Abstract
<p>Recent work has called into question the longstanding intuition that differences in political orientation are attributable to differences in moral values; instead, people may change their reported values to justify their political preferences. To identify which most plausibly causes which, we conducted a three-wave panel study, using quotas to approximate a demographically representative initial sample of U.S. adults and measuring values in four different ways, with each measure grounded in a distinct theoretical framework. We found that: 1) Ideology and partisanship consistently showed greater cross-wave stability than values. 2) Within-subject wave-to-wave shifts in political orientation and values were rarely and weakly related in either direction. Between-subjects analyses replicated existing work: conservatives and liberals tended to value different things. But during these months, respondents did not tend to become more conservative or liberal depending on what they valued, or to come to value anything more or less because of their ideology.</p>