World Inequality Lab – Working Paper N° 2023/15 - The far-right donation gap - Julia Cagé

We are, to the extent of our knowledge, the first to provide evidence – using both survey and tax data – on the evolution of the share of charitable donors and its relationship to the electoral rise of the far right and of communal moral values. [...] Note, however, that part of the gap between the fiscal data and the reported donations in the survey may also come from the fact that most households (as encompassed in the tax data) include several individuals, while the survey data is at the individual level. [...] The “other left” candidates include the candidate from the French communist party (Fabien Roussel, 2.28%) of the votes, the candidate of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (Philippe Poutou, 0.77%), the candidate of the Socialist party (Anne Hidalgo, 1.75%), and the candidate of Lutte Ouvrière (Nathalie Arthaud, 0.56%). [...] The main independent variable, Elections′c(d) , is a vector of the (IHS transformations of the) vote shares obtained by the candidates in the 2012 and 2017 presidential elections, with the share of the registered voters abstaining as the reference category. [...] Table 3 reports the results for the 2012 and 2017 presidential elections pulled together.27 In Column (2), we introduce the number of charities and the number of global charities, where the latter is more predictive of the share of households that donate without affecting the estimated elasticities of the share of donors with respect to vote shares.