IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp13022.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Bowling with Trump: Economic Anxiety, Racial Identification, and Well-Being in the 2016 Presidential Election

Author

Listed:
  • Fabian, Mark

    (Brookings Institution)

  • Breunig, Robert

    (Australian National University)

  • De Neve, Jan-Emmanuel

    (University of Oxford)

Abstract

We use well-being data from the Gallup Daily Poll and a measure of racial animus derived from Google search data to explain why racial identification became politically salient in the 2016 Presidential Election. We find that the oft-observed positive relationship between racial animus and Trump's vote share is eliminated by introducing an interaction between racial animus and a measure of the basic psychological need for relatedness. We also find that rates of worry have a strong and significant positive association with Trump's vote share, but this is offset by high levels of relatedness. Together, these two results imply that racial voting behavior in 2016 was driven by a desire for in-group affiliation as a way of buffering against economic and cultural anxiety. Such behavior is well established in laboratory studies in self-determination theory and worldview defense theory. We find no effect on Trump's performance from social capital or exposure to trade shocks. This suggests that the economic roots of Trump's success may be overstated and that the need for relatedness is a key underlying driver of contemporary political trends in the US.

Suggested Citation

  • Fabian, Mark & Breunig, Robert & De Neve, Jan-Emmanuel, 2020. "Bowling with Trump: Economic Anxiety, Racial Identification, and Well-Being in the 2016 Presidential Election," IZA Discussion Papers 13022, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13022
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp13022.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dold, Malte & Krieger, Tim, 2024. "Market democracy, rising populism, and contemporary ordoliberalism," Discussion Paper Series 2024-01, University of Freiburg, Wilfried Guth Endowed Chair for Constitutional Political Economy and Competition Policy.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    well-being; voting; racialized economics; nativism; Trump;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • F1 - International Economics - - Trade
    • I0 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - General
    • I3 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13022. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.