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Framing universal basic income around core moral beliefs about social equality and family tradition can shift Americans’ attitudes toward the policy across party lines, according to new research published in American Politics Research. A national survey experiment indicates that people’s underlying personal values, rather than their political party labels alone, guide whether they accept or reject arguments for guaranteed government cash payments. Republicans who personally value equality became more favorable toward the policy when it was framed as advancing that value, though that result rested on a handful of respondents.
Universal basic income, often abbreviated as UBI, is a social policy proposal in which the government sends regular, unconditional cash payments to every adult citizen, regardless of their income, employment status, or financial need. A number of American cities have tested smaller guaranteed income pilot programs in recent years, yet the idea faces stiff resistance at the national level, particularly among Republicans and conservatives who generally oppose expanding government spending.
Political scientists have debated whether changing how the policy is framed, meaning emphasizing certain aspects or consequences of an issue in public messaging, can overcome this partisan divide. In a 2021 survey experiment by three of the same authors, neither factual policy details nor broad value appeals persuaded Americans to cross party lines on basic income.
Similarly, a 2022 experimental study of American adults found that pitching universal basic income around conservative economic priorities, such as shrinking government bureaucracy or encouraging personal responsibility, failed to soften right-wing opposition. The new study’s authors argue that earlier work, including their own, had not tested frames tied to the specific values that divide American politics.
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Other evidence suggests that moral appeals can sometimes succeed where purely economic arguments stall. For instance, an experiment with liberal and conservative participants indicated that prompting people to reflect on the personal relevance of an opposing side’s concern narrowed ideological gaps in moral judgment. Along similar lines, a 2023 study of U.S. conservatives found that reframing basic income around conservative moral principles reduced hostility toward cash assistance.
In the new study, political scientists Changlip Kim and Soren Jordan of the Department of Political Science at Texas A&M University, along with colleagues at other institutions, examined how universal basic income maps onto two foundational values that divide American politics: egalitarianism and moral traditionalism.
Egalitarianism refers to the belief that society and government should actively reduce economic and social inequalities so everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. Moral traditionalism refers to a preference for preserving established social norms and conventional family structures, paired with skepticism toward rapid cultural change.
“We were motivated initially by watching the journalistic coverage of stimulus payments during the federal response to the COVID pandemic,” study co-author Jordan told PsyPost. “It feels like a long time ago now, but a variety of stories talked about how families were spending time together at home, how people were saving more and felt on more equal financial footing, or how people were spending this new disposable income on suspect goods (like alcohol). Those patterns seemed to map pretty clearly to underlying, polarizing values of moral traditionalism and egalitarianism.”
Beyond stories about household savings and family time, pandemic news stories also highlighted how stimulus checks eased poverty while raising concerns that cash handouts widened economic divides or funded illicit drug purchases. To test how these competing narratives affect public opinion, the researchers conducted a survey experiment in May 2022 using a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults recruited through the polling firm YouGov. Out of 2,500 initial participants, 2,024 completed all questions measuring their personal values and were included in the final analysis.
Participants answered two sets of four questions to measure how strongly they supported egalitarianism and moral traditionalism, allowing the researchers to classify each person as supporting, opposing, or feeling neutral toward each value. Each participant was then randomly assigned to read either an unrelated control story about baseball or one of four short news-style articles adapted from real media stories about pandemic stimulus checks.
Each treatment article defined universal basic income and quoted a hypothetical citizen and a policy expert connecting the policy to one of the two values. Two articles focused on egalitarianism, describing basic income either as giving everyone an “equal shot” or as splitting society into “those who work and those who don’t.” The other two focused on moral traditionalism, portraying the payments either as helping households return to a “traditional, single-income family” or as undermining families by funding people for whom “‘getting by’ means getting high.” Afterward, participants rated their support for universal basic income on a scale from 1 to 7, where lower scores reflected opposition and higher scores reflected stronger support.
Across the experiment, how people reacted to the articles depended primarily on their underlying personal values rather than their political party. Once participants were grouped by whether they favored or opposed equality and tradition, Democrats, Independents, and Republicans tended to move in the same direction after reading the same message.
Among participants who held neutral views on the highlighted value, the articles produced modest shifts that mostly followed the tone of the story. Reading a positive article nudged support upward by about 0.6 points on the 7-point scale among value-neutral Republicans for both equality and tradition, and by roughly 1.0 point among value-neutral Independents who read the pro-tradition story. Shifts in the remaining neutral groups that read positive articles were not statistically significant. Reading that basic income harms equality reduced support by 0.7 points among neutral Democrats and 0.5 points among neutral Republicans, while reading that it harms traditional morality did not produce statistically significant changes among neutral respondents in any party.
Messages centered on egalitarianism produced consistent effects among people with strong views on equality. When participants who personally value equality read that basic income gives everyone a fair shake, support climbed across Democrats, Independents, and egalitarian Republicans alike, though only 10 Republicans fell into that group. By contrast, when people who oppose egalitarianism read that basic income promotes equality, the message triggered a backlash, driving down support among anti-egalitarian Republicans and Independents. Only two Democrats fell into that group, too few to interpret.
“The clear takeaway is that UBI is more than just partisan,” Jordan said. “Framing the policy in terms of a value that an individual supports, especially egalitarian values, leads both Democrats and Republicans to be more supportive of UBI.”
Articles warning that basic income violates equality by dividing workers from non-workers produced two unexpected patterns. Even among Independents and Republicans who oppose egalitarianism, reading that argument lowered support for the policy rather than raising it. Meanwhile, a small subset of 11 egalitarian Republicans actually expressed greater support after reading that basic income undermines equality, a result for which the authors stated they had no strong explanation.
Moral traditionalism produced no consistent pattern. Among people who favor traditional moral norms, reading that cash payments fuel drug use and erode family life lowered support for basic income by roughly 0.65 points across Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike. Among those who reject moral traditionalism, that same anti-tradition story boosted support among Independents, while upward shifts among Democrats and Republicans were not statistically significant.
Yet telling morally traditional Americans that basic income helps restore single-income families failed to win them over. Among morally traditional Republicans, the shift was not statistically significant, and morally traditional Democrats became less supportive of the policy, a pattern the authors suggest may stem from Democratic women objecting to traditional gender roles. Meanwhile, participants who oppose moral traditionalism became more supportive of basic income across all political parties after reading that single-income family story.
“I think we were surprised that anything moved support for UBI, given how polarized social welfare policy tends to be,” Jordan explained. “Other research that we cite in the paper has found no effect of framing on support for the policy. Our frames were just different—they emphasize these long-standing values—which makes them move support.”
These findings align with earlier experimental research on political persuasion, which indicated that framing contentious policies around an ideological opponent’s core moral beliefs increased support among both liberals and conservatives. They also parallel research with conservative and moderate voters showing that framing progressive economic platforms around traditional values such as patriotism, loyalty, and tradition boosted electoral backing, although that work evaluated support for political candidates rather than direct public opinion on a specific policy like universal basic income.
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these results. Power calculations indicated the study needed 64 participants per group to detect a half-point shift on the 7-point scale, a target the overall sample of more than 2,000 adults easily met. Dividing participants by experimental story, political party, and personal values still left very few people in rare ideological combinations. For instance, only 10 egalitarian Republicans and two anti-egalitarian Democrats landed in the pro-equality condition, leaving estimates for those small subgroups uncertain.
“These effects are not small: receiving a message about UBI commensurate with your values changed support for the policy by around 1 point on our 7-point scale of support,” Jordan noted. “We’re really careful not to over-interpret these magnitudes, though, since there are not many people in the ‘off-diagonals’ (meaning not many egalitarian Republicans or morally traditional Democrats). To measure these effects better, we would need a much larger sample size.”
“We use an online survey panel, so there is some concern about sample quality,” he added. “But this concern is shared by basically all modern survey research. And we know that experimental treatments like ours are still capable of estimating effects that would replicate on samples through other means of surveying. So even if someone was skeptical of the size of the effects, or skeptical of the small sample sizes, we would still argue that the effect likely exists, even if we’re uncertain about how strong it is.”
The specific examples chosen for the news stories also shape what the experiment can establish. The story about violating moral traditionalism highlighted illegal drug use, an activity that draws broad disapproval well beyond social conservatives, whereas the story about reinforcing tradition tied extra household income to traditional gender roles. In addition, the survey captured immediate reactions to a single article in isolation, so it cannot show whether these shifts endure when voters hear competing partisan arguments simultaneously.
The authors suggest that future studies should untangle why moral traditionalism produces conflicting reactions to universal basic income. Because unconditional cash can be seen both as supporting stay-at-home parenting and as enabling idleness or vice, understanding which aspect weighs heaviest for socially conservative voters remains an open question for public policy researchers.
Beyond moral values, the researchers also plan to examine how rapid advances in artificial intelligence and workplace automation since the 2022 survey may reshape public debate over guaranteed income. “Our survey was from a few years ago, and the world of UBI and automation has changed a lot since then,” Jordan said. “We’re planning to do more survey research to see how these changes in automation and AI affect support for UBI policy, especially given evolving economic conditions.”
The study, “The Value-Oriented Dynamics of Support for Universal Basic Income in the United States,” was authored by Changlip Kim, Soren Jordan, Kathryn Haglin, and Grant Ferguson.
