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Published in: Political Behavior 1/2019

13-10-2017 | Original Paper

Durable Democracy? Economic Inequality and Democratic Accountability in the New Gilded Age

Authors: Benjamin J. Newman, Thomas J. Hayes

Published in: Political Behavior | Issue 1/2019

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Abstract

Scholarship in the U.S. provides mounting evidence of a linkage between economic inequality and inequality in representation and policymaking. In response, this article addresses a research question striking at the very heart of the resilience of the democratic capitalist design: Do voters punish elected officials for inequality? We advance the argument that voter punishment of incumbents for inequality will occur when inequality is locally salient and for officeholders that support inequality-enhancing legislation. Relying upon secondary analysis of large-N national survey data, we find that voters residing in high inequality contexts voted against incumbents who supported regressive tax policies and opposed minimum wage increases. Interestingly, for inequality-attenuating incumbents, we find increased support among voters in high inequality contexts. Importantly, robustness checks reveal that observed punishment effects hold for Democratic and Republican incumbents. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for American democracy in an era of rising inequality.

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Appendix
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Footnotes
7
We acknowledge that decades of research on citizen knowledge of governmental affairs often demonstrate Americans have relatively low levels of knowledge or interest in politics (e.g. Converse 1964; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Neuman 1986). However, as we point out, additional studies lend evidence to our expectation that under certain conditions, its possible for citizens to have an increased likelihood of awareness of either legislator positions or salient issues.
 
8
The 2006 CCES mistakenly omits the Senate race in Indiana in 2006 in its list of candidates for U.S. Senate (see pg. 88 of Guide). Moreover, the 2006 CCES did not collect data on the vote choice in the Senate Election for respondents from Indiana. This leaves our analysis with only 28 incumbent elections, rather than 29.
 
9
Our zip code level estimates of the Gini Coefficient are based upon zip code household income data from the 2000 Decennial Census. For more information about the procedure we use to estimate Gini, as well as information about the distribution of this measure, see Supplemental Appendix B. As the Gini Coefficient is one of several measures of income inequality, we demonstrate that the results presented in Table 1 hold when using an alternative measure, such as the 80/20 Ratio (See Table C1 in Supplemental Appendix C).
 
10
Our E-NOMINATE measure excludes votes on topics such as defense procurement and all votes concerning internal procedures of Congress. Taking the 109th Congress as an example, the new measure includes votes such as #545 to increase the minimum wage (social welfare) as well as #596 passing pension reform (government management) and excludes votes such as #638 confirming Robert Gates as Defense Secretary (foreign and defense policy) or #630 requesting the attendance of absent Senators (miscellaneous procedure). We include the Civil Rights category as it contains many votes related to economic inequality such as #402 on the topic of campaign contributions, #481 on women’s health services, and #13 on protecting veterans from bankruptcy. This category also overlaps with an alternative coding scheme (Peltzman) which includes these votes as domestic social policy.
 
11
These zip-code demographic variables were obtained from the 2000 Decennial Census. Republican Vote is measured at the county-level, and is the percent of voters in each county voting for Bush in the 2004 Presidential Election. This data was obtained from: http://​uselectionatlas.​org/​.
 
12
These controlled interactions are essential. For example, were we to observe that respondents in higher inequality areas are more likely to vote against inequality-enhancing incumbents, one might speculate that such effects are driven by the correlation between Gini and residing in a lower income and democratic context, where what is essentially being observed is the punishment of conservative incumbents by voters in democratic-dominated environments. To separate out the conditional effects of Gini from absolute wealth and political culture, we control for the interaction of these variables with incumbent E-NOMINATE scores.
 
13
An additional possibility is that population density, given its correlation with Gini, is the driving the interactive results presented in Table 1. To dispel this possibility, we re-estimated the interactive model in Table 1 controlling for the interaction of Population Density with E-NOMINATE Scores, and find our results hold (see Table C2 in Supplemental Appendix C).
 
14
We should note that our results hold when including additional controls for incumbent characteristics (race, gender, tenure in office) and election characteristics (incumbent and challenger campaign spending, and presidential approval) (see Tables C3 in Supplemental Appendix C). Additionally, our results are robust to the exclusion of potentially influential data, such as respondents from states with atypical incumbent Senators like Lincoln Chaffee (R) and Ben Nelson (D) who each voted out of step with their respective parties (see Supplemental Appendix D).
 
15
Indeed, in his analysis of the 2002 and 2004 ANES, Bartels (2008) finds that among Americans who accurately perceive economic inequality as growing (e.g., "much larger" or "somewhat larger"), roughly 4.7% report viewing growing inequality as a "good thing" and roughly 27% report being indifferent or not having thought about it. More recently, the 2012 Middle Class Survey conducted by Pew found that 5.2% of Americans view growing economic inequality as a "good thing" and roughly 7% report being indifferent to growing inequality.
 
16
For these subsample analyses, we defined Democratic (Republican) voters as those who self-identified as being strong and weak Democrats (Republicans).
 
17
Low knowledge voters either (a) incorrectly reported the incumbent's position on the minimum wage and capital gains tax cut vote, or (b) reported "Don't know" for each question about these votes. High knowledge voters correctly reported their incumbent's position on both votes. We should note that when we define low knowledge voters as those who reported "Don't Know" to questions about their Senator's votes on minimum wage increases and capital gains tax cuts, the results are more statistically and substantively insignificant than those presented in Table 3 (see Supplemental Appendix E).
 
18
For the 2008–2009 CCES data, we rely upon NOMINATE scores from the 110th Congress, and for the 2012 CCES data we rely upon NOMINATE scores from the 112th Congress. For this analysis, our contextual data (i.e., Gini) comes from the 2008-12 ACS five-year file. All individual control variables are coded identically to the 2006 CCES analysis. The 2008, 2009, and 2012 CCES did not include a question about perceptions of the state economy.
 
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Metadata
Title
Durable Democracy? Economic Inequality and Democratic Accountability in the New Gilded Age
Authors
Benjamin J. Newman
Thomas J. Hayes
Publication date
13-10-2017
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Political Behavior / Issue 1/2019
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9435-3

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