Why Politicians Keep Campaigning on Culture

But these days, political rhetoric often centers on cultural flashpoints like religion or immigration instead of the economy. This tendency to highlight cultural issues over economic ones is surprising, as voters consistently rank the economy among the most important concerns. For example, the share of voters calling the economy “extremely important” rose from 36 percent in 1996 to 52 percent in 2024. And not only are Democrats and Republicans focusing on cultural topics over economic ones, but their messaging on culture also tends to be much more polarized. 

“The question is how to join these two pieces of the puzzle: on the one hand, everybody’s talking about culture, but on the other hand, for voters, it all boils down to jobs and the price of gas,” says Georgy Egorov, a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Kellogg. 

Egorov, along with his colleagues Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Konstantin Sonin of the University of Chicago, devised a theoretical model to help explain the phenomenon. In their model, politicians seek to appeal to voters on both cultural and economic issues—but messages about the economy are harder for voters to understand and interpret. As a result, candidates resort to campaigning on culture, and they become more extreme in their cultural rhetoric as a way of differentiating themselves from each other, even as their messages about the economy—which is what voters truly care about—converge. 

“When we ask if the political world has become more polarized, the answer is yes,” Egorov says, “but maybe not on the issues that average voters really care about.” 

Competing signals 

The researchers’ model depends on the assumption that campaign rhetoric is “noisy”: politicians don’t always say exactly what they mean to say, and in the case of economic policies, some may be genuinely difficult to explain, making simplifications and shortcuts inevitable. Out of these “noisy” signals, voters must attempt to glean what politicians will actually do if elected. Both dimensions matter to voters, but cultural and economic messages differ in how easily voters can decode them. 

“What you stand for [culturally] is reflected by what you say on social media, so it’s more observable and harder to manipulate,” Egorov says. “At the same time, the messaging on the economy is quite obscure. You hear both Democrats and Republicans talking about the plight of the middle class and the need to support small businesses, so figuring out where exactly everyone stands is a bit difficult.” 

This leads to a balancing act where candidates seek to appeal to the most voters while also differentiating themselves from their competitors. And this dynamic can be especially challenging for within-party elections, such as primaries. 

In any match-up between two candidates, one of them will have cultural and economic stances that align more closely with those of the “median” or average voter. That candidate has a natural incentive to communicate those stances as clearly as possible to maintain their advantage. The other candidate, then, is incentivized to appear more like their opponent to curry favor with the same voters—mimicking the first candidate’s rhetoric. In response, the first, more “median”-friendly candidate will start skewing their own rhetoric in order to maintain a distinction from their opponent. 

If political messaging was perfectly transparent to voters, the less-appealing candidate would simply chase their opponent’s messaging to make their own messaging closer to the average voters’ preferences on both economic and cultural matters. But Egorov and his colleagues wanted to know what happens in cases where “cultural positions are easier to comprehend” than economic ones. 

Going extreme on culture 

This is exactly the condition that the researchers designed into their model. “The goal of campaigning is to signal to the voters who you are,” Egorov says. “The politicians will therefore communicate along the dimension that’s more observable—in other words, culture. And what’s important to voters—like the economy—is something they will have to figure out on their own.” 

Politicians care most about the median voter, who prefers a relatively moderate economic policy. Candidates therefore want voters to infer from their rhetoric that they will, in fact, be moderate on the economy. If taking a more-extreme and easily observable cultural position helps convey that message, candidates have an incentive to do so. In the researchers’ model, this is exactly what happens: electoral competition pushes candidates toward more-extreme cultural rhetoric—that is, tacking away from the median voter’s preferences—even as their economic positions become more moderate and converge. 

“If voters care about the economy, and the median voter is relatively moderate about the economy, then the job of candidates is to say, ‘Okay, I’m not going to do anything extreme economically,’” Egorov says. “I’m talking about culture as something I’m passionate about to signal that doing something radical on the economy is not on my mind.” 

Cultural costs 

Egorov was surprised by one implication of the model, which is that moderation and convergence on some issues can coexist with polarization on others. But he says that they make intuitive sense. Despite the noise in their rhetoric, politicians are actually delivering what voters consider important: more-moderate economic messaging. “But at the same time, it comes at the cost of more polarization on other issues—in this case, culture,” he says. 

The model is no Rosetta Stone for 21st-century politics—“it’s not a universal theory,” Egorov acknowledges. Political polarization has risen and fallen before, and there is no reason to assume that today’s pattern is permanent. We just happen to live at a time where economic concerns coexist with unusually visible cultural positions—likely due to the rise of social media—creating conditions that can generate the cultural polarization that everyone is talking about. 

Should we be concerned about cultural polarization if the parties converge on economic issues or even switch sides on some dimensions, such as trade? Perhaps not, according to the researchers, at least in the short run. Given that voters ultimately care more about economic issues than cultural ones, the shift toward increasingly extreme campaign rhetoric may not affect them much. 

“It’s reasonable to believe that whatever politicians say on culture does not change the opinions of current adults,” Egorov says.  

However, this inflamed state of discourse changes the political environment in which children grow up. Egorov worries that persistent polarization in rhetoric could eventually produce polarization in underlying values as well. “At what point do we become so distant on cultural issues,” Egorov asks, “that it becomes pointless to signal about them?”