“Compensate the Losers?” Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the US

Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet-Marx and Suresh Naidu

No 31794, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We argue that the Democratic Party’s evolution on economic policy helps explain partisan realignment by education. We show that less-educated Americans differentially demand “predistribution” policies (e.g., a federal jobs guarantee, higher minimum wages, protectionism, and stronger unions), while more-educated Americans differentially favor redistribution (taxes and transfers). This educational gradient in policy preferences has been largely unchanged since the 1940s. We then show the Democrats’ supply of predistribution has declined since the 1970s. We tie this decline to the rise of a self-described “New Democrat” party faction who court more educated voters and are explicitly skeptical of predistribution. Consistent with this faction’s growing influence, we document the significant growth of donations from highly educated donors, especially from out-of-district donors, who play an increasingly important role in Democratic (especially “New Democrat”) primary campaigns relative to Republican primaries. In response to these within-party changes in power, less-educated Americans began to leave the Democratic Party in the 1970s, after decades of serving as the party’s base. Roughly half of the total shift can be explained by their changing views of the parties’ economic policies. We also show that in the crucial transition period of the 1970s and 1980s, New Democrat-aligned candidates draw disproportionately from more-educated voters in both survey questions and actual Congressional elections.

JEL-codes: H20 J0 P0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hpe, nep-lab and nep-pol
Note: DAE LS PE POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31794.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31794

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31794

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().