September 2016
It ’ s Nativism :
Explaining the Drivers of Trump ’ s Popular Support
The five ideological multi-item scales employed here have good measurement properties ( see specific question wording in appendix ). They all are unidimensional ; have decent convergent and divergent validity ; and have Cronbach alpha scores ranging from . 537 to . 924 . Cronbach alpha is a commonly used measure of reliability which is essentially the average inter-item correlation . The simple rule of thumb is that a scale with a score of . 6 or more is a robust measure 3 . The Authoritarian scale is a relatively weak metric ; that said , it is still in the acceptable range .
Of the five scales , only the Authoritarianism scale is borrowed in its entirety . This 4-item scale was first developed by Altemeyer 4 and later adapted by Feldman 5 and employed on the ANES . The items focus on child-rearing practices and have been shown to correlate with a wide range of politically relevant variables .
The remaining four multi-item scales all are Ipsos adaptations . Nativism is a 5-item scale which taps anti-immigrant and nativist beliefs . I borrow and adapt several items from the GSS and World Values Survey . Populism-System Broken is a 5-item scale . Its objective is to capture voters ’ underlying predisposition towards populism . Here I define populism as support for taking extra-institutional actions to fix a political system which is perceived as broken . I adapted this scale from an Ipsos poll on Latin America populism conducted in 2005 . I call the battery of questions The Caudillo Syndrome : people believe the system is broken ; rigged against people like them ; and only a leader willing to break the rules can fix it .
Worse Off than Parents is a 6-item scale intended to measure one of the central tenets of the American Dream — that one will be better off than their parents . I adapted this from a single GSS question .
Finally , Fear of Others is a 4-item scale developed by Ipsos in 2015 . Here I was keen on tapping into the relative sense of identity loss and its impact on political behavior . Additionally , I will use three single items as controls .
• Abortion ➡ whether the person thinks abortion should be legal or illegal — a proxy measure for social values . We developed this item for our online polls in 2009 .
• Government Intervention ➡ whether the person wants more or less government intervention in the economy . This item was developed in 2009 during the health care reform debate .
• American Dream ➡ forced choice question asking people what more closely comes to their notion of the American dream : is it more about working hard and getting ahead or about being a melting pot ? Our own research has shown that this measure correlates strongly with being a Republican versus Democrat .
We analyze the impact of the above explanatory factors on three outcomes , or dependent , variables :
1 . Support for Trump in the primaries among all voters ; 2 . Support for Trump in the primaries among Republicans ;
3 . Likelihood to identify as a Republican . Here I use identity as a Republican as an analytical control and benchmark .
Ultimately , we are interested in reproducing , albeit imperfectly , voter decision making : what factors , in other words , are more ( or less ) important in determining support for Trump ? To do this , we employ two separate estimators of impact : ( 1 ) logistic regression and ( 2 ) Bayesian Network Analysis 6 .
3 DeVellis , Robert F . Scale Development : Theory and Applications . Thousand Oaks , CA : Sage Publications , 2003 . Print . 4 Altemeyer , Bob . 1981 . Right-Wing Authoritarianism . Winnipeg , Manitoba , Canada : University of Manitoba Press . 5 Feldman , Stanley . 2003 . “ Enforcing Social Conformity : A Theory of Authoritarianism .” Political Psychology 24 ( 1 ): 41-74 . 6 For a good read on Bayesian belief networks see Pearl , Judea ( 2000 ). Causality : Models , Reasoning , and Inference . Cambridge University Press . ISBN 0-521-
77362-8 . OCLC 42291253 . Also Spirtes et al : Causation , Prediction , and Search , second edition ( 2001 ) by Peter Spirtes , Clark Glymour and Richard Scheines . ISBN-13 : 978-0262194402
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