Sample. The Political Role of Freedom and Equality as Human Values. Marc Stewart Wilson & Christopher G. Sibley 1

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1 Marc Stewart Wilson & Christopher G. Sibley 1 This paper summarises three empirical studies investigating the importance of Freedom and Equality in political opinion in New Zealand (NZ). The first two studies provide support for Rokeach s contention that followers of different political viewpoints may be differentiated by their relative endorsements of the values of freedom and equality. i These studies were conducted in NZ which, thanks to a change of electoral system, displays a degree of political heterogeneity absent from earlier tests of the hypothesis. Study one describes the result of content analysis of parliamentary speeches by representatives of five ideologically distinct political parties. Contrary to previous local findings (but consistent with overseas research) the parties were classifiable in their differential endorsement of the target values. The classification related systematically to the parties positions in NZ political climate, with leftwing parties endorsing equality over freedom while the reverse was increasingly true of parties of the right. The second study shows that political preference may be predicted from respondents responses to the Schwartz values inventory, ii with particular importance attributed to the values of universalism and self-direction. In both studies, equality is more important in predicting political affiliation, while limited, the studies suggest that the two-factor model does successfully differentiate parties and their supporters in a multi-party context. Finally, we present a scale summarising the central and core elements of a social representation of individual versus group-based entitlement to resource-allocations in NZ, drawn from qualitative analyses of the discourses of NZ s citizens, its political elites, and the media. People who positioned equality as group-based tended to support the Labour and Green parties and those who positioned equality as meritocracy tended to support the National and NZ First parties. Taken together, these findings indicate that the Equality Positioning Scale provides a valid and reliable measure that contributes to models of the psychological and ideological bases of voting behaviour in NZ. Moreover, our findings suggest that the positioning of equality provided an axis of meaning that aided in the creation and mobilisation of public opinion regarding resource-allocations, land claims, affirmative action programs, and a host of other material issues in the months leading up to the 2005 NZ election Values & Value-Systems Perhaps the most frequently cited definition of what constitutes a human value is offered by Rokeach as an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is 1 The authors wish to acknowledge the invaluable funding for this study provided by the Victoria University of Wellington Internal Grants Committee. Study one has been previously published in a different form as Wilson (2004) while study three has previously been published as Sibley and Wilson (2007, study two).

2 personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence. iii Rokeach argued that, considered together, values form values systems, where a value system is an enduring organisation of beliefs concerning preferable modes of conduct or end-states of existence along a continuum of importance. iv Thus the importance of different values should co-vary with the importance of others in the value system. Human values are strongly prescriptive in nature and form the core around which other less enduring beliefs are organised. As such they are important in a range of other processes. For example, the formation of specific attitudes is presumed to be predicated upon more general values. If attitudes are predicated upon value systems then by extension political attitudes are also predicated upon values. Indeed, Rokeach contended that the traditional left-right (liberalconservative) continuum was not sufficient to differentiate (or make comparisons) between all the varieties of political ideologies active at the time. v In its place, Rokeach proposed that the minimum dimensions necessary to describe different ideologies was two, and outlined a programme of research intended to show that proponents of different political philosophies differ in their relative support for the two values of freedom and equality. For example, adherents of liberal democratic or socialist doctrine should endorse both values equally highly while the reverse is true of Nazist or fascist sympathisers, who should endorse neither. Differential endorsement of the two values is illustrated by Republican or right-wing supporters valuing freedom over equality and communists favouring equality over freedom. Rokeach found support for the two-value hypothesis in content analyses of the written works of idealogues commonly accepted as typifying different political persuasions. vi Rokeach and his colleagues selected as representative of communist, capitalist, fascist, and socialist orientations the writings of Lenin, Goldwater, Hitler, and a number of socialist writers (the argument being that no one individual was sufficiently prototypal). A number of raters content analysed the four 25,000 word excerpts, making frequency counts of the occurrence of sentences containing synonyms for all of Rokeach s terminal and instrumental values. The final analysis compared the relative frequency rankings of all the values for each of the exemplars. The overall importance of freedom and equality was illustrated by the finding that they accounted for 45% of all terminal value occurrences. The relative frequencies seemed to support Rokeach s two-value model, with freedom and equality being ranked first and second (out of seventeen terminal values) most frequent respectively in the socialist excerpts, sixteenth and seventeenth for the Hitler (fascist) excerpts, first and sixteenth for Goldwater (capitalist), and seventeenth and first for Lenin (communist). Later studies by Rous and Lee, vii using samples of American ideologues, and Mahoney, Coogle, and Banks, viii using American presidential inaugural addresses, were consistent with the contention that freedom and equality defined two basic dimensions underlying the themes of the presenters. Levine applied the two-value model in a content analysis of a selection of New Zealand political party programmes. ix Simple frequency counts of the eighteen terminal values, including freedom and equality, specified by Rokeach x were calculated. Given the variations

3 Marc Stewart Wilson & Christopher G. Sibley in the amount of campaign material for the different parties Levine rank ordered the frequency counts of the eighteen values for each party. National ranked freedom first, and equality second, while Labour ranked equality first and freedom third. The smaller parties sampled were differentiated to a greater extent, with Social Credit citing freedom and equality first and third, Socialist Unity fourth and first, and the Values Party endorsing the two values second and eighth respectively. Given the lack of parliamentary representation of the smaller parties it would appear that the middle ground of NZ politics at the time was characterised by Labour and National as system-supporting centre parties. Based on this literature there is general support for the differentiation of ideologies by these two primary values. Unfortunately, beyond the content analyses described previously there has been little consistent support for the proposition that supporters of the different political parties these ideologues represent may be differentiated in the same manner. Several studies, including a number by Rokeach himself, have found that equality was the only useful discriminator of the two values. xi For example, Bishop, Barclay, and Rokeach administered the Rokeach Value Survey to a national probability sample and reported that endorsement of equality differentiated the sample according to their presidential preference, but freedom did not. xii The only application of this research in New Zealand was conducted by Ng and utilised discriminant analysis of value ratings of fee-paying members of the three major parties of the early eighties (National, Labour, and the now defunct Social Credit). xiii Ng found that discriminating values formed two dimensions. Labour and National were only distinguishable on one dimension, with Labour members valuing equality, justice, broadmindedness, a world of peace, and friendship, while National members endorsed obedience, loving, national security, an exciting life, and responsibility. Importantly the value of freedom was not a value significantly associated with either discriminant dimension, consistent with the body of critical literature already described. Rokeach has countered the lack of supportive findings by suggesting that contemporary Western societies (of which America was considered the prototype) are characterised by a strong societal emphasis on freedom, and as a result are sufficiently politically homogeneous that only the smallest minority of the population might be expected to endorse freedom significantly less than equality. xiv While this may indeed be the case it is perhaps surprising that other values, for example a world at peace, do consistently differ across political groups even though that value might be expected to be a dominant Western value as well. Indeed a world at peace is consistently endorsed more than freedom. If this is the case, why does freedom appear to be a value commonly alluded to in content analyses of conservative political discourse? It may be the case that the current socio-political context has given rise to a different emphasis on freedom. Freedom may mean different things to different people and it may be that while freedom remains important, the content associated with it may have changed. At the height of the cold war it might be easier to explain the importance attributed to freedom by right-wing oration, but in contemporary New

4 Zealand after a decade under increasing user-pays systems it may be the case that selfreliance is the dominant feature of individual freedom. For this reason, this research is intended to address the two-value hypothesis in a distinctly different context to that in which it was originally conceived. Additionally, the single-item measures used to test the two-value hypothesis have been criticised for their lack of reliability, as well as their validity in tapping into the complicated constructs that freedom and equality represent. xv Using a multiple-item measure of the two values Mueller was able to successfully differentiate supporters, which indicates that the use of single-item measures may account for some of the non-findings in the two-value literature. This paper, then, is devoted to investigation of the role values may play in political perception and preference. This investigation examines the speeches of political elites and prediction of survey respondent preference based on the values they hold to be important. i M. Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values (New York: Free Press, 1973) ii S. H. Schwartz, Universals in the Structure and Content of Values: Theoretical Advances and Empirical Tests in 20 Countries, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 25 (1992): 1 65 iii Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values, 5 iv Ibid. v Ibid. vi Ibid. vii G. L. Rous & D. E. Lee, Freedom and Equality: Two Values of Political Orientation, Journal of Communication Winter (1978): viii J. Mahoney, C. L. Coogle & P. D. Banks, Values in Presidential Inaugural Addresses: A Test of Rokeach s Two-Factor Theory of Political Ideology, Psychological Reports 55 (1984): ix S. Levine, Values and Politics: A Content Analysis of Party Programmes, in Politics in New Zealand: A Reader, ed. S. Levine (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1978): x Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values. xi V. A. Braithwaite, Beyond Rokeach s Equality-Freedom Model: Two-Dimensional Values in a One- Dimensional World, Journal of Social Issues 50 (1994): 67 94; R. Cochrane, M. Billig & M. Hogg, British Politics and the Two-Value Model, in Understanding Human Values, ed. M. Rokeach (New York: Macmillan, 1979): ; K. Helkama & S. Salminen, The Rokeach Two-Value Model of Political Ideology in Finland, in Recent Advances in Social Psychology: An International Perspective, eds. J. P. Forgas & J. M. Innes (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publications, 1989); Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values; D. Thannhauser & D. Caird, Politics and Values in Australia: Testing Rokeach s Two-Value Model of Politics A Research Note, Australian Journal of Psychology 42 (1990): xii G. F. Bishop, A.M. Barclay & M. Rokeach, Presidential Preferences and Freedom-Equality Value Patterns in the 1968 American Campaign, Journal of Social Psychology 88 (1972): xiii S. H. Ng, Future Development: Power, Values, and Choice, (paper presented at the 20th International Congress of Applied Psychology, Edinburgh, 1982) xiv M. Rokeach, The Two-Value Model of Political Ideology and British Politics, in Understanding Human Values, ed. M. Rokeach (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co, 1979): xv D. J. Mueller, A Test of the Validity of Two Scales on Rokeach s Value Survey, Journal of Social Psychology 94 (1974): ; D. J. Mueller, The Relationship of Political Orientation to the Values of Freedom and Equality, Journal of Psychology 86 (1974):

5 The full article, as well as the responses to it, can be read in Human Beings and Freedom: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, available at