Fatalists for Trump: A Cultural Theory of Authoritarianism and Presidential Vote

• In Event: Donald Trump and Voters

Abstract

Who are Trump voters? Efforts to explain US presidential preference incorporate a host of factors and in the Trump era prominently include efforts to assess the role of support for authoritarianism. Largely absent from these studies is an assessment of the role political culture may play. This is an important gap in electoral studies and public opinion research since political culture has been shown to be related to ideology, partisanship, policy preferences, and other significant political variables. We seek to begin to remedy this literature deficit using the cultural theory (CT) developed by Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky, and others. In previous research, relying on annual US national surveys over the past decade that incorporated measures of support for four political cultures specified by CT, we showed that Democrats and liberals draw their support from an egalitarian political culture, while Republicans and conservatives depend on a coalition of individualists and hierarchs. As we expected, those who identify with fatalistic views were most variable in their ideological and partisan identifications but importantly appear to have landed fully in the Republican and conservative columns in the Trump era. In this paper, using additional unique survey data from the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, we extend our investigation to analyze the political cultural bases for presidential preference and support for authoritarianism. We use structural equation models to assess how the influence of political culture on presidential preference is conditioned by support for authoritarianism and to assess how the influence of authoritarianism on presidential preference is conditioned by political culture.

Authors

• Joseph T. Ripberger

• Brendon Swedlow, Northern Illinois University