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Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 2017, 5(1), 107-116.
Social Psychological Perspectives on Trump Supporters
Thomas F. Pettigrew*a
aDepartment of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA
*Department of Psychology, High Street, University of California, Santa Cruz, 95064,
USA. pettigr@ucsc.edu
Abstract
.
No one factor describes Trump’s supporters. But an array of factors – many of
them reflecting five major social psychological phenomena can help to account
for this extraordinary political event: authoritarianism, social dominance
orientation, prejudice, relative deprivation, and intergroup contact. Research on
the topic demonstrates that these theories and concepts of social psychology
prove centrally important in helping to understand this unexpected event. This
paper describes the supporting data for this statement and demonstrates the
close parallels between these American results and those of research on far-right
European supporters.
Keywords
Authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, prejudice, relative deprivation,
intergroup contact, Trump supporters.
Social scientists are keenly aware that the world is exceedingly complex, that
virtually all social phenomena are multivariate. Understanding Trump’s supporters is
no exception. We must consider an array of interrelated factors to account for this
unprecedented election – demographic and individual factors that constituted the
tinder for the explosion and the actual igniting factors that lit the fire. Research on
the topic demonstrates that numerous theories and concepts of social psychology
prove centrally important in helping to understand this unexpected event. But no
claim is made that these social psychological factors provide in themselves a
complete explanation. Obviously, key political variables are also involved (Norpoth,
2016), and these are intertwined with the social psychological variables to be
evaluated in this paper.
The Tinder
The Trump movement is not singular within the United States (the Know
Nothing movement in the 1850s, the Wallace movement in the 1960s, and the
more recent Tea Party Movement). Moreover, other democracies have seen
similar movements (e.g., Austria’s Freedom Party, Belgium’s Vlaams Blok,
France’s National Front, Germany’s Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), and
Britain’s U.K. Independence Party (UKIP). In virtually all these cases, the tinder
especially involved male nativists and populists who were less educated than the
general population. But this core was joined by other types of voters as well. Five
highly interrelated characteristics stand out that are central to a social
2
psychological analysis – authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, outgroup
prejudice, the absence of intergroup contact and relative deprivation.
Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)
Authoritarianism is an intensely studied syndrome the effects of which are
surprisingly consistent across the globe (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, &
Sanford, 1950; Allport, 1954; Altemeyer, 1981, 1988, 1996). Several traits
characterize the syndrome: deference to authority, aggression toward outgroups,
a rigidly hierarchical view of the world, and resistance to new experience.
Authoritarianism is typically triggered by threat and fear (Feldman & Stenner,
1997; Stenner, 2005), and authoritarians tend to view the world as a very
dangerous and threatening place (Allport, 1954).
There is debate as to whether to consider authoritarianism a personality
construct or a political ideology in itself. However, there is no necessary conflict
between these two perspectives (Pettigrew, 2016). Authoritarianism begins early
in life as a personality orientation – witness its genetic roots (Ludeke & Krueger
2013, McCourt et al. 1999). And later this orientation typically leads to some form
of a right-wing political ideology. Purely personality measures of authoritarianism
are needed now to complement these political attitude assessments; and two
such promising scales are now available (Feldman & Stenner, 1997; Oesterreich,
2005). These scales eliminate the political content of earlier measures.
Authoritarianism has been successfully measured in different ways. Political
scientists prefer to ask about what is more important for children – respect for elders
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more important than independence; obedience more important than self-reliance; to
be well-behaved more important than being creative; and to have good manners
more important than to be curious (Feldman, 2017; Feldman & Stenner, 1997).
Social psychologists prefer such items as: “The authorities should be
obeyed because they are in the best position to know what is good for our
country”; and “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues
children should learn.” These method-ological approaches are highly interrelated
and both have proven useful. And note that they overlap in their attention to basic
values.
SDO is closely related to authoritarianism but clearly separable (Sidanius
& Pratto, 2001; Duckitt & Sibley, 2007). It features an individual's preference for
the societal hierarchy of groups and domination over lower-status groups. It
represents a predisposition toward anti-egalitarianism within and between
groups. Individuals who score high in SDO are typically dominant, driven, tough-
minded, disagreeable, and relatively uncaring seekers of power. They believe in
a "dog-eat-dog" world, and they report being motivated by self-interest and self-
indulgence (Levin, Federico, Sidanius & Rabinowitz, 2002).
Though found among left-wingers (e.g., Dusso, 2016), authoritarianism is
more numerous among right-wingers throughout the world (Meloen, 1993).
Trump’s speeches, studded with such absolutist terms as “losers” and “complete
disasters,” are classic authoritarian statements. His clear distinction between
groups on the top of society (Whites) and those “losers” and “bad hombres” on
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the bottom (immigrants, Blacks and Latinos) are classic social dominance
statements.
In the United States, Republicans began averaging higher on
authoritarianism than Democrats before the rise of Trump (Hethington & Weiler,
2009). And the party began to learn how to appeal to this segment of the
American electorate in various ways. The Republican Party’s opposition to
virtually everything proposed by the African-American President Obama helped.
But it remained for Trump to break the unwritten rules of American politics and
appeal directly and openly to authoritarians and those who score high on SDO.
Not surprisingly, recent work reveals that Trump supporters tend to be
especially high scorers on both scales. Eight months prior to the election,
MacWilliams (2016) relied on his survey finding - that high authoritarians were
strongly in favor of Trump - to predict correctly that routine election surveys were
sharply underestimating Trump’s support. During the presidential primaries in
February 2016, Feldman (2017) also found a significant positive relationship
between authoritarianism and favorable evaluations of Trump among
Republicans. Indeed, none of the evaluations of the other primary candidates
revealed such a connection.
In agreement, Choma and Hanoch (2017), analyzing data from a
Mechanical Turk sample of 406 American adults, found that both authoritarianism
(r = +.46) and SDO (r = +.48) correlated highly (p<.001) with the intention to vote
for Trump. Similarly, Van Assche and Pettigrew (2016) gathered another
5
Mechanical Turk sample of 139 White American adults and found
authoritarianism (r = +.47) and SDO (r = +.32) correlated highly (p<.001) with
planning to vote for Trump. This consistency across these various studies
is noteworthy because they employed different measures of the key predictor
variables. The first two of the studies cited above employed Feldman’s political
science measure of authoritarianism, while the other two studies used standard
social psychological items. All four studies also employed somewhat different
SDO items.
The joint power of authoritarianism and SDO to predict far-right-wing
voting has also been repeatedly found in European research – in Belgium and
France (Swyngedouw & Giles, 2007; Lubbers & Scheepers, 2002; Van Hiel,
2012; Van Hiel & Mervielde, 2002), the Netherlands (Cornelis & Van Hiel, 2014)
and Italy (Leone, Desimoni & Chirumbolo, 2014). Thus, the American data are
not unique.
Prejudice
Many outgroup prejudices characterize dedicated Trump’s followers, not
just anti-immigrants, but anti-outgroups in general. Since Richard Nixon’s
“southern strategy,” the Republican Party has employed strategies that appeal to
bigotry with “dog whistles” – somewhat subtle codewords for race and other
minorities designed to be heard by racists but not by non-racists. Nixon opposed
racial school desegregation by claiming to be against the “bussing” needed to
achieve interracial schools. Ronald Reagan began his campaign in 1980 by
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giving a “states’ rights” speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi quite near where three
civil rights workers had been lynched earlier. George H. W. Bush in 1988 ran a
campaign ad of an African-American murderer that his opponent had released
from jail – an ad for which his campaign manager later apologized.
The 2008 presidential campaign witnessed recurrent Republican slips that
betrayed traditional racist thinking (Staples, 2008; Pettigrew, 2009). One
Republican club issued false ten dollar bills with Obama’s picture accompanied
by stereotyped African-American food - a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried
chicken. The McCain campaign ran an advertisement claiming that Obama had
been “disrespectful” to Governor Palin – the old Southern term recalling
sanctions against Black men interacting with White women. Republican
Representative Lynn Westmoreland described Obama and his wife as “uppity.”
And Republican Representative Geoff Davis called the then-47-year-old Obama,
“Boy.”
Trump is less subtle. He has repeatedly made unconcealed use of
prejudice against outgroups ranging from “dangerous” Muslims to Mexican
“rapists.” His dedicated followers loved it; breaking with so-called “political
correctness,” he blared openly what they had been saying privately.
Not surprisingly, then, support for Trump correlates highly with a standard
scale of modern racism (r = +.48; Van Assche & Pettigrew, 2016). And once
again a European study is congruent with this American finding. Billett and
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de Witte (2008) found that prejudice against immigrants was the single most
important predictor of support for the far-right Vlamms Blok Party in Flemish
Belgium.
Data from France’s 2012 presidential election strongly indicates that the
racist National Front campaign of Marine Le Pen moved perceptions of social
norms to the political right (Portelinha & Elcheroth, 2016). It appears that Trump,
too, has eroded norms that proscribed intolerant speech and behavior. Racist
graffiti, threats and hate crimes all rose sharply following Trump’s election victory
(Reilly, 2016).
In addition, pre-election publicity that minorities were planning to vote in
large numbers for Clinton undoubtedly stirred Republicans to turn out too. In fact,
the African-American turnout fell below that of 2008 and 2012 – a key factor in
Clinton’s narrow losses in North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Intergroup Contact
A major means of reducing intergroup prejudice is through optimal
intergroup contact (Pettigrew, 1998; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006, 2011). So it is
noteworthy that there is growing evidence that Trump’s White supporters have
experienced far less contact with minorities than other Americans. For instance,
Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016, p. 14) found that “...the racial and ethnic
isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of
Trump support.” This finding remains true for both non-Hispanic Whites in
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general and for the smaller subset of White Republicans. And this lack of
intergroup contact result emerges while controlling for dozens of other variables.
Consistent with this finding, these researchers also found that Trump
support increased as an area’s distance from the Mexican border increased.
Throughout the world, intergroup contact has been shown typically to diminish
prejudice by reducing intergroup fear and inducing empathy (Pettigrew & Tropp,
2008, 2011). Its extreme absence for most Trump fans is an important factor that
has been virtually ignored in the post-election analyses.
Interestingly, a similar finding emerged in research on the United
Kingdom’s Brexit vote to leave the European Union (EU). The extent of voters’
social networks and their propensity to travel beyond their hometown had
stronger effects than income in shaping their nationalistic, populist, anti-
immigrant support for leaving the EU. But those who had spent time with a
foreigner were 15% less likely to have voted to leave (Maguire, 2016). We return
later for further analysis of the Brexit vote.
Relative Deprivation
The principal media explanation for explaining Trump’s followers involves
economics. Trump loyalists were assumed to have lost their jobs to Mexico and
China and to be understandably angry. Little mention was made of the major
reason for massive job losses – the accelerating pace of automation.
Mass media writers, reading each other and non-randomly interviewing a
few unemployed workers, latched on to this too-simple theory as the primary
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explanation for the Trump victory. Single-factor theories are always dubious
(Pettigrew & Hewstone, 2017). The claim was that economically-deprived and
often unemployed, angry working-class voters in basic manufacturing areas
switched political parties and voted for “change.” This argument ignored the fact
that the greatly depleted power of labor unions (by 2016, down to only 10.7% of
wage and salary workers) to help turn out the Democratic vote was a significant
factor – especially in key industrial states.
Undoubtedly, this media caricature fits some followers, especially in the
swing states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But this contention
does not provide the major explanation for Trump’s support. The argument lost
much of its credence when Silver (2016) estimated that the median annual
income of Trump supporters was a solid $72,000. The most impressive and
extensive study of voting intentions later provided an estimate of $81,898 for
Trump backers’ mean household income. Instead of being far poorer than Clinton
voters, this figure was slightly above the $77,046 for those who had an
unfavorable view of Trump (Rothwell & Diego-Rosell, 2016).
Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016) analyzed in detail the individual and
geographic data of 125,000 American adults who had answered Gallup survey
phone calls during the long election period. Many of their results challenge the
widespread view of Trump supporters. Trump followers were less likely than
others to be looking for work, unemployed or part-time employed. And those
voters living in districts with more manufacturing were actually less favorable to
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Trump. Nor were his followers largely living and working in postal areas where
employment in manufacturing had declined since 1990. Underlying these results
is the fact that blue-collar Trump supporters tend to work in occupations that are
largely shielded from Chinese and Mexican competition – transportation, repair,
and construction (Rothwell & Diego-Rosell, 2016).
To be sure, social mobility has been declining in the United States.
Contrary to the popular too-simple theory, however, people who live in areas with
greater mobility voted more Republican (Campante & Yanagizawa-Drott, 2016).
This was even true in the crucial “swing states,” and it is a trend that can be
detected in other recent elections.
But these findings do not mean that social class and economics played no
role whatsoever in this tight election. Instead of absolute deprivation, social
psychologists stress the importance of relative deprivation. Disappointing
comparisons to relevant referents is often more significant than factual changes
(Pettigrew, 2015, 2016; Smith, Pettigrew, Pippin & Bialosiewicz, 2012). What
voters think is true is more important in elections than the actual truth.
Trump adherents feel deprived relative to what they expected to possess
at this point in their lives and relative to what they erroneously perceive other
“less deserving” groups have acquired. Rapidly rising costs of housing and
prescription drugs have aggravated their financial concerns. Their savings may
not allow the type of ideal retirements they had long envisioned. And hopes for
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their children advancing beyond their status and going to college are being
dashed by rising tuitions.
Building on the research of Chetty and Hendren (2016), Rothwell & Diego-
Rosell (2016) found that Trump actually did better in some low mobility areas
(e.g., Raleigh, Indianapolis and rural areas generally) where children are having
difficulty just reaching the status of their parents. Working-class families had
previously depended on low-tuition state institutions of higher learning for
educational and employment mobility. But largely Republican state legislatures
throughout the country have sharply reduced funding to these schools, forcing
rising tuitions. Thus, Trump adherents are typically not personally economically
destitute; but they are, as Thomas Edsall (2016) phrased it, “falling behind the
Joneses.” In short, they were often feeling deprived relative to their hopes and
expectations.
Trump exploited this sense of relative deprivation brilliantly. He articulated
issues snugly within the authoritarian worldview of his admirers. His words and
claims appalled many Americans, but he knew his target audience well. In their
insightful analysis, Reicher and Haslam (2016) describe Trump’s carefully staged
rallies in detail. Calling them “identity festivals” that embodied a politics of hope,
they note how they were choreographed to bind the attendees into a populist
movement with the media (forced to sit in a cordoned-off back section),
immigrants, and the so-called “elite” as enemies. Criticism of Trump by the media
and other sources (such as Clinton calling some of his followers “deplorables”)
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only enhanced the movement and served to confirm Trump’s assertions against
their common “enemies.”
Trump’s oft-repeated slogan, “Make America great again,” augmented the
movement’s thrust. It represented a brash reactionary call to return to an earlier
time when America’s position in the world was unchallenged, when American
presidents and Supreme Court judges were all White males, when immigration
was restricted and widespread racial segregation persisted, and when the
government’s affirmative action programs largely helped White males (e.g., the
G.I. Bill of Rights, Federal housing loans). And his cabinet heads suggest that
Trump plans to return to that long-ago scene as much as possible.
The Spark
All five of these tightly interconnected phenomena – authoritarianism,
social dominance, prejudice, lack of intergroup contact and relative deprivation –
make people vulnerable to an intense sense of threat. Authoritarian leaders have
long understood that they can attract followers by enhancing the perception of
dangerous threats to the society and offering simple solutions (Mols & Jetten,
2016). Sometimes the threats are real (Hitler with massive Weimar inflation), but
often they are imagined (Trump with patently false claims of a declining
economy, massive voter fraud, enormously increased crime, and unvetted
immigration). With a background of genuine terrorist threats, Mideast conflict,
and a recent great recession, even imagined threats seem plausible – especially
13
to citizens who are already easily threatened and who have witnessed rapid
change in their localities.
Consider again the U.K. Brexit vote. Urban areas, such as London, with large,
established immigrant populations voted strongly to remain in the European Union
(EU); while areas with relatively few immigrants voted heavily to leave the EU. But
when a longitudinal analysis is applied, the key variable emerges: the speed of
change in the immigrant population. Areas with modest immigrant populations in
2000 that had witnessed more than a 200% rise in immigrants by 2015 voted an
astounding 94% to leave the EU (Economist, 2016). This striking result is an
example of the delicate balance between threat and contact – the dual effects of
diversity (Green, Sarrasin, Baur & Fasel, 2015; Pettigrew & Hewstone, 2017;
Wagner et. al., 2006). London and other major English cities had had long
experience with immigrants, and had increased their diversity relatively gradually.
Time had reduced the sense of threat and enhanced positive intergroup contact. But
for small towns and rural districts with a sudden and rapid entry of immigrants,
perceived threat prevailed and optimal contact was as yet minimal.
A quite similar process occurred in small Midwestern towns with rapid
increases in Latino immigration. According to Adamy and Overberg (2016a), areas
whose diversity index rose by 150% witnessed a 67% vote for Trump. Consider
Arcadia, Wisconsin, that had job growth – not restricted jobs (Adamy & Overberg,
2016b). Arcadia’s plentiful jobs attracted rapid in-migration from below the Mexican
border – roughly 1,500 miles away. The resulting perceived threat, unalleviated by a
14
period of intergroup contact, made many rural and small-town White Midwesterners
respond positively to Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric. This interpretation is
supported by the macro-findings of Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016) discussed
above.
A Final Word
No one factor describes Trump’s supporters. But an array of factors –
many of them reflecting five major social psychological phenomena that form the
tinder and the spark - can help to account for this extraordinary political event.
These social psychological factors are not unique to the United States. We
have seen throughout the paper that many studies of Europe’s far-right-wing
voters show results strikingly similar to these data on the 2016 American
election. Authoritarianism and social dominance attitudes have been routinely
found to correlate significantly with far-right voting in nations throughout Europe.
These voters share with Trump supporters similar views of women, minorities,
immigrants, and free-market economics. Three major Populist-like grievances of
Europe’s far-right arise from economic changes, political elitism and immigration
– with immigration the most intense issue (Ivarsflaten, 2008). American research
suggests that the same can be said about the Trump movement.
The implications of this analysis for scholars who study these political
phenomena in democracies are three-fold. First, despite vast differences in
political structures and economic circumstances between Western nations, there
15
are a surprising number of important similarities across these various populist
political movements.
Second, these similarities suggest that those conducting research on one
such movement might well look to work in other countries for additional variables.
For instance, the importance of relative deprivation for understanding Trump
supporters offers a possible research approach that has been seldom employed
in European work.
Finally, the actual operation of the five social psychological variables and
theories detailed in this paper need to be integrated within a broad political
context. Political and social psychological approaches are mutually supportive -
not anti-thetical. Future research must bring them together in multi-level models.
Funding
The author has no funding to report.
Competing Interests
The author has declared that no competing interests exist.
Acknowledgements
The author has no support to report.
16
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