Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP18356
Authors: Julia Cag; Moritz Hengel; Yuchen Huang
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: charitable giving; political donations; far-right; social norms; underlying preferences; communal moral values; universalist moral values
JEL Codes: H24; H31; L38
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| charitable donations (D64) | political donations (D72) |
| far-right voters (D72) | communal moral values (A13) |
| far-right voters (D72) | charitable donations (D64) |
| vote share for far-right candidates (D72) | share of households declaring charitable donations (D64) |