The Far-Right Donation Gap

Le Lemma organise un séminaire, sur le thème « The Far-Right Donation Gap » le mardi 11 juin à 11h. 

Julia CAGE (Sciences Po)

Résumé : 

We document a widespread decline in the share of donors to charities in Western countries over the past decade, and show that this can be in part explained by a lower propensity to donate among far-right voters. Focusing on France, we first conduct a large-scale survey (N = 12,600) and show that far-right voters are significantly less likely to report a charitable donation than the rest of the population, conditional on a rich set of controls. Second, using administrative tax data for the universe of French municipalities (N ≃ 33, 000) combined with electoral results, we find that the negative relationship between vote shares for the far right and charitable donations holds in a broad range of specifications, at both the extensive and the intensive margin, and controlling for municipality fixed effects. Third, we exploit unique geo-localized donation data from several charities and document similar patterns. All evidence points towards a drop in the propensity to donate driven by a shift in social norms that threatens general acceptance of the charitable sector. We provide consistent evidence using survey data from Germany and novel tax data from Italy.