Does Money Make People Right-Wing and Inegalitarian? A Longitudinal Study of Lottery Winners

Nattavudh Powdthavee and Andrew Oswald

The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) from University of Warwick, Department of Economics

Abstract: The causes of people’s political attitudes are largely unknown. We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing people before and after a lottery windfall, we show that winners tend to switch towards support for a right-wing political party and to become less egalitarian. The larger the win, the more people tilt to the right. This relationship is robust to (i) different ways of defining right-wing, (ii) a variety of estimation methods, and (iii) methods that condition on the person previously having voted left. It is strongest for males. Our findings are consistent with the view that voting is driven partly by human self-interest. Money apparently makes people more right-wing JEL classification: D1 ; D72 ; H1 ; J7

Keywords: Voting; gender; lottery wins; political preferences; income; attitudes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-ltv, nep-pol and nep-sog
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

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https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/w ... werp_1039_oswald.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Money Make People Right-Wing and Inegalitarian? A Longitudinal Study of Lottery Winners (2016)
Working Paper: Does Money Make People Right-Wing and Inegalitarian? A Longitudinal Study of Lottery Winners (2014)
Working Paper: Does Money Make People Right-Wing and Inegalitarian? A Longitudinal Study of Lottery Winners (2014)
Working Paper: Does Money Make People Right-Wing and Inegalitarian? A Longitudinal Study of Lottery Winners (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wrk:warwec:1039

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