Liberal, Conservative, or Charitable: Politics Underpins How We Give -
To all the battles, big and small, between Democrats and Republicans, add this one: Who gives more to charity?
Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, tried to tackle the question several years ago in his book Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide and concluded that the answer was Republicans—a finding which, depending on how you feel about AEI, is either obvious or dubious.
Brooks’ thesis, bandied about the blogosphere and the op-ed pages of New York’s respective partisan rags, the Times and the Journal, was essentially this: while liberal households make, on average, more money than conservative ones, they’re more stingy in their giving. A Republican family might donate $1,600 in a typical year; a Democratic one just $1,200. Not only that, Brooks argued, but the right was better about giving blood and making time for volunteer work than the left. Critics protested that the disparity in dollars donated had largely to do with religion—no one hits you up for money so often as a pastor, and nothing puts the squeeze on like an offering plate being handed down the pew—and, after removing churches from the equation, they re-crunched the numbers to produce a more favorable result.
A forthcoming study from the International Journal of Research in Marketing demonstrates that who gives is less interesting a question than why they give. The answer has much to do with the “moral foundations” that underpin our personal politics.
Through a series of three experiments, researchers from Pennsylvania State University, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Rice University showed that just changing a few words in a charity’s mission statement had an impact on whether liberals or conservatives were more likely to make a donation. By calling on touchstone values like “equality” (for Democrats) and “tradition” (for Republicans), the authors were able to re-frame a single non-profit to suit either side of the aisle.