Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote
By Diana C. Mutz. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018
914 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Significance Support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election was widely attributed to citizens who were “left behind” economically. These claims were based on the strong cross-sectional relationship between Trump support and lacking a college education. Using a representative panel from 2012 to 2016, I find that change in financial wellbeing had little impact on candidate preference. Instead, changing preferences were related to changes in the party’s positions on issues related to American global dominance and the rise of a majority–minority America: issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status. Results highlight the importance of looking beyond theories emphasizing changes in issue salience to better understand the meaning of election outcomes when public preferences and candidates’ positions are changing. This study evaluates evidence pertaining to popular narratives explaining the American public’s support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election. First, using unique representative probability samples of the American public, tracking the same individuals from 2012 to 2016, I examine the “left behind” thesis (that is, the theory that those who lost jobs or experienced stagnant wages due to the loss of manufacturing jobs punished the incumbent party for their economic misfortunes). Second, I consider the possibility that status threat felt by the dwindling proportion of traditionally high-status Americans (i.e., whites, Christians, and men) as well as by those who perceive America’s global dominance as threatened combined to increase support for the candidate who emphasized reestablishing status hierarchies of the past. Results do not support an interpretation of the election based on pocketbook economic concerns. Instead, the shorter relative distance of people’s own views from the Republican candidate on trade and China corresponded to greater mass support for Trump in 2016 relative to Mitt Romney in 2012. Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups rather than complaints about past treatment among low-status groups. Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/032bed07a5e4e68f438fd7ba380f214b36c3777a
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Citations in the corpus
- Vote Switching in the 2016 Election: How Racial and Immigration Attitudes, Not Economics, Explain Shifts in White Voting (2019, background): “…2016 primary election (Newman, Shah, and Collingwood 2018), and that racial and immigration attitudes were associated with Trump support among voters (Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck 2018; Mutz 2018), this paper is the first to thoroughly examine the correlates of vote switching in the 2016 election.”
- Applying the Theory of Affective Intelligence to Support for Authoritarian Policies and Parties (2019, background): “…acceptance of previously disparaged groups (such as single women, women in the workplace, gay marriage, atheists, and more).21 Yet, as we show above, the misattribution of the consequences of anger to anxiety is dominant in coverage and interpretation (Deterline, 2017; Mutz, 2018; Nussbaum, 2018).”
- Identity Politics and Trade Policy (2018, neutral): “(10) Afterward, the equilibrium policy is determined instead by 11On the role of the populist revolution in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, see for example, Sides et al. (2016), Mutz (2018), and Oliver and Rahn (2016).”
- Contraction as a Response to Group Threat: Demographic Decline and Whites’ Classification of People Who Are Ambiguously White (2020, background): “More broadly, the finding echoes research linking status threats to political conservatism (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015; Craig and Richeson 2014b; Willer et al. 2016) and support for Trump (Knowles and Tropp 2018; Major et al. 2018; Mutz 2018).”
- The “Great Replacement” conspiracy: How the perceived ousting of Whites can evoke violent extremism and Islamophobia (2021, background): “More specifically, it has been linked to support for conservative ideologies (Craig & Richeson, 2014b), the Tea Party (Willer et al., 2016), far-right political candidates (Mutz, 2018), and anti-Black and anti-Hispanic attitudes (Alba et al., 2005).”