Uncovering the Source of Patrimonial Voting: Evidence from Swedish Twin Pairs

Abstract

The boom in wealth inequality seen in recent decades has generated a steep rise in scholarly interest in both the drivers and the consequences of the wealth gap. In political science, a pertinent question regards the political behavior across the wealth spectrum. A common argument is that the wealthy practice patrimonial voting, i.e. voting for right-wing parties to maximize returns on their assets. While this pattern is descriptively well documented, it is less certain to what extent this reflects an actual causal relationship between wealth and political preferences. In this study, we provide new evidence by exploiting wealth variation within identical twin pairs. Our findings suggest that while more wealth is descriptively connected to more support for right-wing parties, the causal impact of wealth on policy preferences is likely highly overstated. For several relevant policy areas these effects may not exist at all. Furthermore, the bias in naive observational estimates seems to be mainly driven by environmental familial confounders shared within twin pairs, rather than genetic confounding.

Patrimony at Risk: Market Uncertainty and Right-Wing Voting

“…In a recent study, however, Ahlskog and Brännlund (2021) found no significant effects from financial assets on either voting or social policy preferences. (The authors used a discordant twin-study design based on register data from Sweden.)…”

“…Moreover, the impact from assets, the former authors contend, is dependent on polarization between political parties over economic policy (Hellwig & McAllister, 2019). Ahlskog and Brännlund (2021), however, achieved findings at odds with such claims: Sweden, namely, has very low capital taxes, and a great polarization occurred between political parties in that country over economic issues during the period studied. Such results suggest there is more to learn about the relationship between political behavior and asset wealth.…”

“…That is, owners of both real and financial assets lean to the right (if they are wealthy enough) because government policy affects both financial and real-estate markets. However, more quasi-experimental studies have found that it is housing rather than financial wealth that works as a predictor of right-wing voting (Ahlskog & Brännlund, 2021). The question is why these results differ so much.…”

“…We find the same pattern in lottery studies if we collate the demand for lottery tickets with risk preferences because such preferences too are linked to voting choices (Lin˜eira & Henderson, 2019). Studies that manage to control for such factors report very weak effects from assets on voting (Ahlskog & Brännlund, 2021).…”

Social origin and political participation: does education compensate or reinforce family (dis)advantages?

“…We do so by estimating family fixed effects (FFE) models on data of identical twins (Neale and Cardon, 1992;Allison, 2005). Although, to our best knowledge, this is the first study that tests compensation and reinforcement effects of education on political participation based on identical twin data, the use of twin data for studying causal effects on political outcomes is becoming a more widely utilized methodological approach (Dinesen et al, 2016;Robinson, 2019;Ahlskog and Brännlund, 2021;Weinschenk et al, 2021). We use twin data from the German TwinLife Study and analyze 1,046 identical twin pairs (raised together) of 21-25 years old (Hahn et al, 2016).…”