Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/282838 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 16711
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
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.
Subjects: 
voting
political preferences
personality
competitiveness
reciprocity
JEL: 
D72
D91
J16
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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