Cooperation, framing, and political attitudes

This paper shows that political attitudes are linked to cooperative behavior in an incentivized experiment with a large sample randomly drawn from the Danish population. However, this relationship depends on the way the experiment is framed. In the standard game in which subjects give to a public good, contributions are not linked to political attitudes. In an economically equivalent version, in which subjects take from a public good, left-wingers cooperate significantly more than subjects to the right of the political spectrum. This difference is to some extent caused by differences in beliefs and cooperation preferences but a substantial part is left unexplained, indicating that left wingers find cooperating under this institution more attractive than right wingers do.