Family Income and the Intergenerational Transmission of Voting Behavior: Evidence from an Income Intervention

Randall Akee, William Copeland, E. Jane Costello, John B. Holbein and Emilia Simeonova

No 24770, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Despite clear evidence of an income gradient in political participation, research has not been able to isolate the effects of income on voting from other household characteristics. We investigate how exogenous unconditional cash transfers affected voting in US elections across two generations from the same household. The results confirm that there is strong inter-generational correlation in voting across parents and their children. We also show—consistent with theory—that household receipt of unconditional cash transfers has heterogeneous effects on the civic participation of children coming from different socio-economic backgrounds. It increases children’s voting propensity in adulthood among those raised in initially poorer families. However, income transfers have no effect on parents, regardless of initial income levels. These results suggest that family circumstance during childhood—income in particular—plays a role in influencing levels of political participation in the United States. Further, in the absence of outside shocks, income differences are transmitted across generations and likely contribute to the intergenerational transmission of social and political inequality.

JEL-codes: D31 D72 H53 H75 I38 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-pol and nep-soc
Note: CH LS PE POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24770.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:24770

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24770

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 ().