Regional neuroticism and socioeconomic conditions predict voting for Trump
Year: 2021
Type: preprint
Abstract: Since Donald Trump’s rise to power in 2016, researchers have sought to understand the roots of his support. Some have found that emotional factors such as unhappiness (Ward et al., 2020) and neuroticism (Obschonka et al., 2018; Chen & Palmer, 2018) predict voting for Trump. However, these accounts do not answer the question: Why now? Presumably, some people have always been prone to negative emotionality, yet Trump’s rise was unexpected. Clues to the timing come from a separate literature, which has emphasized the role of recent adverse economic conditions (Autor et al., 2017; Frey, Berger, & Chen, 2018) and threatening social circumstances (Knowles & Tropp, 2018; Major, Blodorn, & Major Blascovich, 2018; Mutz, 2018) as predictors of Trump support. We synthesize these perspectives by taking a classic interactionist approach, arguing that support for Trump can be best understood as the product of a region’s tendency to experience negative emotions and its socioeconomic conditions. We have found initial support for these conclusions in analyses of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. We now seek to replicate our findings in confirmatory analyses of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. To ensure that our results generalize across multiple levels of analysis, we will examine predictors of Trump support in two types of regions: counties and CBSAs. We will characterize a region’s tendency to experience negative emotions using aggregated BFI-44 neuroticism scores from the Gosling-Potter Internet project. We will characterize a region’s socioeconomic conditions using latent factors derived from a factor analysis of publicly available economic, health, and demographic data from 2019/2020. We will interact regions’ neuroticism with each factor score on share of the 2020 Trump vote. We expect regions whose residents are highest on neuroticism and have the most socioeconomic adversity and least ethnic diversity to be those most likely to vote for Trump in 2020. In sum, the paper will examine how neuroticism can exacerbate the effects of a region’s socioeconomic conditions with politically relevant consequences. We will discuss the implications of considering both a region’s psychological disposition and its objective circumstances for theories of authoritarianism.
Source: OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints)
Authors: Gosling, Sam, Rentfrow, Jason, Talaifar, Sanaz, Steutzer, Michael
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6925402443