Who is Neoliberal? Durkheimian Individualism and Support for Market Mechanisms

This paper investigates the drivers of support for market mechanisms (competition and optimizing behavior by agents). We elicit such attitudes using concrete and simplified situations where respondents face a tradeoff between an economically efficient situation and a pro-social objective. We find that support for deviation from efficient solutions achieved through market mechanism is strongly correlated with moral values as defined by Haidt (2013): care, fairness, loyalty and authority. While the traditional left-right divide spans some of this variation, an even bigger role is played by what we label “individualism”, the average support for all 4 values, a moral stance orthogonal to the left-right divide. We ground this measure of individualism in the sociology of Emile Durkheim.