Larry M. Bartels

Unequal democracy : the political economy of the new gilded age

The first edition of Unequal Democracy was an instant classic, shattering illusions about American democracy and spurring scholarly and popular interest in the political causes and consequences of escalating economic inequality. This revised and expanded edition includes two new chapters on the political economy of the Obama era. One presents the Great Recession as a “stress test” of the American political system by analyzing the 2008 election and the impact of Barack Obama’s “New New Deal” on the economic fortunes of the rich, middle class, and poor. The other assesses the politics of inequality in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the 2012 election, and the partisan gridlock of Obama’s second term. Larry Bartels offers a sobering account of the barriers to change posed by partisan ideologies and the political power of the wealthy. He also provides new analyses of tax policy, partisan differences in economic performance, the struggle to raise the minimum wage, and inequalities in congressional representation. President Obama identified inequality as “the defining challenge of our time.” Unequal Democracy is the definitive account of how and why our political system has failed to rise to that challenge. Now more than ever, this is a book every American needs to read.

Uninformed Votes: Information Effects in Presidential Elections

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Messages Received: The Political Impact of Media Exposure

Analyses of the persuasive effects of media exposure outside the laboratory have generally produced negative results. I attribute such nonfindings in part to carelessness regarding the inferential consequences of measurement error and in part to limitations of research design. In an analysis of opinion change during the 1980 presidential campaign, adjusting for measurement error produces several strong media exposure effects, especially for network television news. Adjusting for measurement error also makes preexisting opinions look much more stable, suggesting that the new information absorbed via media exposure must be about three times as distinctive as has generally been supposed in order to account for observed patterns of opinion change.

Homer Gets a Tax Cut: Inequality and Public Policy in the American Mind

In 2001 and 2003, the Bush administration engineered two enormous tax cuts primarily benefiting very wealthy taxpayers. Most Americans supported these tax cuts. I argue that they did so not because they were indifferent to economic inequality, but because they largely failed to connect inequality and public policy. Three out of every four people polled said that the difference in incomes between rich people and poor people has increased in the past 20 years, and most of them added that that is a bad thing—but most of those people still supported the regressive 2001 Bush tax cut and the even more regressive repeal of the estate tax. Several manifestly relevant considerations had negligible or seemingly perverse effects on these policy views, including assessments of the wastefulness of government spending and desires for additional spending on a variety of government programs. Support for the Bush tax cuts was strongly shaped by people’s attitudes about their own tax burdens, but virtually unaffected by their attitudes about the tax burden of the rich—even in the case of the estate tax, which only affects the wealthiest one or two percent of taxpayers. Public opinion in this instance was ill informed, insensitive to some of the most important implications of the tax cuts, and largely disconnected from (or misconnected to) a variety of relevant values and material interests.

What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas?

Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? asserts that the Republican Party has forged a new “dominant political coalition” by attracting working-class white voters on the basis of “class animus” and “cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion.” My analysis confirms that white voters without college degrees have become significantly less Democratic; however, the contours of that shift bear little resemblance to Frank’s account. First, the trend is almost entirely confined to the South, where Democratic support was artificially inflated by the one-party system of the Jim Crow era of legalized racial segregation. (Outside the South, support for Democratic presidential candidates among whites without college degrees has fallen by a total of one percentage point over the past half-century.) Second, there is no evidence that “culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern” among Frank’s working-class white voters. The apparent political significance of social issues has increased substantially over the past 20 years, but more among better-educated white voters than among those without college degrees. In both groups, economic issues continue to be most important. Finally, contrary to Frank’s account, most of his white working-class voters see themselves as closer to the Democratic Party on social issues like abortion and gender roles but closer to the Republican Party on economic issues.

Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans

It is important to know what wealthy Americans seek from politics and how (if at all) their policy preferences differ from those of other citizens.There can be little doubt that the wealthy exert more political influence than the less affluent do. If they tend to get their way in some areas of public policy, and if they have policy preferences that differ significantly from those of most Americans, the results could be troubling for democratic policy making. Recent evidence indicates that “affluent” Americans in the top fifth of theincomedistributionaresociallymoreliberalbuteconomicallymoreconservativethanothers.Butuntilnowtherehasbeenlittle systematicevidenceaboutthetrulywealthy,suchasthetop1percent.Wereporttheresultsofapilotstudyofthepoliticalviewsand activities of the top 1 percent or so of US wealth-holders. We find that they are extremely active politically and that they are much moreconservativethantheAmericanpublicasawholewithrespecttoimportantpoliciesconcerningtaxation,economicregulation, and especially social welfare programs. Variation within this wealthy group suggests that the top one-tenth of 1 percent of wealthholders (people with

Presidential Vote Models: A Recount

40 million or more in net worth) may tend to hold still more conservative views that are even more distinct from those of the general public. We suggest that these distinctive policy preferences may help account for why certain public policiesintheUnitedStatesappeartodeviatefromwhatthemajorityofUScitizenswantsthegovernmenttodo.Ifthisisso,itraises serious issues for democratic theory.

THE AMERICAN PUBLIC'S DEFENSE SPENDING PREFERENCES IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA

Was it Al Gore’s election to lose? Most political scientists, including us, believed that peace and a booming economy would give Gore a significant advantage in the 2000 presidential race. The election outcome – a virtual dead heat in the popular vote – has prompted two reactions that seem to us to be quite wrong-headed. On one hand, many journalists and some political scientists have interpreted the 2000 result as casting doubt on the basic premise of presidential vote models, that economic and political “fundamentals” play a systematic and largely predictable role in shaping presidential election outcomes. If Gore was supposed to win easily but didn’t, doesn’t that just go to show that the so-called “fundamentals” are less important than they seem and that every election is a unique political event, beyond the reach of simple-minded historical regression analyses? On the other hand, some observers – including some of the most prominent election forecasters – have concluded that the problem was not with the forecasting models but with Al Gore as a candidate. “Gore didn’t run a campaign consistent with the model,” according to

New Measures of Issue Salience: An Evaluation

The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union have produced marked changes in the defense spending preferences of politically informed Americans, but rela- tively little change among the 60 percent or so of the public least informed about politics. The overall level of defense spending preferred by well-informed citizens is significantly lower than during the Cold War and significantly less related to ideology and isolationism. Willingness to use force in the international arena remains the primary determinant of defense spending preferences among both well-informed and relatively uninformed citizens. Willingness to use force is in turn primarily related to basic social and cultural values, including trust in people and symbolic patrio- tism. How do the policy preferences of ordinary citizens change in response to dramatic political events? The end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union-and of the Soviet Union itself-provides a remarkable oppor- tunity to examine the dynamics of opinion change in the face of funda- mental changes in the context and political underpinnings of U.S. de- fense policy. My aims here are to identify the most important determinants of defense spending preferences in the post-Cold War period and to examine how the determinants of defense spending pref- erences have changed since the early 1980s. Some previous analysts have used aggregated time series data to

Electoral Continuity and Change, 1868-1996

The 1979 NES Pilot Study and the 1980 National Election Study included new items intended to measure the importance of different issues to individual respondents. Theory suggests that voters should weigh more important issues more heavily than less important issues in arriving at candidate evaluations and vote choices. However, no such differential weighting is evident using the new measures of issue salience in either the Pilot Study or the 1980 Election Study. A variety of question formats, samples, and coding schemes all lead to the conclusion that the new salience items add little or nothing to our ability to account for electoral behavior.