The Far-Right Donation Gap

Résumé

We document a widespread decline in the share of donors to charities in Western countries over the past decade. We show that this can be in part explained by the growing electoral importance of the far-right. We indeed uncover a lower propensity to donate among far-right voters, using several novel datasets and empirical strategies. First, we conduct a large-scale survey one week before the 2022 French Presidential elections 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, we provide similar evidence using administrative tax data combined with electoral results for the universe of French municipalities, relaxing social desirability bias concerns. Given that the charitable sector is highly diverse,we next collect unique geo-localized donation data from several charities with different purposes. We show that the negative relationship between far-right voting and charitable giving is much stronger for charities with a global reach than for more local ones. However, far-right voters do not compensate less universalistic preferences by more local donations; they simply give less overall. Finally, exploiting novel administrative tax data from the public funding of NPO in Italy, we show that the lower altruistic preferences of far-right voters do not come from the supply side of the charitable sector. Overall, our novel evidence points towards a drop in the propensity to donate driven both by a shift in social norms that threatens the general acceptance of the charitable sector among loyal far-right voters,and by the growing electoral support for the far-right.(avec Moritz Hengel et Yuchen Huang)