base provides important nuance to existing claims that morality polarizes and tribalizes politics. The paper contributes to research on party competition, morality and politics, and representation.