Worldview defense and self-determination theory explain the return of racial voting: evidence from the 2016 US election

Journal article

Abstract:: We use self-determination and world view defense theories to explicate the psychological roots of identitarian voting in recent US, UK, and EU elections. We test our theory using the 2016 US election as a case study, data from a representative sample of nearly half a million Americans, and a measure of racial animus derived from Google search data. We find that worry has a strong and significant positive association with Trump’s vote share, as predicted by worldview defense theory. However, this is reversed in counties with high levels of relatedness – one of the three basic psychological needs emphasized by self-determination theory. The positive relationship between racial animus and Trump also loses significance once an interaction between racial animus and relatedness is introduced. These results imply that identitarianism is driven at least in part by a desire for in-group affiliation emerging out of worldview defense and unmet basic psychological needs.

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Language:: English
Keywords:: group identity

worldview defense theory

FFR

self-determination theory

voting

well-being
Pubs id:: 1268550
Local pid:: pubs:1268550
Deposit date:: 2022-07-18

Copyright holder:: Fabian et al
Rights statement:: © 2022 The Authors. European Journal of Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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