Political ideology and generosity around the globe

In a world severely put under stress by COVID-19, generosity becomes increasingly essential both when able to transcend local boundaries, building upon universalistic values, and when directed toward more local contexts, such as the native country. This study aims to investigate an underresearched determinant of generosity at these two levels, a factor that captures one’s beliefs, values, and opinions about society: political ideology. We study the donation decisions of more than 46,000 participants from 68 countries in a task with the possibility of donating to a national charity and an international one. We test whether more left-leaning individuals display higher generosity in general (H1) and toward international charities (H2). We also examine the association between political ideology and national generosity without hypothesizing any direction. We find that more left-leaning individuals are more likely to donate in general and more likely to be generous internationally. We also observe that more right-leaning individuals are more likely to donate nationally. These results are robust to the inclusion of several controls. In addition, we address a relevant source of cross-country variation, the quality of governance, which is found to have significant informative power in explaining the relationship between political ideology and the different types of generosity. Potential mechanisms underlying the resulting behaviors are discussed.

to protect people from COVID-19. It is measured as the proportion of the daily wage in the corresponding country that participants keep for themselves (Self-interest), give to a national charity (National generosity), or to an international charity (International generosity). These measures are available for more than 46,000 participants in 68 countries.
Related to our study, ref. 9 showed, over a sample of 18,411 participants from 42 countries, that liberals cooperate slightly more than conservatives in a prisoner's dilemma. Compared to it, we innovate in two ways. First, we consider measures about giving, which entail only preferences, rather than cooperation, which also involves beliefs. Second, ours is a COVID-19related study and thus brings evidence on prosocial behavior in emergencies, when it is needed the most. Most recently, ref. 11 studied the link between political ideology and generosity at different administrative levels in the United States and Italy, finding that liberals, compared to conservatives, are more likely to be generous at the national and global levels, while they are similar at the state/regional level. Compared to it, we can draw more general conclusions given the global coverage of our dataset, and we can study the heterogeneity of the effect through countryspecific factors.
In line with our predictions, we find that i) more left-leaning individuals are more likely to donate in general and ii) more likely to be generous internationally. Also, while we were agnostic on donations at the national level, we do find that more right-leaning people are more likely to donate nationally. These findings are robust to the inclusion of several controls, including COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, thus ruling out the explanation that rightleaning people tend to be less generous toward COVID-19 charities because they are less likely to believe in COVID-19.
Last, we study heterogeneity across countries, focusing on an indicator of the quality of governance which has been found to be associated with individualist vs universalist values (14). Related to our work, Romano et al. (9) found that government effectiveness and rule of law moderate the association between political ideology and parochial cooperation as well as general cooperation. We find that these moderations generalize to several other measures of quality of governance and to the relationship between political ideology and generosity. This allows us to propose a theoretical mechanism to explain our findings.

Results
The first three columns of Table 1 report linear regressions predicting self-interest, national generosity, and international generosity as a function of political ideology. More right-leaning individuals are associated with higher self-interest (β = 0.083, t = 11.58, P < 0.001) and lower international generosity (β = −0.086, t = −18.51, P < 0.001), whereas there is no significant correlation between national generosity and political ideology (β = 0.001, t = 0.06, P = 0.95). Taking into account the hierarchical nature of the data by adding country fixed effects, which returns the same outputs as a multilevel mixed-effects model used in previous studies (9,13), columns (4) to (6) confirm the positive association between right-leaning ideology and selfinterest (β = 0.042, t = 5.95, P < 0.001) and the negative correlation between right-leaning ideology and international generosity (β = −0.062, t = −13.88, P < 0.001). It also discloses a positive relationship between right-leaning ideology and national generosity (β = 0.018, t = 2.99, P = 0.003). Columns (7) to (9) include both country fixed effects and a set of controls (gender, age, employed, student, collective narcissism, national identity, individual narcissism, moral circle, moral cooperation, open-mindedness, COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, health condition, and self-ladder) selected according to a correlation analysis between the outcome variables and the additional information contained in the survey. Results confirm that right-leaning ideology is positively associated with selfinterest (β = 0.033, t = 4.30, P < 0.001) and national generosity (β = 0.014, t = 2.13, P = 0.033) and negatively associated with international generosity (β = −0.047, t = −10.10, P < 0.001). All variables have been normalized between 0 and 1; thus, for example, very left-leaning participants are less self-interested than very right-leaning participants by about 3.3% points, a tiny effect in line with previous work on political differences in cooperation (9). We refer to the OSF repository for additional analyses where we control for the severity of the pandemic, compare representative vs convenience samples, and illustrate the stability of the results across countries.
We also examine if the relationship between political ideology and generosity may be influenced by country-level factors. We run a moderation analysis, considering the quality of governance as a source of possible cross-country variation. We use the Worldwide Governance Indicator (WGI), which incorporates six different dimensions of governance: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence/terrorism, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. Fig. 1 shows the mixed-effects linear predictions derived from the interaction between WGI and political ideology for the three outcome variables. Thus, when the quality of governance increases, individuals increase self-interest, with the trend being steeper for right-leaning individuals (Panel A, β = 0.045, z = 5.44, P < 0.001), and decrease national generosity, with the trend being flatter for right-leaning individuals (Panel B, β = 0.024, z = 3.52, P < 0.001). Panel (C) illustrates how right-and left-leaning individuals adopt opposite behaviors toward an international charity when the quality of governance Table 1 (1) (2)  increases: Right-leaning individuals tend to donate less; leftleaning ones tend to donate more (β = −0.069, z = −13.75, P < 0.001). The results are robust to using each index as a separate measure of the quality of governance and to including all the controls.

Discussion
Using a global dataset, we found that left-leaning people, compared to right-leaning people, tend to be more generous in general and toward an international charity. We also observe that right-leaning people tend to donate more at the national level. These results are robust to the inclusion of several controls. We studied the heterogeneity of the effects across countries by making use of an indicator of the quality of governance. We showed that the quality of governance moderates the three correlations between political ideology and the various measures of generosity. These results suggest a double substitution effect. On the one hand, as the quality of governance increases, leftleaning people may tend to embrace either the universalist or the individualist values typically brought forward by countries with high quality of governance; these values put little emphasis on local boundaries (14). On the other hand, as the quality of governance increases, right-leaning people may react negatively to the universalist values, through a cultural backlash (2), and therefore increase only their individualism.
We contribute to previous research in multiple ways. Using a unilateral decision, as opposed to a strategic one (9), we can conclude that political ideology also affects preferences. This is in line with previous work finding a correlation between rightwing ideology and pro-self-orientation (15). Yet, we make a step forward measuring national and international forms of generosity at a global level. This allows us to study the moderation effect of quality of governance and to shed light on the underlying mechanisms driving the results.
In sum, this work provides insights about the link between political ideology and altruistic preferences around the globe and about how this relationship varies as a function of the quality of governance.

Materials and Methods
The individual-level data used in this study have been collected by the International Collaboration on Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19. The survey was approved by the Ethics Board at the University of Kent. All relevant ethical regulations were followed, and all participants were asked to give informed consent. The country-level data leading to the Worldwide Governance Indicator have been downloaded from the World Bank. Details can be found in SI Appendix. Data, Materials, and Software Availability. The dataset and the STATA source code for all the analyses are available on the Open Science Framework repository: https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/xtmwz (16). Previously published data were used for this work (13) OSF Repository: https://doi.org/10.17605/osf. io/tfsza (17).