HMN 2025: Why small business owners are more likely to be right wing

Small business owners are more likely to identify with and vote for right-wing parties, according to a new study in the British Journal of Political Science. The research suggests it is the experience of being a small business owner that leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation.

The study, which analyzed the 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 never owned a business; that people who inherited a business, more than those who started a new business, are more right-leaning; and that even within a narrow professional subset such as physicians with their own practices, business ownership aligns with a disproportionate right lean.

Neil Malhotra, professor of political economy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, said 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 business.

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

The study used a wide range of data sources: an original, first-of-its-kind bespoke survey of small business owners based on a unique administrative sampling frame of the recipients of the US Paycheck Protection Program; a comparable survey of a general sample of the US adult population; a cross-national survey data; and data on the partisan registration and donations of a targeted set of occupations.

The gig economy could benefit right-wing parties

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

“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: 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,” said Malhotra.

“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 politics of wealthy small business owners

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. Indeed, one of the main ways a person can make a high income without a college degree is by running a successful small business.

HILEs comprise approximately 20.2% of Americans that are not small business owners. This figure, however, is substantially higher among small business owners: 33.1% of employer small business owners and 26.6% of non-employer small business owners fall into this category.

The study found that 59.2% of HILEs identify with the Republican Party, and 50.3% would vote for Trump. Among other respondents, these figures are 47.6% and 36.2% respectively.

Political differences by sector

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 are more involved in complex industries such as construction, health care, and manufacturing, which have more of an interface with regulations involving labor laws, health and safety, and compliance.

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