Representation: Elections and Beyond

Chapter 7. The Paradox of Voting—for Republicans: Economic Inequality, Political Organization, and the American Voter

CHAPTER 7 The Paradox of Voting—for Republicans: Economic Inequality, Political Organization, and the American Voter Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson Over the last generation, Americans at the top of the economic ladder have pulled sharply away from everyone else. The share of pretax income earned by the richest 1 percent of households more than doubled, from 9 percent in 1970 to over 23 percent on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis (Piketty and Saez 2003; Saez 2012). Gains higher up the ladder have been more spectacular still, even as earnings growth for most Americans has slowed (Hacker and Pierson 2010a). At the same time, the Republican Party has become more conservative on economic issues. According to a widely used left-right index based on congressional roll-call votes, Republicans in the House of Representatives have become dramatically more conservative, on average, since the 1970s, while Republicans in the Senate have become substantially more conservative. The average Democrat in Congress, by contrast, has moved only modestly to the left (calculated from Poole and Rosenthal 2012). A long line of democratic theorists, as well as most political science models of redistribution, would predict that under these circumstances, non-rich voters would shift to the Democrats in support of greater government efforts to tackle inequality (e.g., Tocqueville 2000 [1835]; Meltzer and Richard 1981). With the GOP moving right as less affluent voters moved left, the Republican Party would lose ground to the Democratic Party. Yet the GOP has not only gained ground over this period, shifting to essential parity 140 Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson with Democrats in the electoral arena, but also picked up support from a crucial downscale component of the Democrats’ coalition, the white working class. Why? Why has there not been a broader electoral backlash against the more conservative party in an era of rising inequality? Most commentators on this question have focused on voters and values. Thomas Frank, in his bestselling 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?— a bible among despairing Democrats after George W. Bush’s reelection— argued that Republicans had skillfully used cultural wedge issues to attract working-class support in an era in which the working class had fallen farther and farther behind the well off. From the other side of the political spectrum, New York Times columnist David Brooks (2001) countered that working-class voters had turned against a Democratic Party increasingly beholden to wealthy liberal elites. Popular commentary has portrayed an enduring divide in which values trump class: a less affluent Red America filled with NASCAR-loving, gun-toting GOP traditionalists who oppose gay marriage versus a richer Blue America filled with sushi-loving, New Yorker-reading Democratic cosmopolitans. In this conventional view, voters are the prime movers, and it is their failure to rise up and demand action that is taken as evidence of either their lack of real interest (Brooks) or GOP manipulation of their conservative social values (Frank). In this chapter, we present a quite different view—one focused on political organizations as well as voters, and on perceptions (and misperceptions) of inequality and government policy as well as voter ideology. We show that while voters are key players, the American political game has been dominated by political elites, in part because the organizations that once gave voters information and clout have eroded. As a result, growing elite polarization and class stratification have, ironically, occurred alongside a profound demobilization of American voters around issues of inequality. Contrary to the conventional view, the source of this demobilization is organizational far more than it is attitudinal. That is, it is rooted in structural shifts in the nature of American politics—from the rise in business lobbying to the decline of organized labor and large-scale voluntary associations— more than it is based on changes in the fundamental beliefs of voters. These organizational changes, however, have helped spark shifts in voters’ views that have reinforced the tilt of American politics away from less affluent voters. This argument has crucial implications for how we understand what elections can and should do. Over the last generation, students of American The Paradox of Voting—for Republicans 141 politics have almost single-mindedly built their investigations around a view that we call “politics as electoral spectacle,” in which public opinion and elections are seen as the driving force behind politicians’ positions and, ultimately, public policy. This perspective has...