Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Series: Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers
Creation-Date: 2024-11-01
Number: 24-001/I
Author-Name: Thomas Buser
Author-Workplace-Name: University of Amsterdam 
Title: Adversarial economic preferences predict right-wing voting
Abstract: I analyze Dutch panel data that contains rich information on voting, political opinions, and personality traits. I show that "adversarial" preferences – competitiveness, negative reciprocity, distrust, and selfishness – are strong predictors of right-wing and populist political preferences. Their explanatory power is similar to that of a rich set of socioeconomic status indicators – including income, education and occupation – and robust to non-parametrically controlling for them. I replicate previously studied associations between classic personality traits and political preferences, and show that adversarial preferences predict voting independently from these traits – and often with larger effect sizes. The complex Dutch party landscape allows me to go further than simple left-right comparisons to differentiate parties along an economic left-right axis, a social progressive-conservative axis, and a populism axis. Competitiveness predicts voting for economically right-wing parties, whereas negative reciprocity, distrust, and selfishness are stronger predictors of voting for socially conservative and populist parties.
Classification-JEL: D72, D9, J16
Keywords: voting, political preferences, personality, competitiveness, reciprocity
File-URL: https://papers.tinbergen.nl/24001.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
File-Size: 1.242.847 bytes
Handle: RePEc:tin:wpaper:20240001