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Published in: Political Behavior 1/2016

24-02-2015 | Original Paper

The Rich are Different: The Effect of Wealth on Partisanship

Author: Erik Peterson

Published in: Political Behavior | Issue 1/2016

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Abstract

Rich voters tend to be Republicans and poor voters tend to be Democrats. Yet, in most settings it is difficult to distinguish the effects of affluence on partisanship from those of closely related variables such as education. To address these concerns I use state lottery and administrative records to examine the effect of changing economic circumstances on the partisanship of over 1,900 registered voters. Winning larger amounts in the lottery produces a small increase in the probability an individual is later a registered Republican, an effect that is larger for those who registered to vote after winning. This suggests that wealth does affect partisanship, particularly for those without preexisting attachments to a political party. Comparing estimates from the lottery to cross-sectional data suggests the latter exaggerates the relationship between wealth and partisanship, although controlling for additional variables produces largely similar estimates.

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Appendix
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Footnotes
1
In this introductory section I use affluence, economic status, wealth and income interchangeably. In the empirical section of this paper, I confine my examination to the relationship between wealth and partisanship.
 
2
This same notion suggests that decreases in affluence should produce greater support for the Democratic Party, something which I leave to future research.
 
3
The Cash 5 lottery game I examine has a lower tier amount where individuals who match 4 of 5 numbers win hundreds, as opposed to thousands or millions, of dollars. I contacted the Pennsylvania Lottery to obtain information about this group, but unfortunately records on winners at this level are not kept by the lottery.
 
4
Because the lottery winners under study differ from the overall public in other ways (e.g., they are older and more likely to be male), there are concerns about the external validity of these findings that I consider in the “Discussion” section portion of the paper.
 
5
The information about lottery winners was obtained from versions of this page (http://​www.​palottery.​state.​pa.​us/​Winners-Beneficiaries/​Winners-By-Game/​Cash-5-Winners.​aspx) saved at archive.org.
 
6
16 matched individuals are listed multiple times in the lottery winning data. I use the sum of their winnings as the independent variable.
 
7
I use an April 2013 export of the Pennsylvania voter file.
 
8
In Supporting Information B I consider reasons for failing to match some individuals using the Catalist national voter file.
 
9
Supporting Information A provides additional descriptive information.
 
10
The key finding of this paper of a large effect of winnings on the registration of previously uninvolved individuals does not change if untransformed winnings, instead of log winnings, is used. However in these specifications there is longer a significant effect of winnings on partisan registration for all winners pooled together. These alternative specifications are reported in Supporting Information F.
 
11
The reported results in this section do not meaningfully change if logistic regression is used instead, although the standard errors of the estimates are somewhat larger. These tables are presented in Supporting Information D. In Supporting Information E, I consider specifications with Democratic Registration in 2013 as the dependent variable and find a somewhat weaker relationship. This occurs because individuals winning less in the lottery are also more likely to not affiliate with either major party.
 
12
In the main text I report point estimates and confidence intervals for key parameter estimates. Regression tables for all the models reported in the text can be found in Supporting Information C.
 
13
A balance check on gender shows that winners of larger amounts are slightly more likely to be male than winners of smaller amounts (Supporting Information C, Table 3). The parameter estimates exhibit little change when gender is also included as a covariate. These alternative specifications are reported in Supporting Information C, Table 4.
 
14
Supporting Information C, Table 5, Model 4 shows the general findings about the effects of wealth on partisanship hold even when the analysis is subset to only cases where information on both an individual’s pre- and post-winning partisanship is available.
 
15
High-valued lottery winners likely change some issue positions in response to winning (Doherty et al. 2006). However, if they continue to identify as a Democrat, there is little reason to suspect that these issue position changes should demobilize them from future participation in Democratic primaries, while this demobilization should occur if they no longer identify as a Democrat.
 
16
The voter file export is from September 2013 and was obtained through a university subscription. The individual-level data in the voter file export is anonymized.
 
17
An additional concern is the extent to which difference brought about by changes in wealth among lottery winners can be compared to differences in partisanship related to cross-sectional differences in wealth. Given an appropriately specified model, either approach can recover the underlying relationship between wealth and partisanship (see e.g., Plosser and Schwert (1978, pp. 637–638) for a discussion of the equivalence of these results). A clear case where the results may differ is if omitted variable bias is present in the cross-sectional regression, a concern that is more limited for the lottery study results given the research design that produced those findings.
 
18
More details on this analysis along with full regression tables are included in Supporting Information H.
 
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Metadata
Title
The Rich are Different: The Effect of Wealth on Partisanship
Author
Erik Peterson
Publication date
24-02-2015
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Political Behavior / Issue 1/2016
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-015-9305-9

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