There exists an apparent contradiction in American political thought about moral reasoning. On the one hand, political conservatives often claim moral superiority over liberal Democrats. Based upon the results of the 2000 and 2004 U.S. Presidential elections, it appeared as though a majority of the voting public discounted important issues such as the economy, healthcare, and the environment in favor of conservative moral issues by voting for Republican George W. Bush. On the other hand, studies based on Kohlberg's stages of moral development have concluded that liberals tend to operate within higher principled stages of moral reasoning, while conservatives operate within lower conventional levels. Critics argue that Kohlberg's concept of developmental stage is invalid, thereby questioning the results of these studies. In order to provide empirical evidence for these results, as well as to support the notion of developmental stages, this study utilized the Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC) to relate an individual's performance on multiple measures of moral reasoning to a mathematical order of hierarchical complexity. Rather than using standard performance-based tests of moral reasoning, such as the Defining Issues Test (DIT), or the Moral Judgment Test (MJT), this study utilized moral dilemmas from these measures, and the and specific items typically used to measure the responses. A mathematical order of hierarchical complexity was applied to each item, and the results were analyzed using the Rasch analysis. Overall results indicated that with a few specific exceptions the order of hierarchical complexity did not predict political affiliation however, findings did support the notion that the test items were measuring moral reasoning levels which provides support for Kohlberg's stage theory. Education-level and household income, were found to be highly correlated and significant predictors of political affiliation while level of religiosity was correlated with, and found to be a significant predictor of one's identification as a liberal or a conservative. Future research is needed to compare the results of traditional moral reasoning tests with the hierarchical methodology used in this study. Hierarchical complexity may prove to be a valuable tool to objectively measure individual differences in other realms of social science.