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Ren, Sihan

University of British Columbia

Sovereign citizens are known for their unique worldviews, but what causes one to subscribe to such ideology? Previous studies have identified the movement's historical roots of the movement in economic hardships and racism. This study contributes to existing scholarship by approaching the subject from the angle of political trust and consequently contextualizing the trust literature to the sovereign citizen movement. Correspondingly, this study theorizes that economic hardship, pre-disposed racism, and the location of residence induce one’s ideological affinity towards the sovereign citizen's movement. It proposes three corresponding hypotheses, which are tested using randomized survey experiments. It compares the differences in means between the control and the various treatment groups to estimate the average causal effect (ACE). It successfully rejects one null hypothesis: economic hardship is a meaningful inducer of ideological affinity to the movement, not racism. Additionally, location also appears to provide additional insights with strong reactions to treatments from suburbanites, but the overall relationship is not substantial. The study ends by discussing the implications of the results and identifying the study's limitations, mainly the bias due to unrepresentative samples.

Text

2024-08-21

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88986

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/