Political Alienation and the Trump Vote in the 2016-2020 U.S. Presidential Elections

Repository for "Political Alienation and the Trump Vote in the 2016-2020 U.S. Presidential Elections"

Repository Contents

• R Scripts

  1. Alienation-Source.R
  2. Alienation-Descriptives.R
  3. Alienation-STM.R
  4. Alienation-VoteModels.R

• R Project

  1. Alienation.Rproj

• Data Files

  1. anes_timeseries_2016_redacted_openends.xslx
  2. anes_timeseries_2020_redactedopenends_excel_20211118.xlsx
  3. anes_timeseries_cdf_stata_20211118.dta
  4. anes_timeseries_2020_csv_20220210.csv
  5. anes_timeseries_2016.dta
  6. usmisc2015-mipd_ann.dta

Replicating the paper

As noted above, there are four scripts in this repository: Alienation-Source.R, Alienation-Descriptives.R, Alienation-STM.R, and Alienation-VoteModels.R. Running these scripts in their entirety will produce all of the empirical results found in the paper and the online appendix. A short description of each script is provided below:

1. Alienation-Source.R

   • This is the source script where I clean and reshape the four data files that are used in this project anes_timeseries_2016_redacted_openends.xslx, anes_timeseries_2016.dta, anes_timeseries_2012.dta, and anes_timeseries_cdf.dta. These four data files come directly from the American National Election Studies and can be accessed by clicking here. This script begins by merging the 2016 survey data with the redacted open-ended responses. Then, I proceed to isolating the necessary variables from the 2016, 2012, and CDF files, renaming the necessary variables, and finally reshaping the necessary variables. When this script is run in its entirety, it will produce three cleaned data-frames: mydata.16, mydata.12, and mydata.cdf. Each of the remaining scripts in this repository begin by loading these data files.

2. Alienation-Descriptives.R

   • This files produces means and histograms of the alienation measures, as well as the descriptive statistics tables found in the supplemental materials.

3. Alienaiton-STM.R

   • This script is for the creating and exploration of the Structural Topic Model.

4. Alienation-VoteModels.R

   • This file estimates the models of turnout and vote choice found in the main text and supplemental material. Tables and figures from the models are also generated with this script.