17:45 - 20:00
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Costin Ciobanu
Discussant/s:
Brandon Beomseob Park
Meeting Room J

Mary Stegmaier, Michael Lewis-Beck, Beomseob Park
Economics and Elections: The future agenda

Alexandra Jabbour
Beyond the neighbourhood, but not too far: reconsidering the effect of the immediate environment on citizens’ perceptions of the economy

Eitan Tzelgov, Loren Collingwood
The Political Economy of Detention Centres and its Impact on Vote Choice in the 2020 U.S. Election

Ignazio Jurado
Retrospective Voting under Supranational Constraints

David Wineroither, Florian Weiler, Simon Fink
Seeking for Shelter: The Sectoral Basis of Economic Voting in Austria
The Political Economy of Detention Centres and its Impact on Vote Choice in the 2020 U.S. Election
Eitan Tzelgov 1, Loren Collingwood 2
1 University of East Anglia
2 University of New Mexico

Recent scholarship tends to find more evidence for symbolic, rather than economic, theories of vote choice. However, most studies examining economic voting fail to take account of the political economy of vote choice in geographic areas dominated by industries that clearly stand to gain or lose by a candidate’s victory or defeat. This research challenges the literature on symbolic and economic voting, by leveraging precinct and individual-level data in the context of the 2020 presidential election among the 25 counties that comprise South Texas -- a region dominated by Mexican-Americans and individuals who work in border patrol and immigration enforcement. The Trump Administration expanded these industries and promulgated harsh immigration policies highlighted by child separation and detention. As a result, these industries and those working in them experienced great vitriol from liberal Democrats, many promising to “Abolish ICE.” We hypothesize that relative to the 2016 vote, precincts located near immigrant detention facilities, ICE field offices, and border patrol headquarters, will show disproportionate swings towards Trump in the 2020 election. Second, we hypothesize that individual-level vote switching from Clinton (2016) to Trump (2020) is better predicted by whether an individual works in immigration enforcement or knows someone who does rather than an individua’s racial or anti-immigrant attitudes. Our results have implications for theories of vote choice and for understanding ethnic minority politics.