On Wealth and Politics
Uncovering the Source of Patrimonial Voting: Evidence from Swedish Twin Pairs
The boom in wealth inequality seen in recent decades has generated a steep rise in scholarly interest in both the drivers and the consequences of the wealth gap. In political science, a pertinent question regards the political behavior across the wealth spectrum. A common argument is that the wealthy practice patrimonial voting, i.e. voting for right-wing parties to maximize returns on their assets. While this pattern is descriptively well documented, it is less certain to what extent this reflects an actual causal relationship between wealth and political preferences. In this study, we provide new evidence by exploiting wealth variation within identical twin pairs. Our findings suggest that while more wealth is descriptively connected to more support for right-wing parties, the causal impact of wealth on policy preferences is likely highly overstated. For several relevant policy areas these effects may not exist at all. Furthermore, the bias in naive observational estimates seems to be mainly driven by environmental familial confounders shared within twin pairs, rather than genetic confounding.
The correlation is more likely to be the product of who chooses professional paths that involve wealth how that interacts with their politics.
Sweden isn’t the United States, of course, but I suspect the results would hold over here. Except to the extent that wealthy voters are becoming less Republican. That itself is an international phenomenon, though. One affect of that phenomenon may be a more wealth-friendly Democratic Party, however. (See SALT tax objections, and the left’s many frustrations with Obama and Clinton administrations.)
(h/t Rolf Degan)
I read this to mean that people perceive wealthy people being economically and socially conservative, but the reality is that wealth is not a strong determiner of political leanings?Report
It means that while wealth is positively correlated with support for economically conservative policies, it does not appear to be a significant causal factor in support for economically conservative policies.Report
My theory of the SALT deduction is that in equilibrium it actually results in higher taxes on high earners. Because it gives high earners a 30-40% refund on state taxes, states increase taxes to higher levels than they would without the SALT deduction. In order to make up the lost revenue, Congress raises marginal rates on federal income taxes, mostly on high earners (recall that the SALT limitation was paired with a reduction in marginal rates).
So the SALT deduction results in higher state taxes and federal taxes that are not significantly lower on average.
The reason Democrats oppose the SALT limitation is not a newfound empathy for high-earning taxpayers, but rather a concern that it will result in a revolt against the high-tax regimes of blue states. The fact that Democrats are pushing to increase marginal rates while restoring the unlimited SALT deduction supports this interpretation over the sympathy-for-the-wealthy interpretation.Report
Are there really, really fashionable positions that are completely orthogonal to wealth-related politics that are held up as being far more important than wealth-related politics to the point where wealth-related politics are called a “distraction”?Report
I think it is always hard to extrapolate any causal factor here when dealing with large populations. As you note, it is probably more about sources of wealth. Despite many media dinner safaris, the average Trump voter was fairly well to do. The old term for them would have been petit bourgeois. Not necessarily college educated but people who made the money in contracting businesses, trucking, car dealerships, etc.
There is more evidence that college-educated professionals are swinging towards the Democrats but college-educated professional includes everyone from a teacher making 35K-40k a year to people with successful law and medical practices. The range of career and income is big.Report
More specifically, I think the current Democrat-Republican split is about class not income, with education acting as the class marker. An adjunct may be much poorer than someone who has no degree, but owns a car dealership, but I think they are of a higher social class.Report
So lets keep going with this.
What is it that binds the groups together?
Say, the middle income shopkeeper with the hedge fund manager, or the adjunct professor to the tech millionaire?
Our political viewpoints are disconnected from pocketbook concerns of wealth so there is obviously another set of issues that causes people to align themselves to a group.
My suggestion is that it is cultural attitudes towards gender and race.Report
I think it’s instructive to look at where the blueward drifts have occurred in the last several years: places with high population growth especially in the suburbs around a core city. Think Colorado and Nevada, and now Arizona and Georgia. As a cartogram, all of them increasingly resemble Colorado as shown here.Report
I don’t think this is completely correct except about a subset of the population. There are still plenty of working class people who vote Democratic. But the issue as Chip notes frequently is that too many people have outdated notions about what it means to be working class and who is the working class. The number of people with these outdated notions is wide and you can see it in professional media and in small lefty publications. They still see the working class as being white, male, and industrial with steel toed boots instead of being women who work as home-health aides in crocs and scrubs.
There are still plenty of really rich people that support the GOP for plutocratic reasons and then maybe a group that supports the Democratic Party despite or because of their wealth.Report
Yes, I think you and Chip make good points – the class based model only really applies to white voters, and that’s largely because so much of the white non-degree class’s political activity is based on racial animus.Report
It seems weird to define a person without much formal or informal power as beloning to higher social class than somebody with a lot of formal and informal social power.
Trying to do a class breakdown of American society is really weird. Besides what Chip and Saul noted, there were always wide geographic varieties. It was kind of easier to do a class analysis during the Gilded Age because so many wealthy people decided to basically act like the British gentry in part. These days things are more defuse with a lot of different upper classes. You have the business upper class, the celebrity upper class, the political upper class, etc. You also have a lot of middle classes and working classes.Report