Political responses to economic change

The three papers comprising this dissertation investigate how economic conditions affect American politics. I pay particular attention to the politics of individual issue areas, drawing on theory from political economy and public opinion research. In the first paper, I address growing realignment along educational lines in American politics. Just as the returns to a college degree have increased in recent decades, the voting behavior of those with and without college degrees has changed. Working class white voters — long a key Democratic constituency — have turned to the Republican Party in recent decades. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party increasingly draws its support from college-educated white voters and racial minorities. Using survey data from 1984 to 2020 and an issue voting framework, I show that this realignment corresponds with three trends. First, while college-educated white voters have long been more liberal on cultural issues, they are now also more liberal than those without college degrees on issues of redistribution. Across a variety of issues, college-educated voters now stand to the left of the working class, pushing them toward the Democratic Party. Second, I exploit variation in local labor markets to show that growing income inequality between college- and non-college workers has contributed to the leftward economic shift of college-educated voters. Third, since the early 2000s, non-college voters have come to base their votes on cultural issues to the same degree as college-educated voters. For decades, cultural issues have pushed college-educated voters towards Democrats; however, only in recent years have those issues pushed non-college voters toward Republicans. In sum, the educational realignment among white voters is due to increasingly liberalism among the college-educated and an increased salience of cultural issues for those without college degrees. This finding has implications for the politics of redistribution, fiscal policy, and populism. In the second paper, I investigate the effect that local economic conditions have on candidates' campaign messaging. While local economies are diverging, political behavior appears to have nationalized — potentially presenting an accountability problem if politicians are not responsive to the conditions within their districts. I draw on televised campaign advertisements to measure the issues that congressional candidates prioritize in their campaigns, and relate them to local labor market conditions. Despite growing political nationalization, I find that candidates are responsive to the economic conditions that their constituents face. Candidates in high-unemployment areas focus their campaigns on jobs and employment, while decreasing emphasis on the safety net. The magnitude of these effects varies by party in a way consistent with strategic issue emphasis. These findings suggest that economic geography helps to constrain political nationalization. The final paper, co-authored with Clayton Nall, studies the politics of local housing development — a policy area made more important by rising geographic inequality. In high-opportunity metro areas — which are often liberal on matters of national politics — local political constraints on housing construction increase home prices. This affordability problem benefits current homeowners at the expense of lower-income renters, who may be priced out of the nation's most productive regions. We investigate the cross-pressuring that liberal homeowners may experience on matters of local land use. We find that self-interest, rather than ideology, structures citizens' attitudes toward building more housing. Liberal homeowners tend to oppose housing development, even when reminded of the benefits for poorer families. In contrast, renters of all political orientations show much higher support for new housing construction. This finding suggests that local governments, which are often beholden to incumbent homeowners, are unlikely to solve the affordability crisis on their own. Moreover, it suggests that public opinion over local policies — which often present large, easily identifiable consequences — do not map neatly onto national-level political ideology

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Rodden Jonathan
Scheve Kenneth F.
Grimmer Justin
Nall Clayton