Political ideology through the lens of behavioral economics

Traditionally, social scientists have studied the psychological origins of political attitudes with survey measures. However, there is growing recognition that incentivised decisions in behavioural economic games provide better or at least complementary measures of latent preferences. Much prior research also views politics along a unidimensional left/progressive versus right/conservative spectrum, even though increasing evidence suggests two distinct dimensions of political views, one correlated with attitudes on inequality and a second with attitudes on social control. The former dimension is labelled as economic conservatism/progressivism, and the latter as social conservatism/progressivism. We provide an overview of studies that use economic games to study political ideology under both the unidimensional framework and the two-dimensional framework.