Are Conservatives or Liberals Healthier?

People tend to forget that individuals are more similar to each other than they are different. Even in a famous speech given in 1957, John F. Kennedy couched similarities in the context of political ideology:

“We recognize that what unites us is greater than what divides us—and in that spirit we meet tonight as Democrats—not as Northern, Southern, liberal, or conservative Democrats, not as New Deal, Fair Deal, States Rights, Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania Democrats—but as just plain unashamed, unyielding and unbeaten Democrats."

Research also tends to analyze people based on differences, with political affiliations sometimes a variable. Some researchers have looked at the relationship between political ideology and health.

Politics and health

Personality remains relatively stable from childhood to adulthood, and research has demonstrated that personality in nursery-school kids correlates with adult political ideology. Childhood is formative in terms of political socialization. Factors that affect ideology include trauma, new experiences, friendships, and health. Low-birth-weight babies who are born into environments that are rendered stressful or unhealthy by state policies, for instance, may adopt more liberal beliefs than babies born in stress-free, healthy environments.

Source: Terri Sewell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

According to the results of a longitudinal cohort analysis published in SSM – Population Health, U.S. researchers found that healthy children (under age 10) were increasingly likely to voice conservative beliefs as older adults (over age 64). This difference arose independently of academic history, personality, or later-life health. The association was propelled by children with better health, and childhood health may somehow impact social forces resulting in adult political attitudes.

More specifically, adults in excellent health were 30 percent more likely to express conservative ideology compared with liberal ideology, while differences in ideology did not correlate with poor childhood health, after taking family income and financial status into consideration.

One important limitation of the study is that older adults tend to be more conservative by nature. Another limitation is that childhood health was appraised retrospectively—when participants were adolescents. Of note, the researchers assessed participants only as adolescents and in their late 60s—with no data gathered between high school and later age.

In a study published in PLoS One, Harvard researchers found that respondents with right-wing ideologies reported better health than those with left-wing beliefs. Moreover, participants from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics reported poorer health than those from democratic, liberal, and Christian conservative countries.

The authors hypothesized that political ideology likely doesn’t directly mediate health.

“People's evaluation of the political left-right spectrum incorporates both materialistic and non-materialistic values, and is, therefore, a general marker of political ideology and values. Probably, political ideology taps a broad range of values and beliefs (e.g., civic engagement, religiosity, and feelings of individual responsibility), which appear to benefit people's health," the authors wrote.

"Additionally, the extent to which individual political ideology is associated with self-rated health varies between political regimes although the variation across some regimes was not statistically significant. Our finding that the association is strongest in social democratic countries deserves further exploration. Finally, the association could be due to reverse causality, meaning that good health would lead to conservative viewpoints. This would require truly longitudinal data on health and political ideology, which to our knowledge does not exist yet,” the authors continued.

In a study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, Republicans were 25 percent less likely to report poor health and 15 percent less likely to be smokers compared with Democrats.

“The observation that republicans enjoy better health status may reflect the core republican value of individual responsibility, which could translate into increased adherence to health-promoting behaviours,” the Harvard researchers wrote.

Instead of having a direct effect on health, political ideology could serve as a marker for health-promoting values and attitudes.

Implications

Healthier people are more likely to vote than unhealthy people. Politicians are more responsive to those who vote versus those who don’t, thus giving voters more political clout. This puts conservatives at a political advantage, according to authors in SSM – Population Health.

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“Both healthy citizens and those espousing conservative ideology are less likely to think that social policy is effective at improving public health and are less supportive of government involvement in healthcare," the authors stated.

"And, state electorates that overrepresent healthy voters tend to spend less on public health and have less generous Medicaid programs. This misalignment between unhealthy constituencies and legislative policy has generated concern and calls for solutions among public health, medical professional, and public policy advocates since disparities in voice and power can exacerbate health disparities,” the authors concluded.