EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Political Behavior of Wealthy Americans: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs

David Broockman, Greg F. Ferenstein and Neil Malhotra
Additional contact information
David Broockman: Stanford University

Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business

Abstract: American politics overrepresents the wealthy. But what policies do the wealthy support? Many accounts implicitly assume the wealthy are monolithically conservative and that increases in their political power will increase inequality. Instead, we argue there is substantial heterogeneity by industry, wherein the wealthy from an industry can share a distinctive set of political preferences. Consequently, how increases in the wealthy's influence affect inequality depends on which industries' rich are gaining influence and which issues are at stake. We demonstrate our argument with three original surveys, including the two largest surveys of wealthy Americans to date: one of technology entrepreneurs--a burgeoning wealthy demographic' and another of political campaign donors. We show that technology entrepreneurs support liberal redistributive, social, and globalistic policies but conservative regulatory policies--a bundle of preferences rare among other wealthy individuals. Consistent with our theoretical argument, we also present evidence that suggests these differences arise from their distinctive predispositions.

Date: 2017-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-hpe and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/gsb-cmis/gsb-cmis-download-auth/441556
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:stabus:repec:ecl:stabus:3581

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Papers from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:repec:ecl:stabus:3581