The Economic Origins of Authoritarian Values: Evidence from Local Trade Shocks in the United Kingdom
Abstract: Authoritarian values have long been thought to be an important determinant of public opinion and political behaviour including the support of populist political parties. Explanations for why some individuals have more authoritarian values than others have focused on various processes of socialization and economic conflict. Evidence that economic change fosters authoritarian values has primarily been based on aggregate correlations across countries or across time within countries or individual-level correlations between economic characteristics and authoritarian values. Using an original 2016 survey representative of the British population, this paper uses local economic shocks in Great Britain induced by China’s integration with the world economy to estimate the causal impact of economic change on authoritarian values. We find that individuals living in regions in which local labour markets were more substantially affected by imports from China have significantly more authoritarian values.

Our estimates are robust to the inclusion of a wide variety of demographic variables as well as controls for immigration patterns. We interpret these results as signalling the potential importance of economic shocks from many sources such as technological change and macroeconomic cycles on value formation.

A sandwich lunch will be available at the session and is booked according to numbers. If you would like to order lunch for this session, please reply to aoife.dudley@politics.ox.ac.uk no later than noon on Friday 26th May.
Date: 29 May 2017, 12:15 (Monday, 6th week, Trinity 2017)
Venue: Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details: Seminar Room A
Speaker: Stephanie Rickard (LSE)
Organising department: Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR)
Organisers: Dr Robin Harding (University of Oxford), Dr Radoslaw Zubek (University of Oxford), Professor Petra Schleiter (University of Oxford), Dr David Doyle (University of Oxford)
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editors: Charles Game, James Baldwin, Ellysia Graymore