Re: [Pen-l] RE: what's the matter with Kansas?

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

The best critique of What's The Matter With Kansas is not leftist, but  
by the empirical political scientist Larry Bartels.

Early version:

<http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/kansas.pdf>.

>   â  Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party?   
> No.  White voters in the
> bottom third of the income distribution have actually become more  
> reliably Democratic in
> presidential elections over the past half-century, while middle- and  
> upper-income white voters
> have trended Republican.  Low-income whites have become less  
> Democratic in their partisan
> identifications, but at a slower rate than more affluent whites â  
> and that trend is entirely confined
> to the South, where Democratic identification was artificially  
> inflated by the one-party system of
> the Jim Crow era.
>    â  Has the white working class become more conservative?  No.   
> The average views of low-
> income whites have remained virtually unchanged over the past 30  
> years.  (A pro-choice shift on
> abortion in the 1970s and â80s has been partially reversed since  
> the early 1990s.)  Their positions
> relative to more affluent white voters â generally less liberal on  
> social issues and less
> conservative on economic issues â have also remained virtually  
> unchanged.
>    â  Do working class âmoral valuesâ trump economics?  No.   
> Social issues (including abortion)
> are less strongly related to party identification and presidential  
> votes than economic issues are,
> and that is even more true for whites in the bottom third of the  
> income distribution than for more
> affluent whites.  Moreover, while social issue preferences have  
> become more strongly related to
> presidential votes among middle- and high-income whites, there is no  
> evidence of a
> corresponding trend among low-income whites.
>    â  Are religious voters distracted from economic issues?  No.   
> The partisan attachments and
> presidential votes of frequent church-goers and people who say  
> religion provides âa great dealâ
> of guidance in their lives are much more strongly related to their  
> views about economic issues
> than to their views about social issues.  For church-goers as for  
> non-church-goers, partisanship
> and voting behavior are primarily shaped by economic issues, not  
> cultural issues.


Later version:

<http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/kansasqjps06.pdf>.


> 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 conïrms that white voters without college  
> degrees have
> become signiïcantly less Democratic; however, the contours of that  
> shift bear little
> resemblance to Frank's account. First, the trend is almost entirely  
> conïned to the
> South, where Democratic support was artiïcially inïated 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  
> signiïcance 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.

Bartels' other papers make for rather depressing reading:

<http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/papers.htm>.


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