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Questions that are rarely asked, a continuing series
Why do affluent, middle-class, and poor voters all seem so exquisitely sensitive to election-year income growth for the wealthiest families?
Oddly, the voting of lower-income voters is relatively insensitive to their own election-year incomes. One option is that media reporting is biased toward coverage of the rich and famous. Another option is that we, as voters, are biased toward considering our pleasure or displeasure with the strength of the high-ranking members of our tribe.
That question is from Larry Bartels's Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.
Here is a previous installment in the series.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on April 25, 2008 at 07:24 AM in Political Science | Permalink
Comments
Yes of course people are interested in their reiative positions.
In packs of animals alpha status brings enhanced opportunities
for feeding and breeding.
This is all well established.
Our species of social animal evolve under similar constraints as
other social animals for which alpha status had great advantage.
In Inca society, the Inca had the greatest access to females, and
on down the hierarchy access was directly related to status.
Posted by: indiana jim at Apr 25, 2008 7:38:50 AM
a question never asked, however, is why it is that so many posts have extra paragraph breaks here at MR. Do people want their text to be contained in the smaller column? Is it b/c it makes it stand out? Is some browser inserting extra ones? Do people think you need to hit return, like the typewriter?
Posted by: shawn at Apr 25, 2008 8:23:40 AM
Shawn,
When I start typing in the comments box, the box extends past the right margin into the book adds. So as the cursor moves all the way to the right, it goes out of view even though I am still typing. Perhaps others are having a similar problem. I am using IE6.
Posted by: MS at Apr 25, 2008 9:19:09 AM
Because lower-income voters tend to be very likely to under-report their most discretionary income.
Posted by: Chris at Apr 25, 2008 9:45:26 AM
Ah, the old "why don't they vote 'their interests'" thing. That's frustrated the American Left for a long time, hasn't it?
Maybe because lower income voters actually have some practical street smarts and know that soaking higher income voters really isn't in their long term interest?
Maybe they can sense when lefty politicians are trying to use them to enrich and empower lefty politicians?
Posted by: holmegm at Apr 25, 2008 10:11:10 AM
ah...so it's an html formatting problem on mr's end. thanks MS, that's interesting...always wondered. What's your display resolution?
Posted by: shawn at Apr 25, 2008 11:18:40 AM
1280x1024. I think the formatting is actually the result of people hitting return to avoid the cursur from moving off the screen into the margin. As you can see, my formatting is fine. I just can't see a portion of what I've typed.
Posted by: MS at Apr 25, 2008 11:45:10 AM
I'd like to see the polls that prove the premise. And a poll question that raises income disparity alone is suspect.
In my personal experience, most people outside of political junkie cult (including, without limitation, journalists) don't care about income disparity and in the real world you can go months without anyone mentioning it. I suppose its because normal people are consumed by trying to make money, raise families, getting their local sports' teams GM fired, and selecting various consumer goods and services.
Posted by: guy in the veal calf office at Apr 25, 2008 12:18:02 PM
It's the intellectuals and political elites on the left who care. For them, it's a narrative they can use to justify their policies and defeat the other team. The people only care because that's what they have been told.
Posted by: Patrick Fitzsimmons at Apr 25, 2008 12:36:29 PM
"It's the intellectuals and political elites on the left who care. For them, it's a narrative they can use to justify their policies and defeat the other team. The people only care because that's what they have been told."
Voting in a general election isn't necessarily a one-dimensional proposition; yet the voter is left with more or less a one-dimensional option. Voting one party over another can signal many things:
1) Voting FOR a particular ticket
2) Voting AGAINST a particular ticket
3) Voting, on balance, FOR a particular party platform
4) Voting, on balance, AGAINST a particular party platform
and so on. Surely a voter who is poor and always will be poor, but who is vehemently pro-life is voting against his/her best financial interests. Perhaps even knowingly.
Isn't it pretty much the strategy of the Republican party to appeal to disparate groups on single issues?
Posted by: at Apr 25, 2008 2:52:40 PM
Envy
Posted by: k at Apr 25, 2008 6:06:07 PM
Need more info. Is the premise of the question that 'election-year income growth for the wealthiest families' correlates well with voting patterns across income class? (And is it supposed to be obvious which way the correlation goes?) But is it only election-year wealthy income growth which does this, and if you consider non-election-year income growth the effect goes away? (I doubt that but that seems to be the point here.) Anyway I'd look for a common cause. In particular (if I've understood the premise, and there really is something special about election-year income) maybe when wealthy folks get a windfall in an election year in particular, they throw more money at an election and end up funding a magnified 'media effect' (more advertising, election seems 'more heated' to the layperson, etc). And in leaner years they don't so we are left with only the latent media effect. To the extent a 'media effect' exists at all, if it's magnified in some years and not in others based on some factor X, it could very well appear as if voting patterns across the spectrum are highly sensitive to X.
Of course the assumption that "the wealthiest families" would have lean years in which they don't have spare campaign cash seems kind of silly on its face. But perhaps not, on a psychological level. Political spending (and going to thousand dollar a plate fundraisers, etc), and placing an emotional stake in an election's outcome (attaching yourself to one candidate's fate in particular) is a sort of luxury good that requires spare cash, free time, and a lack of other more pressing/immediate concerns in one's life (job, family, etc), so it makes sense to me that wealthy income volatility could cause big swings.
Posted by: Sonic Charmer at Apr 26, 2008 9:00:57 AM
One option is that media reporting is biased toward coverage of the rich and famous.
A more plausible version of this hypothesis is that the media focus on events such as stock market fluctuations that affect the incomes of the rich more than they affect the poor. Or they affect everyone's income, but the fluctuations show up quickly in the capital gains of the rich and slowly in the wages of the poor, and the poor are reacting to forseeable but not yet measured fluctuations in their own income.
Posted by: Peter McCluskey at Apr 27, 2008 4:52:45 PM
Maybe the poor voters know that socialism won't make them actually richer in the long term.
Posted by: at Apr 29, 2008 1:23:15 PM
