Title: Universalism: Global Evidence

Abstract: This paper presents a new set of stylized facts about the global variation in universalism, leveraging hypothetical money allocation tasks deployed in representative samples of 64,000 people from 60 countries. Our data reveal large variation across individuals and countries, which almost entirely reflects heterogeneity in people’s moral ideals regarding how to treat different types of relationships. Young, female and atheist people are more universalist around the globe, while correlations with education and urbanicity are specific to rich Western nations. Universalism is strongly predictive of relevant outcomes such as civic engagement and left-wing economic and social policy views, in particular in the rich West. Across countries, universalism is strongly related to Christianity, weak kinship ties and democracy. Analyses across country-age-cohorts as well as migrants further suggest that experience with democracy shapes universalism. Overall, our results provide global evidence that a universalist morality and politico-economic outcomes interact in systematic ways.