Ethical distance and electoral accountability: voters punish politicians whose ethical views diverge from societal consensus

How do citizens react to political candidates who diverge from societal views on ethical issues? Politicians sometimes take ethical positions that depart from widely shared social views. We argue that such ethical distance has systematic electoral consequences for two reasons: ethics structure everyday judgment and decision-making, and because politicians govern on behalf of others, voters prefer representatives whose ethical positions reflect those of the broader society. Using six preregistered conjoint experiments embedded in two original surveys of nearly 6000 Americans and Canadians, we show that voters evaluate candidates' ethical positions relationally, relative to ethical national views, and systematically penalize candidates who deviate from them, even when those candidates share the voter's own ethical views. This sociotropic ethical penalty is consistent across voter subgroups on consensual moral issues, but becomes more heterogeneous on contested issues where societal agreement is weaker. We further show that the strength of this penalty varies across ethical issues and across voters. Together, these findings exhibit that voting behavior has an ethical, non-instrumental, and fundamentally social component: voters evaluate candidates not only by asking whether they agree with them personally on ethical matters, but also by asking whether candidates reflect the ethical views of the society.