Ideological spillovers across the Atlantic? Evidence from Trump’s presidential election

Costa-Font, Joan ORCID: 0000-0001-7174-7919 and Ljunge, Martin (2023) Ideological spillovers across the Atlantic? Evidence from Trump’s presidential election. European Journal of Political Economy, 76. ISSN 0176-2680

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Abstract

Ideological spillovers refer to the modification of an individual's core beliefs after learning about other people's beliefs. We study one specific international ideological spillover, namely, the effect of the unexpected election of a United States (US) president (Donald Trump on the 9 th of November 2016), who openly questioned the so-called ‘core liberal consensus’, on European's core political beliefs. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) around the election event, we show that the Trump presidential election (TPE) gave rise to a ‘backlash effect’. That is, it steered core European beliefs in two specific domains, making Europeans more favourable to (i) globalisation and (ii) international mobility (about 10% change in the overall Likert scale range of the statement that immigrants contribute to a country). Contrasting with the hypotheses of ‘belief contagion’, we do not find evidence that TPE steered illiberal beliefs. Furthermore, TPE improved (deteriorated) the view Europeans had of their own country (the United States).

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/european-jou...
Additional Information:	© 2022 Elsevier B.V.
Divisions:	Health Policy
Subjects:	J Political Science > JL Political institutions (America except United States) J Political Science > JC Political theory
JEL classification:	D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D72 - Economic Models of Political Processes: Rent-Seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior F - International Economics > F5 - International Relations and International Political Economy > F50 - General Z - Other Special Topics > Z1 - Cultural Economics; Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology > Z10 - General P - Economic Systems > P1 - Capitalist Systems > P16 - Political Economy
Date Deposited:	21 Apr 2022 09:54
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 02:58
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/114902

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