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Explaining support for Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy has become a key social-science challenge. An emerging literature highlights several important individual-level precursors of Trump support, including racial attitudes, sexism, and authoritarianism. In this report, we provide evidence for the role of a novel psychological factor: collective narcissism, an inflated, unrealistic view of the national ingroup’s greatness contingent on external recognition. Using data from a recent national survey, we demonstrate that collective narcissism is a powerful predictor of 2016 presidential votes and evaluations of Trump, even after controlling for other variables known to predict candidate preferences in general and Trump support in particular.
Federico et al. (Tue,) studied this question.