Economic inequality and ideological roll-call votes: Income stratification, minority threat and support for conservative legislation (original) (raw)
Related papers
American Journal of Sociology, 2007
This study assesses whether racial and ethnic resentments still influence U.S. politics. Tests of hypotheses derived from minority threat theory and minority voting power stipulating quadratic relationships between minority presence and roll call votes for liberal legislation in the House of Representatives are conducted. In addition to these nonlinear associations, the political influence of the most menacing crime the public blames on underclass minorities is assessed as well. Fixed-effects estimates based on analyses of 1,152 state-years in the post-civil rights era indicate that the expected Ushaped relationships are present between minority population size and roll call votes for liberal legislation. Additional findings suggest that expansions in the murder rates produced decreased support for liberal policies. Statements by Republican campaign officials on how they deliberately used mass resentments against minorities to gain normally Democratic votes provide evidence about the intervening connections between the threat to white dominance posed by larger minority populations and reduced support for liberal legislation.
2007
This study assesses whether racial and ethnic resentments still influence U.S. politics. Tests of hypotheses derived from minority threat theory and minority voting power stipulating quadratic relationships between minority presence and roll call votes for liberal legislation in the House of Representatives are conducted. In addition to these nonlinear associations, the political influence of the most menacing crime the public blames on underclass minorities is assessed as well. Fixed-effects estimates based on analyses of 1,152 state-years in the post-civil rights era indicate that the expected Ushaped relationships are present between minority population size and roll call votes for liberal legislation. Additional findings suggest that expansions in the murder rates produced decreased support for liberal policies. Statements by Republican campaign officials on how they deliberately used mass resentments against minorities to gain normally Democratic votes provide evidence about the intervening connections between the threat to white dominance posed by larger minority populations and reduced support for liberal legislation.
Race, crime, and Republican strength: Minority politics in the post-civil rights era
Social Science Research, 2008
This investigation assesses the relationships between racial threat and partisan dominance in state legislatures with tests of interactive hypotheses. The findings show that historically contingent expectations derived from racial threat theory, Republican law and order campaign appeals, and fundamentalist strength account for Republican strength in the legislatures. Two-way fixed-effects estimates based on pooled time-series analyses of 799 state-years in the post-civil rights era show that the percentage of Republicans in the state legislatures grew after increases in African American presence and the violent crime rates. The combined effects of a growth in African American and fundamentalist populations also account for increased Republican seats in these bodies. Statements by Republican campaign officials on how they deliberately used mass resentments against minorities to gain votes provide evidence about the intervening links between minority threat, the menace posed by high violent crime rates, and increased Republican strength in the state legislatures.
Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2020
Racial resentment has been linked to opposition towards welfare programs for the poor and other redistributive policies. Theoretical work implies that because redistributive polices have been rhetorically linked to negative racial stereotypes, racially resentful whites will oppose redistributive policies, even when they might benefit from them. However, this proposition has not been empirically tested. Using the 2016 American National Election Study, we examine whether the relationship between racial resentment and a variety of economic policy attitudes is conditional by individuals' income level. We find that the relationship between racial resentment and opposition to redistribution is weaker for lower income whites than for whites with higher incomes. When it comes to redistributive preferences, economic self-interest tempers the influence of racial resentment for lower income whites. For whites with higher incomes, however, the influence of racial resentment on redistributive preferences is significantly larger. This indicates that in the absence of directly benefiting from a redistributive policy, whites will oppose it if they harbor racial antipathy. We exploit the time series design of the ANES to demonstrate that these patterns hold across multiple election cycles (2004-2016).
How Race-Relations Have Determined Voting Behavior Since the Civil Rights Era
2007
In contemporary American Politics, there have been many studies on voting behavior. They have included topics such as bloc voting, coalition building to form an electoral majority, and 3 rd party voting. This paper addresses the question why some racially diverse regions and states have tended to vote Republican in contemporary Presidential elections, while others have tended to vote Democratic. My hypothesis is that race relations have been a major factor in determining voting behavior since the 1964 Presidential elections. I argue that in regions and states where race-relations are polarized, racial issues are generally more salient than other issues, and these regions as well as states generally vote Republican in Presidential elections. In regions and states where race-relations tend to be more harmonious, racial issues are tend to be less salient, and these states generally vote Democratic in Presidential elections. I measure racial polarization in a variety of ways such as differing voting reactions based on issues with a strong racial component, rates of interracial marriages, electoral reactions to policy, and strength of organized racism. The findings generally confirm my hypothesis, although there a few regions as well as states where the findings are not entirely in line with my hypothesis.
Objective. Recent research indicates that political polarization in Congress and income inequality share a closely linked positive association. But virtually no studies examine the direction of influence between these variables as it is assumed that income inequality causes political polarization. The major purpose of this investigation is to examine the temporal causal ordering of these variables. Methods. This study constructs a time series national-level data set with information for the years 1913 to 2008. Vector autoregression and granger causality tests are utilized to explore the temporal causal ordering of congressional polarization and the income share of the top 0.1, 1.0, 5.0, and 10.0 percent of earners in the United States. Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity regressions are also employed to assess the strength of the association between congressional polarization and top incomes net of relevant control variables. Results. The findings indicate that the past values of congressional polarization are better predictors of top income shares than vice versa. The results also demonstrate that polarization in the House of Representatives produces a more consistent and robust connection with top incomes than polarization in the Senate. Lastly, congressional polarization only produces robust associations with the income share of the top 0.1 and 1.0 percent of earners but not for the top 5.0 and 10.0 percent. Conclusion. While the Senate possesses more powerful negative agenda control procedures to stifle the legislative processes vis-` a-vis the House, it is polarization in the latter that returns the more robust associations with income inequality. Political polarization and income inequality are currently at levels unseen in the United States during the postwar period. As to the former, there is a growing consensus among researchers that political parties, politicians, and party activists are more ideologically divided and partisan today than in decades prior (Layman, Carsey, and Horowitz, 2006; Poole and Rosenthal, 1997; Stone and Rapoport, 1994). Poole and Rosenthal (1997) measure polarization levels in both houses of Congress and find that the partisan voting behavior of Republicans and Democrats decreases during the interwar period only to revert upwards over the past half-century. Some claim that the mechanisms of persuasion and selective recruitment are to blame (Saunders and Abramowitz, 2004), while others cite the influx of single-issue interest groups and their ability to influence the voting behavior of members of Congress (Brady and Han, 2006). As to the latter, that inequality increased over the past few decades is an observation that few social scientists would disagree with. Termed the Great U-Turn by Harrison and Bluestone (1988), income inequality dropped precipitously during the first half of the 1900s only to retrend upwards over the latter half of the century. From the outsourcing
Class, race issues, and declining white support for the Democratic Party in the South
Political Behavior, 2001
The Democratic Party in the South has experienced a major loss of white voters in recent decades. Two major hypotheses have been proposed to explain this change. The dominant explanation in recent years has been that race issues have driven whites from the Democratic Party in the South. In this view, defections from the Democratic Party have occurred because whites oppose the party's positions on race issues. In contrast, others have suggested that class divisions have emerged as important, with affluent whites increasingly supportive of the Republican Party because they find its positions more compatible with their interests. Using NES data, this article assesses the evidence for these hypotheses, examining the impact of income position and race issues on partisan behavior since 1952. While both factors affect partisan support, income has come to have a relatively greater effect on partisan support than race issues. The evidence clearly indicates that class divisions in the South have steadily increased and that affluent whites have steadily shifted to the Republican Party. The implications are significant for understanding the dramatic changes in the South in recent decades. Much has been made of the tensions over race issues, and the findings presented here lend further support to the importance of race issues in southern electoral politics. However, these findings also suggest that class divisions are a steadily increasing source of political cleavage in this region. The current state of electoral politics in the South cannot be properly understood unless both of these factors are taken into account.
The Hidden Role of Racial Bias in Support for Policies Related to Inequality and Crime
Since the Jim Crow era, overtly racist attitudes toward African-Americans have decreased. During this same period, however, racial inequalities have persisted and the approach to addressing such inequalities has shifted away from social assistance and toward punitive controls. This article poses an explanation for this seeming paradox, drawing on measures of implicit racial affect in a nationally representative survey to reveal a persisting relevance of racial bias in understandings of and support for public policies—even among those explicitly denying such bias. Among non-Hispanic whites, implicit racial bias is significantly associated with opposition to policies designed to ameliorate these inequalities as well as support for punitive crime policies. Racial bias appears to play a less important role in support or opposition to these policies among Hispanic whites and especially among African-Americans. Implications for public policy debates are discussed.
Income inequality and partisan voting in the United States*
2010
Objectives: Income inequality in the United States has risen during the past several decades. Has this produced an increase in partisan voting differences between rich and poor? Methods: We examine trends from the 1940s through the 2000s in the country as a whole and in the states. Results: We find no clear relation between income inequality and class-based voting. Conclusions: Factors such as religion and education result in a less clear pattern of class-based voting than we might expect based on income inequality alone. The Republicans are traditionally the party of the business establishment, while the Democrats represent labor. Even to the extent the Democratic Party represents established interests-for example, government employees, teachers, and others on the public payroll-they tend to be lower income than comparable Republican-leaning business groups. As McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal (2006) point out, economic inequality has implications for class-based voting. All else being equal, the greater the inequality, the more the economic interests of the rich and poor should diverge, and the more one would expect to find such groups at home in opposing political parties. Recent decades have seen a striking rise in income inequality in the United States (Gottschalk and Danziger, 2005; Piketty and Saez, 2007; Mishel, Bernstein, and Shierholz, 2009). Has this led to an increase in partisan voting differences between rich and poor? We offer no sweeping story here. Instead we share some statistical observations on inequality and voting over time in the country as a whole and in the states, revealing patterns that suggest complex connections between inequality, geography, and partisan voting in the United States.
Political Behavior, 2006
Does context-racial, economic, fiscal, and political-affect whites' votes on racially-related ballot propositions? We examine non-Hispanic whites' voting behavior on three California ballot initiatives: Propositions 187, 209, and 227. Unlike previous analyses that lacked individual-level data and were therefore limited to ecological inference, we combine individual-level data from exit polls with county-level contextual variables in a hierarchical linear model. Racial/ethnic context affected whites' votes only on Proposition 187, economic context had no influence on vote choice, and the effect of fiscal context was limited to Proposition 227. However, across the propositions, whites' decisions were shaped by their political context. Thus, we do not find support for the ''racial threat'' hypothesis across all racially-charged issues.