Understanding the distinctive psychologies of the social and economic dimensions of ideology

One of the most enduring frameworks for categorising political beliefs is the left–right spectrum, originally derived from the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly. Many scholars have argued that this distinction remains a useful high-level abstraction (Jost, 2021), and most citizens across many countries can reliably locate themselves on a simple left–right scale (Laponce, 1981; Fuchs & Klingemann, 1990). Some have even suggested that the two poles reflect longstanding psychological orientations toward preserving versus reforming social institutions, a distinction that can be traced back to classical political thought (Hibbing et al., 2014). However, empirical research has consistently shown that political attitudes rarely align along a single underlying dimension. Factor-analytic work typically reveals two distinct ideological domains, social and economic conservatism, rather than a single continuum (Feldman & Johnston, 2014; Fleishman, 1988). Although these dimensions are often correlated in Western democracies, their alignment varies across historical and cultural contexts. For example, in Eastern European nations where redistributive policies represented the ideological status quo until 1989, socially conservative attitudes frequently coexist with left-wing economic preferences (Bakker et al., 2012). In probably the largest cross-national study of political attitudes undertaken to date, Malka and colleagues (2019) analysed data from 325,804 individuals in 99 nations and found that, globally, it was more common for socially conservative and economically liberal attitudes to be negatively correlated (often modestly) than for them to be positively correlated, as is typical in Western industrialised nations. This implies that the social and economic dimensions of ideology may need to be weighted differently when distinguishing between left- and right-wing political positions depending on the country or context (Benoit & Laver, 2006). Taken together, these findings underscore that the relationship between social and economic ideology is neither universal nor stable across contexts. This variability complicates attempts to identify the psychological foundations of ideology using a single left–right scale and motivates approaching social and economic ideology as partially independent constructs. Research relying on a unidimensional left–right scales has typically linked right-wing attitudes to threat-related dispositions, including intolerance of uncertainty (Jost, 2021), low openness to experience and high conscientiousness (Osborne et al., 2021), and heightened perceptions of economic threat (Funke et al., 2016, 2023). These findings suggest that social conservatism may be anchored in motivations for stability, predictability, and group cohesion in response to threat. By contrast, theorising about the psychological basis of economic conservatism has been less developed. Some scholars argue that many core economic concepts, such as economic growth, are historically recent (Polanyi, 1944/2001) and cognitively unnatural (Rubin, 2003; Boyer, 2018). Empirical work shows that economic conservatism is associated with social dominance orientation (SDO), a preference for hierarchy and status (Bobbio et al., 2010; Everett, 2013), which itself tends to increase with socioeconomic advantage (Zubielevitch et al., 2022). Conversely, support for redistribution is linked to higher agreeableness (Bakker, 2017) and (less certainly) greater empathy (Lucas & Kteily, 2018), traits associated with perspective-taking. Given that autistic traits are sometimes associated with reduced social perspective-taking, we make the tentative novel prediction that they may predict higher economic conservatism. Finally, some scholars propose that economic ideology may also reflect assumptions about whether economic interactions are zero-sum or non-zero-sum, as well as individual differences in cooperative orientation and trust. While some argue that understanding non-zero-sum dynamics favours right-leaning economic views (Boyer & Petersen, 2018), we note that redistributive policies constitute forms of large-scale cooperation, implying that cooperative tendencies and trust may instead favour economic liberalism. 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