Adversarial Economic Preferences Predict Right-Wing Voting

Arbeitspapier

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 16711

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior ; Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making‡ ; Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
• Subject: voting ; political preferences ; personality ; competitiveness ; reciprocity

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Buser, Thomas
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2024

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/282838
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET