Moral values and political reconfiguration in Western democracies, 1975–2025

The MORALCHANGE project investigates how shifts in moral values have shaped political and cultural divides in Scandinavia over the past 50 years. The project draws on social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's studies of moral values. According to Haidt, these values form two dimensions: universalism, emphasizing equality and global care, and particularism, prioritizing loyalty to specific communities. We argue that tensions between these moral frameworks—and how they have been communicated by political elites and media—have fueled the rise of populist movements and polarization around issues like immigration and identity politics. We pose three key questions: How have the moral values expressed by political elites and media changed over time? How do citizens' moral values relate to their political preferences? And how do moral values shape polarization around immigration and identity politics? We hypothesize that social democrats and traditional news media have increasingly emphasized universalist values, creating a “moral gap” with citizens—a gap populist challengers and alternative media with particularist outlooks have emerged to fill. Our diverse team of scholars from political science, history, and computational linguistics will analyze decades of parliamentary speeches, party platforms, and media coverage from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Surveys and experiments further explore how moral values influence attitudes and behaviors. Why Scandinavia? Known for high trust and low polarization, Scandinavia provides a strong test case. If moral conflicts drive political change here, their impact is likely even greater in other Western democracies. By analyzing how moral dynamics are related to emerging political and cultural divides, we aim to improve our understanding of what drives political change in contemporary democracies.

MORALCHANGE investigates the role of moral values in driving political reconfiguration in Western democracies. We focus on three interrelated trends: declining social democratic parties, rising populist and anti-establishment movements, and polarization around contested issues such as immigration and identity politics. Our core proposition is that the changing relationship between the institutional supply and popular demand of moral values is key to understanding these developments. Our project relies on a strongly interdisciplinary setup. We draw on theory from moral psychology and employ machine-learning and computational text analytics alongside qualitative and historically informed text analysis and survey-based research. Our overarching theoretical approach draws on Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), which provides a rich framework to understand and empirically analyze political and cultural conflict in a contemporary-historical context. The theory posits that morality is a universal human yet culturally variable phenomenon that varies along six foundational values: care, equality, proportionality, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Research on MFT has found that endorsement of these values, or different configurations of them, varies across the political spectrum. We apply these insights to examine the role of moral values in driving political reconfiguration, focusing on Scandinavia in the period 1975--2025. Specifically, we will study: (1) the supply side, by analyzing the moral values of political appeals (by social democrats and their national populist challengers) and of news coverage of the immigration issue over a period of 50 years; (2) the demand side, by tracing the relationship between moral values and political orientation over several decades; and (3) the impact of moral values on disagreements and polarization around identity politics (the struggle for recognition and rights of historically marginalized communities) in present-day Scandinavia