How Do Inequality and George Floyd’s Protests Affect the Vote Shares of Trump?

Yidi Wu () and Jianing Zhang ()
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Yidi Wu: Wenzhou-Kean University
Jianing Zhang: Wenzhou-Kean University

A chapter in Eurasian Business and Economics Perspectives, 2023, pp 323-338 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract. The George Floyd protests were a series of protests and civil unrest that began in Minneapolis on May 26, 2020. This paper investigates how inequality and the occurrence of protests affected the vote shares of the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump. We collect data from multiple open sources, including the MIT Election and Science Lab, Institut Publique de Sondage d’Opinion Secteur (Ipsos), and the US Census Bureau. This study delineates the location and magnitude of the protests on the US map and whether the protests escalated or involved police brutality. We investigate the relationship between the Gini index, assembling to protest, escalated violence, and the vote count in favor of Donald Trump by using OLS multivariate regression, fixed effects, logit, dummy variable, and log-linear models. We employ a two-stage least squares model to address the endogeneity issue, where instrumental variables include the unemployment rate, the percentage of people in the countries whose income is under the poverty level, and the top 5% share of aggregate household income by country. The results based on the survey responses regarding 3112 protests, escalations, Gini indexes, and vote shares reveal that counties with high inequality levels and protests have an anti-Trump inclination.

Keywords: Inequality; Gini index; George Floyd’s protest; Election (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurchp:978-3-031-30061-5_20

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-30061-5_20

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