Time preferences as partisan politics: what do party manifestos show in twenty-two OECD countries?

ABSTRACT

This study examines the correlation between economic freedom and sexual freedom in the twenty-two OECD nations included in the 2020 Comparative Welfare States Dataset (Brady and Stephens, 2020. Comparative welfare states data set. University of North Carolina and WZB Berlin Social Science Center). Our research builds on prior work by Unwin (1934. Sex and culture. Oxford University Press, 1935. Sexual regulations and cultural behaviour. Oxford University Press, 1940. HOPOUSIA or the sexual and economic foundations of a new society. Oskar Piest) and Bose (2013). License to Sin: The Politics and Opportunity Cost of Sexual Freedom. SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2039060 or http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2039060. who suggest that economic freedom and sexual freedom are negatively related. We develop an economic and sexual freedom score from the Manifesto Project (Volkens et al., 2020. The manifesto data collection. In M. P. (MRG/CMP/MARPOR) (Ed.), Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB)) and take the difference between the two and track the difference since primarily the end of World War II. Our hypothesis is that right parties will emphasize more economic freedom in their party platforms than sexual freedom, whereas left parties will have more to say about sexual freedom in their party platforms than economic freedom. The difference is because the parties are attracting different types of voters based on their time preferences.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexual freedom
• economic freedom
• party manifestos
• time preferences
• morality politics

Notes

1 This can be complicated by artificial interest rates set by a central bank.

2 For example, the Fraser Institute tracks economic freedom in the world (http://www.freetheworld.com/)

3 Some of those listed were the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Athenians, the Assyrians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Protestant English (Unwin, 1935). He also talks about other civilizations such as the Mongolians, Hittites, and Egyptians (Unwin 1934, 320).

4 They are adultery, sodomy, rape, and child sexual abuse.

5 Another way to test the time preference cleavage would be by just studying economic freedom.

6 The categorization of some countries might fit better in a different category than the authors suggest.

7 We do not plot centre parties for clarity of graphs.

8 This observation is also true for the median scores.

9 When looking at median scores, Finland is added to the 4 countries where the right party median EF-SF score is negative.

10 While CWSD identifies Democratic party as centre, other databases like the Comparative Political Data Set identifies them as left Armingeon, et al. (2020).