Ask people how good society was between 1950 and 2000, and their politics predicts the answer. In every one of six very different countries, people on the right rated that half-century more positively than people on the left.
Follow-up experiments point to the direction of the link. Thinking well of the past did not push people rightward, but bringing their ideology to mind made it shape their view of the past more strongly.
The work is by Francesco Rigoli of the Department of Psychology at City, University of London. It was published online in Political Psychology on March 24, 2024.
The same pattern from Warsaw to Johannesburg
The first study recruited 200 people each in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Mexico and South Africa through the online platform Prolific in October 2022. The countries were picked to differ widely: Poland was communist for most of the period asked about, South Africa lived under apartheid, and Italy and Mexico were dominated by a single party.
Participants rated society from 1950 to 2000, society today, and society in 25 years under a hopeful and a bleak scenario, each on a seven-point scale from very bad to very good. Then they placed themselves on a five-point left to right scale.
In all six countries, a rosier view of the past went with a more right-wing position. The link was strongest in the United States and the United Kingdom. Even in Poland, where the right came to power after communism fell, right-leaning respondents rated the past more favourably.
Views of the present did not separate left from right in any country. In the United States and Poland, and possibly the United Kingdom, people on the left gave higher ratings to the hopeful future scenario.
Which comes first?
In a second study, 200 British participants were asked to write down ways society between 1950 and 2000 was either better or worse than today. Listing the good things did make people rate the past more highly, but it did not move their politics at all.
A third study, with 400 Britons, flipped the test. Half reported their ideology and wrote about their political values before judging the past. In that group the correlation between ideology and rating of the past rose to 0.46, compared with 0.29 in the control group, which judged the past first. The shift came from people at the ends of the spectrum: committed leftists rated the past lower and committed rightists higher once their politics was on their mind.
Rigoli concludes that right-wing ideology “provides a framework to interpret the past as being a better age”, rather than a fondness for the past drawing people to the right.
Two kinds of nostalgia
A final study of 1,200 people across the same six countries asked what they liked about the earlier era. Answers split into two kinds of nostalgia. One was for tradition: more respect for authority, stronger family ties and more respect for traditions. The other was for redistribution: more equal incomes, a stronger welfare state and higher taxes on the rich.
Right-wingers longed for tradition and left-wingers for redistribution, and both kinds of longing warmed people’s view of the past to a similar degree. But ideology predicted nostalgia for tradition much more strongly, which is why the right ends up the more nostalgic camp overall.
Rigoli notes that this mediation analysis used data collected at a single point in time and cannot prove the pathway, and that none of the studies were preregistered. He also points to an earlier study in Turkey that found no link between ideology and collective nostalgia, so the pattern may not hold everywhere.
Study Details:
- Title: Ideology shapes evaluation of history within the general population
- Authors: Francesco Rigoli
- Journal: Political Psychology
- Publication Date: March 24, 2024
- DOI: 10.1111/pops.12971