This week we’re looking at how political leaders can play moral politics to their own advantage. How and when can leaders mobilise concern about moral issues to bolster their power?
It’s often said that when a government faces political trouble, nothing boosts public support quite like a threat to national security. History offers vivid examples — from the surge in backing for Margaret Thatcher during the 1982 Falklands War to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 unity wave. But can governments find other ways to rally citizens without invoking fear or conflict?
In this episode, we explore a fascinating new study that suggests they can — by turning to moral issues instead of security ones. Our guest, Dr. Daniel Schulte, Associate Lecturer in Protest, Revolution & Qualitative Methods at UCL’s Department of Political Science, discusses his research on how governments may use moral framing to distract or unite publics when under pressure, drawing on experimental evidence from Turkey.
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[00:00:04] Alan Renwick: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we're looking at how political leaders can play moral politics to their own advantage. How and when can leaders mobilise concern about moral issues to bolster their power?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick, and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
It has often been said that if a government is in trouble with voters, one thing that can help it out is a threat to the country's security. The public will then rally round the flag and the government's fortunes will revive. And certainly we have seen big increases in support, for example, for Margaret Thatcher's government amidst the Falkland's War of 1982, or for the Bush administration in the United States in the wake of 9/11.
But for a government to engineer such a threat against its own country would be to say the least foolhardy. And let's be clear, there's no suggestion that at all, that was the case for the Falklands or 9/11. Governments can talk up or exaggerate existing security threats. We might think of President Trump's deployment of military forces. In various US cities, for example, but are there alternatives to this securitisation route? Can those in power distract publics from political troubles in other ways?
Well, a new study explores one such possibility. It looks at the degree to which governments can use moral issues as alternatives to security threats and drawing on evidence from experimental research conducted in Turkey it concludes that they can. The author of that study is Dr. Daniel Schulte, associate Lecturer in Protest, Revolution and Qualitative Methods, there's a title, here in the UCL Department of Political Science, and I'm delighted that Daniel joins me now.
Welcome Daniel to UCL Uncovering Politics. It's great to have you on and, before we go into your own analysis, can we maybe explore the background a little bit further? I suggested there that leaders can sometimes use security threats, perhaps also exaggerate, even create such threats in order to advance their own interests. What do we already know about how that's done, how often it's done?
[00:02:34] Daniel Schultz: Hi Alan. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. Yes there is a large literature called Rally Around the Flag or Diversionary War literature, which argues that leaders can turn to security threats.
And you're right to point out that, that often these threats are real ones that occur. But other times they can manipulate information, about these threats and bolster them. And you gave some great examples from the literature already with the Falklands War and 9/11. So just to turn to the 9/11 example, Bush's support and popularity spiked to approximately 90% after the events of 9/11.
And other governments around the world often turn to security, so an example I use in the paper is the Turkish government often politicising Kurdish security issues, so a minority ethnic group in the southeast of Turkey and Northern Syria, and they often politicise these during election periods and specifically between 2015 and 2019. And another example in the paper comes from India where the Indian government highlighted an alleged terrorist threat within Pakistan before the 2019 election. So those are two, two examples that the paper discusses in terms of the security literature.
[00:03:52] Alan Renwick: So this idea of security being used and security threats being used by leaders in power in order to strengthen their position is quite a kind of familiar one. In the paper that we're talking about here you want to look at something slightly different from that and you want to study whether moral issues can be used in a similar way. Why was it that you wanted to get into that question?
[00:04:17] Daniel Schultz: So my PhD thesis and book project focuses on the role that morality policy issues like abortion, LGBTQ rights and religious education can play for would be autocrats coming to power and trying to stay in power.
And so this article was one of the chapters of my PhD thesis and it provides experimental evidence for one of the uses that would be autocrats can use morality policy which is to maintain power or what we call regime maintenance. They try to stay in power and morality policy issues is one of multiple different tools in a toolbox that they can turn to.
[00:05:01] Alan Renwick: So we'll get onto exploring the rest of that, the PhD thesis in the book project towards the end, hopefully. But for the moment, let's focus in on this particular segment. So you were talking about the way in which they can use moral issues in these sorts of ways. What do we actually mean by moral issues here?
[00:05:16] Daniel Schultz: Yes. So morality issues are non-economic value-based topics that involve conflicts over norms about the right way of living. And two types of morality issues that I focus on in the paper are ones over religious buildings or religious sites. And the other one is focused on traditional family values.
[00:05:39] Alan Renwick: And why would we expect. So, so, well, first of all, before I ask that, you are, you said there that you're focusing on authoritarian leaders in this work. Is that right?
[00:05:48] Daniel Schultz: Correct. So in, in Turkey, the term that's often used is electoral authoritarian. So somewhere between a full authoritarian and a democracy. Sometimes called like a hybrid regime.
[00:06:00] Alan Renwick: And okay. And your argument is that, or your hypothesis is, your expectation is that leaders of that kind are likely to use moral issues in order to try to shore up their own popularity, yeah?
[00:06:13] Daniel Schultz: That, that's the basic argument. Obviously there's contingency and there's different issues that the leaders can turn to. But the literature has not put, in my opinion, put enough emphasis on the role that morality policy issues can play for these electoral authoritarian regimes, but especially ones that have a religious nationalist context where a large percentage of the population would be self-identifying and affiliated with a dominant religion.
[00:06:41] Alan Renwick: And can you just spell out for a little bit for us why you would expect authoritarian leaders to use morality politics in this way? I mean, is it, is the underlying mechanism the same sort of thing as we see with security issues? Is it a different kind of mechanism?
[00:06:58] Daniel Schultz: So the literature on the security agenda setting points to, kind of, patriotism, so loyalty to the nation among citizens as being like a major mechanism by which this rally around the flag, rallying around the leader dynamic plays out. So there's like fear of national death or humiliation that can motivate citizens in the face of a security threat, like 9/11 to, kind of, come together to put aside partisan divides and unite amongst the leader for this specific fight against an alleged enemy.
Morality agenda setting works in terms of religious devotion, so loyalty to the religious community. And an important scope condition, as I mentioned, is there needs to be high religiosity citizens or a significant portion of the population kind of affiliated with a dominant religion that, that provides the source for these religious values. And another mechanism is the fear of the diminishing role of religious values in society.
[00:08:01] Alan Renwick: Yeah. So it's actually a similar kind of mechanism, if I understand correctly, to the case of a security threat. It's a kind of threat to the moral values of the society that, that is, that people are thinking of here. Would that be fair?
[00:08:15] Daniel Schultz: In general terms that, that's correct. So, morality is about the fear of the diminishing role of religious values in society, and also pride in this shared religious heritage.
[00:08:25] Alan Renwick: Okay, in essence, what you are thinking is that just as with the case of security threat, if we say, see, a leader is facing unpopularity because of corruption scandals or economic troubles, whatever it might be. In the case of a security threat, the idea of rallying round the flag is the idea that, well, if you get people to think that there's a big external threat threatening the nation, then the nation has to come together and come together behind the leader in order to, to focus on repelling that threat and people kind of stop thinking so much about the economic challenges or the corruption allegations or whatever it might be, were the source of unhappiness.
And similarly in the case of morality politics and the use of morality politics in the way you're describing the idea, if I understand correctly, but again, correct, correct us if I'm wrong, is that leaders are facing challenges. Again, it may be they're facing economic woes, whatever it might be. And I think how can we kind of ring people around behind me as leader? And the idea again is that you get people to fear that there's some kind of threat to the moral order and then they will to some extent forget the other concerns and just focus on confronting that threat as a community as a whole?
[00:09:43] Daniel Schultz: That's correct, Alan. So an important literature that I'm building upon is the authoritarian propaganda literature. And within that literature there's emphasis on what is called agenda setting. So agenda setting is about shifting the agenda or what the government is talking about in the news or in speeches to an issue that is favorable to the government.
And in my paper, I'm focusing on a time in Turkey where there's an economic crisis as well as the COVID pandemic and these are crises facing the Turkish government. And, the idea is that governments want to shift from unfavorable topics, like poor economic performance, rising costs of living, inflation, plummeting value of the Turkish lira, and they wanna shift to issues that they can own and that, that are that they can show as being victories for them.
[00:10:37] Alan Renwick: Can you say a little bit about what kinds of moral issues might work here and that you, I mean, are there different kinds of moral issues? Are they all sort of the same?
[00:10:47] Daniel Schultz: Right. So in my paper I test two types of morality issues that were already being politicised by the Turkish government at the same time. And so the paper goes into the history of those two issues to say that this is not just a, an experiment that is kind of making up kind of different vignettes or scenarios, but they're actually based upon what the Turkish government was actually already kind of politicising in the news. So the first issue is the Hagia Sophia Mosque issue. So, for the listeners the Hagia Sophia, you know, was originally a, a Byzantine church and
[00:11:26] Alan Renwick: this is this hugely famous
[00:11:28] Daniel Schultz: yes,
[00:11:28] Alan Renwick: extraordinary building in Istanbul.
[00:11:30] Daniel Schultz: Correct.
[00:11:30] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:11:31] Daniel Schultz: So during the Republican period in Turkey, so, this building was a museum from the 1930s up until 2020. And in 2020 the government changed the status of the Hagia Sophia from a museum into a mosque. So that's one. And I situate this very specific case within the literature on religious buildings and religious worship centers and how there are conflicts around the world between different groups of people who are claiming different buildings as part of their religious heritage and culture.
The second one which I call, and I situate into the broader family of traditional family values, is the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention issue. The Istanbul Convention was a treaty, an international treaty, which Turkey signed in 2010 which was to fight domestic violence. So, in a way to help protect and strengthen women's rights issues in, in Turkey. So the government signed onto this, but in 2021, they withdrew from the treaty citing language saying that this treaty was imposing gender ideology and forcing kind of Western values related to homosexuality on onto Turkey. A place where such western values were foreign.
[00:12:51] Alan Renwick: And do you have these two moral issues in the study just because it's useful to have several issues because it's always possible that one issue that you choose might have some particular issue, some particular features that you haven't really thought of that would skew the results so it's just useful to have several issues. Or is it that actually you are theorising a difference between different kinds of moral issues?
[00:13:15] Daniel Schultz: Based on my research there are reasons to think that different morality policy issues are not the same. And different issues have different strengths and weaknesses or costs and benefits. And by including two different morality issues I could find, attest whether different issues would have different effects. At the same time, these were two important and issues that were being discussed by by the Turkish government. And I wanted to include them in my survey.
[00:13:47] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Okay. So you were kind of theorising that there might be differences between issues, but you didn't kind of specifically hypothesise that one would have a stronger effect than the other one, for example.
[00:13:58] Daniel Schultz: That's correct. There's, there was no formal hypothesis from the outset when I pre-registered this to, to have differences between the morality issues, but that was an interesting finding that came up.
[00:14:10] Alan Renwick: Which we will get to in just a moment. So a good tease then. Before we get to the findings though, let's just set out the design of this study a little bit more. We've given some hints. We've talked about how this is done in Turkey. We've talked about the fact that you are looking at these two morality issues and you're comparing them with a security threat as well. We've, I think we've hinted at the fact that this is done on the basis of a survey of public opinion. Do you want to just set out in a little bit more detail of what is the design of the study?
[00:14:44] Daniel Schultz: So the main method here is a survey experiment that was fielded online, to an online panel in Turkey. And this survey was taken by Turkish citizens and it was fielded by a reliable data company called Dynata, which was formerly Survey Sampling International. And the total sample is a little bit more than a thousand different respondents. So 1,125 and this was fielded in 2022.
[00:15:15] Alan Renwick: Yeah. And we should just make sure everyone's up to speed with this. So by survey experiment, you mean a survey in which essentially you vary the wording of some of the questions between different respondents and then you look at how does the variation make a difference to their responses, to further questions thereafter.
[00:15:34] Daniel Schultz: That's correct.
So the sample was divided into four different groups and each group had about 270 or 280 respondents in them. One was one, one of the groups was the control condition, which the respondents getting that, that condition were reminded about, the poor economic situation. So recently, the economic situation in Turkey has garnered headlines with increasing prices and inflation and the decreasing value of the Turkish lira.
And then in the security issue treatment, the respondents also read that same prompt about the poor economy, but then they were told to imagine that the government made a statement on the matter. Turkey and the region has been facing serious security challenges, Turkey's struggle for survival is more important than the increased cost of living. So that's the security issue treatment.
And then the morality issue treatments give the respondents information about the economic situation. But instead of talking about the security situation, they say, imagine that the government has been saying the government has been restoring dignity to Turkey's Ottoman heritage by converting the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque. Turkey's struggle to restore dignity to Turkey's religious heritage is more important than the increased cost of living.
[00:16:50] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:16:51] Daniel Schultz: And then for the, the last morality issue is quite similar, but instead focused on the Istanbul Convention issue.
[00:16:58] Alan Renwick: Fantastic. Yeah. So you ask people to read these little bits of text. And then so, so the first text just about the economy. Second text, little bit on the economy, but also the security threat. And then the third and fourth, little bit about the economy and then the two different moral issues. And essentially you are just kind of reminding people of, prompting people to think, oh, security is an issue or this moral concern might be an issue. And then you're asking them a few questions about their perceptions of economic policy, is that right?
[00:17:31] Daniel Schultz: Correct. So the two outcomes that were measured in the study were, the first, the importance of the economy. And second the respondents' overall support for the government's economic policy.
[00:17:44] Alan Renwick: Yeah. And what you're wanting to see is if you remind people of the security threat or the moral threat does that lead to a difference in how they, they respond to those further questions about the economy relative to if they didn't get any of that and they just got the information about the economic situation?
[00:18:04] Daniel Schultz: That's correct Alan. So I thought that these, or I hypothesised that these different treatments would decrease the importance of the economy and increase the support for government's economic policy.
[00:18:18] Alan Renwick: Yeah, so the first of those ideas is that you're, as you, you are kind of changing what's on people's agendas, if you like. So you are reducing the salience, reducing the importance of that people attached to the economy, relative to other issues and therefore you're also causing people perhaps to forget some of the economic problems and therefore be more supportive of the government position on the economy?
[00:18:44] Daniel Schultz: That's correct.
[00:18:45] Alan Renwick: Great. Should we say anything more about the design of the study before we go into the findings? Do you want just to tell us what the specific hypotheses were?
[00:18:56] Daniel Schultz: Yes. So the first hypothesis is that respondents receiving any of these different treatment conditions, whether they're security or morality should have a higher support of government policy and a lower importance of economy than those in the control group. And this is important, important because at the time that this was fielded, Turkey was going through a huge economic crisis with approximately, the official stats say that there was like 80% inflation, in, in the year on 2022. And the news was constantly talking about the rising cost of products at the grocery stores.
And so while we might think that agenda sending setting might not be very effective because citizens can go to the grocery store and see that the prices of vegetables and fruits are high. On the other hand, you know, citizens want it. They're hungry for a message trying to explain what is going on. And so the literature I was building upon was predicting that even in this economic crisis agenda setting should be effective.
[00:20:05] Alan Renwick: Okay, so that's the core hypothesis. You've got a few other more specific hypotheses, but let's perhaps get into the results on the sort of core question of whether mentioning these security issues and moral issues makes a difference or not. On that key point, what did you find?
[00:20:23] Daniel Schultz: So, I find that security, the security treatment, had a strong effect on the support for government policy outcome. While the Hagia Sophia morality treatment had a stronger effect on decreasing citizens evaluation of the importance of the economy.
[00:20:39] Alan Renwick: So it's a kind of curious kind of mixture of effects there. Do we have, do you have any sense of what's going on there? Can how should we interpret those findings?
[00:20:48] Daniel Schultz: So the Hagia Sophia morality treatment, it had a strong effect on decreasing citizens evaluations of the importance of the economy, whereas the Istanbul Convention and treatment did not have statistically significant results. So, when comparing these two issues, I felt like that these two issues kind of represent different types of morality issues.
So the Hagia Sophia issue was more kind of popular amongst the broader population. But there was a significant portion of the population in Turkey that supported the Istanbul Convention, and was against the government overturning it. And so that issue was less popular than the Hagia Sophia morality treatment.
When it comes to why I didn't find effects for both outcomes for for security, I talk about how so, a previous paper that, that I'm extending by Selim Erdem Aytaç found findings for security when that survey, when his survey was fielded in 2019 during an economic crisis, but 2022 was even more of an economic crisis.
And so while I was expecting to have results for security in for both outcomes in the paper I suggest that, that first 2022 was a larger economic crisis than in 2019. And also the discussion on security issues, you have to remember that Russia had just invaded Ukraine at that time and so this was a changed kind of environment in terms of, kind of, security issues. And so this is an important kind of context that I think might explain. But future work can really probe in to try to better understand these. But those are two of the explanations that I try to offer in the paper.
[00:22:35] Alan Renwick: It's really interesting though. It kind of, it gives us at least very preliminary suggestions that there are some circumstances in which politicians, leaders, can use morality, politics, and indeed security threats, in order to distract attention from other matters. But there's only so far they can go here. If the other matters are really strong and really kind of forceful in people's minds, then people are not going to be distracted away. So sounds like you're suggesting that combining your study with previous work done by others, we can start maybe to see a pattern of that kind.
[00:23:14] Daniel Schultz: The other point to to emphasise is that I also had a hypothesis too that was looking at, kind of, these treatment effects on specific subsets of the population. And I did find evidence for, among high religiosity citizens that all three treatments of the security and both the morality issues amongst high religiosity citizens had an effect, a statistically significant effect.
[00:23:41] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:23:41] Daniel Schultz: On, on, on shift, on shifting their support for government economic policy.
[00:23:45] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Which is kind of what you would expect given the mechanism that you outlined earlier on that if it's that, that people's sense of religious identity in a way is being threatened by by what the government is saying it is working against, then more religious people would have stronger sense of religious identity and therefore they would be more affected by that. You would expect that?
[00:24:05] Daniel Schultz: That's correct.
[00:24:06] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Okay. Really interesting. So that is the specific study. We could go a little bit further. There are some more hypotheses there. But time is slightly against us. So let's just think about, do these findings generalise? So you're focusing in on Turkey at, as you've said, a very particular point in time in 2022. Would you expect these kinds of findings to extend to other places, to other times as well? What are you able to say about that?
[00:24:35] Daniel Schultz: So, an important scope condition for the argument of the ability of morality issues to, to have an effect in terms of agenda setting is I think that we need a religious nationalist context, right? Where morality issues have salience. And so in, in the paper I say that future work should explore the generalisability of these findings beyond Turkey, perhaps in places such as India, Israel, Poland, Russia, and other countries with a dominant religious tradition in highly religious populations.
[00:25:07] Alan Renwick: Yeah. And would you expect these mechanisms to extend beyond kind of authoritarian leaning settings as well? I mean, you know, the examples that, that I talked about right at the start of the, the episode were from the UK in the 1980s, the US in 2001 not cases that we would particularly think of as examples of democratic backsliding or anything like that. So the idea that rallying round the flag effects function in well-functioning democracies is I think clearly established. Would this, would morality politics be usable in those settings too?
[00:25:45] Daniel Schultz: I think an important kind of difference between full democracies and electoral authoritarian or fully authoritarian systems or regimes, are that in authoritarian regimes the government has greater control over the media. And because of that, I think that the and some work that I've read by others have suggested that these agenda setting effects can have longer, longer lasting duration than those in democracies.
[00:26:12] Alan Renwick: Okay. Interesting. Good. Something further to study, no doubt in, in future work. Final question then. You mentioned at the start that this work comes from your PhD thesis and that you're now turning that PhD thesis into a book looking at morality politics in autocratising societies. What's the overall thesis of the book?
[00:26:36] Daniel Schultz: So, the overall idea is that morality politics can play two vital strategic purposes for authoritarian governments. Allowing them to first neutralise institutional veto players when they're coming to power. So an initial phase when they're trying to establish themselves and centralise and consolidate power. And second is to serve as a tool of diversion to distract citizens from crisis such as the economic recessions, which I discussed in this paper today. And this is during like a second phase which I call the regime maintenance phase.
[00:27:09] Alan Renwick: Will listeners have to wait long until the book comes out?
[00:27:13] Daniel Schultz: Well, I'm working on, on the book currently and looking to secure a contract. And so, I'm hoping that the book would come out in the next year or two.
[00:27:22] Alan Renwick: Well, let us hope so. Daniel, this has been really interesting. I've found this such an engaging conversation. You've you've taken a concept that I guess is quite familiar to quite a few people around the idea of the security threat being used in these ways. And you've just kind of extended that and explored that in new ways and revealed important evidence on these matters. So thank you so much.
[00:27:42] Daniel Schultz: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:27:43] Alan Renwick: We have been discussing the article Rallying around the mosque or flag: The effects of morality and security agenda setting on political performance in Turkey by Daniel Schulte, which was published over the summer in the journal Mediterranean Politics and we will as ever put details in the show notes for this episode.
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I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham and Kaiser Kang. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
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