Stanford study says small business owners more likely to be Republicans

By Stephen Beech

Small business owners are more likely to be right-wing, according to new research.

Entrepreneurs are more likely to identify with and vote for right-wing parties, reveals the study published in the British Journal of Political Science.

The experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation, say researchers.

The study, which analyzed political leanings of small business owners in the United States, also found that current business owners, but not past owners of businesses, vote more to the right than people who have never owned a business.

Researchers also found that people who inherited a business, more than those who started a new business, are more right-leaning.

And even within a narrow professional subset - such as doctors with their own practices - business ownership aligns with a "disproportionate" right lean.

Professor Neil Malhotra, of Stanford University, says the findings indicate that the appeal of right-wing parties derives from experiences associated with running a business, rather than from background characteristics that lead people to open or run a firm.

He said: “The heightened need to deal with the regulatory state, especially, can lead small business owners to lean further to the right."

The study used several data sources, including a survey of small business owners, a comparable survey of a general sample of the US adult population, and data on the partisan registration and donations of a targeted set of occupations.

Malhotra pointed out how the gig economy is familiarizing more people with the pressures experienced by small business owners.

He said: “As the labor market veers toward gig platforms and gig jobs, more people will become, in many ways, a new form of small business owners.

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"They will have no boss and enjoy more flexibility in their work schedules, while also experiencing the burden of heightened responsibility for key aspects of work as compared to waged staff.

“At the same time, gig workers face economic precarity and instability.

"As a growing number of people have daily experiences akin to those of a business owner, it will be interesting to see if parties and candidates on the right are likely to benefit, or if this is an opportunity for the left to build the social safety net.”

The study found that small business owners are "significantly overrepresented" among individuals without college degrees but who earn higher-than-median incomes – also known as ‘High Income Low Education’, or HILEs.

One of the main ways a person can make a high income without a degree is by running a successful small business.

HILEs comprise around 20.2% of Americans who are not small business owners.

But that figure is substantially higher among small business owners, with 33.1% of employer small business owners and 26.6% of non-employer small business owners falling into that category

The study found that 59.2% of HILEs identify with the Republican Party, and 50.3% would vote for Donald Trump.

Among other respondents, those figures are 47.6% and 36.2% respectively.

The study also found that many of the small business owner occupation types that are Democratic-leaning are creative functions done mainly by sole proprietors – for example, therapy, massage, and graphic design.

On the other hand, Republican-leaning small business owners were more involved in complex industries such as construction, healthcare, and manufacturing, which have more of an interface with regulations involving labor laws, health and safety, and compliance.