Matt Dardet (APRW)

Speaker & Title

Matt Dardet, "Political Risk Aversion and Partisan Sorting in the American Electorate"

Abstract

How do voters’ calculations about and orientations towards risk affect American elections? In this paper, I develop and validate a new measure of political risk aversion, show that it is empirically and conceptually distinct from traditional measures of risk aversion across the social sciences, and demonstrate its substantial effects on American voting behavior. Using three original surveys and a novel LLM-based methodology to estimate political risk aversion from text data, I validate this new measure and, using multidimensional scaling, demonstrate that this construct cannot be reduced to generalized or gambling-based measures of risk aversion. Applying this method to text panels comprising mass and elite discourse, and linking survey respondents to voter file records, I show that risk aversion explains vote choice and turnout even after accounting for partisanship, ideology, and demographics. Finally, I document a striking reversal in the partisan distribution of political risk aversion over time: whereas Republican voters were substantially more risk-averse during the late twentieth century, this relationship began to change between 2008 and 2016, and Democratic voters are now comparatively more risk-averse. Exogenous shocks to personal finances and salient dimensions thereof precede risk-orientation-mediated reorientations of political behavior. These findings suggest that political risk aversion is a significant and underexplored facet of voter psychology, with implications for turnout and political engagement, party identification, populism, and studies of democratic representation.