Threat, trust, and Trump: identity and voting in the 2016 presidential election

ABSTRACT

Using longitudinal data from 421 MTurk participants, collected over 6 months surrounding the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, we investigated the relationships among identity centrality, institutional trust, and vote. Specifically, we were interested in whether trust in science and the media mediated the relationship between the centrality of racial, gender, and class identities, and how the importance of these identities was related to participants’ votes. Results indicated that trust in these institutions did mediate the relationship between centrality and vote in different ways depending on level of privilege, identity domain, and type of trust. For instance, class centrality among working-class people predicted greater trust in the media, which predicted voting for Hillary Clinton, while race centrality among White people predicted less trust in science, which predicted voting for Trump.

KEYWORDS:

• Trust in media
• trust in science
• institutional trust
• identity centrality
• voting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Benjamin T. Blankenship http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5296-9302