Morality's role in politics

People may not usually correlate politics with morality. How does moral conviction play a role in moral attitude formation? This is the question that MORALCOMPASS (The moral compass: How moral judgment guides political attitudes), an EU-funded project, seeks to answer.

In order to form a new theoretical framework to answer this question, an intersection of literature from various fields is at play. These include philosophy, psychology, behavioural economics and neuroscience. Various types of data are also involved, such as original experimental and correlational.

The work aims to arrive at a series of publications based on the theory and methodology implemented. Additionally, it hopes to produce more grant applications that will be devoted to state-of-the-art experimental research in political science. An international conference is being organised to promote the advancement of this research.

To date, two articles have been accepted for publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals and two additional projects are currently underway. This work will benefit ties in the EU and in the United States in order to further enhance this field of research.