Divide and Deal: The Politics of Distribution in Democracies

7 Moral Values and Distributive Politics: An Equilibrium Analysis of the 2004 U.S. Election

186 Chapter 7 Moral Values and Distributive Politics An Equilibrium Analysis of the 2004 U.S. Election Woojin Lee and John Roemer Democrats are assaulting our basic values. They attacked the integrity of the family and parental rights. They ignored traditional morality. And they still do. —1984 platform of the Republican Party The Republican Party, whose economic policies are perhaps in the economic interest of the top 15 percent of the wealth distribution, is supported by approximately one-half of the U.S. electorate. President George W. Bush, during his first term, made quite clear what his economic policies are—from tax cuts that benefit primarily the very rich, engendering large deficits, to abolition of the inheritance tax and privatizing Social Security. In contrast, the policies of the Democratic Party are not left-wing; they are moderate. It would seem that, if voters were rational and concerned largely about the economic issue, the Democratic Party would receive the vast majority of the vote. Why is this not the case? Many explanations can be offered, but we believe the three most likely explanations are the following:1 • Cognitive errors and false consciousness. Voters make cognitive errors concerning economic policy or the theory that maps policies into economic outcomes. They may not connect taxation with the supply of government goods and services. Or voters may be unsure Moral Values and Distributive Politics 187 how efficiently the government converts tax revenues into the public good. This can be viewed as a case of not understanding the mapping from policies to outcomes.2 What voters are concerned with are economic outcomes (their consumption of various goods, and perhaps others’ consumption—we do not assume voters are entirely selfish); what they do not understand is how policies engender outcomes , i.e., the theory of the economy. “False consciousness” might be one description of this phenomenon. But false consciousness also applies to another phenomenon, which is distinct from this one— the belief by poor people that rich people deserve their earnings and that it would be unjust to redistribute through taxation. • Imperfect representation. Politicians represent the wealthy. Bartels (2002), Gilens (2003), and Jacobs and Page (2003) have shown that politicians reflect the preferences of the wealthy, not the average voter. One mechanism, of several, may be that political parties, under a regime of private funding, represent their contributors. Thus, the political competition between Democrats and Republicans may be one between two parties each of whom represents the wealthy, which would skew the equilibrium economic policies to the right. • Policy bundling. Other issues, besides the economic issue, are of importance to voters, and the support for the Republican Party may be in part due to the bundling of the economic issue with these other issues. Important noneconomic issues are race, gun control, abortion , gay marriage (family values), and foreign policy. Thus, the Republicans may have crafted a program with a large constituency, in spite of their economic position. It is not our aim in this chapter to examine the relative importance of these three possible explanations for the vitality of the Republican Party. We focus on the third explanation and take the U.S. presidential election of 2004 as an example. In particular, we study the importance of religious and/or moral-value issues. The “American exceptionalism” literature, dating back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, emphasizes that moral Protestantism (in particular, that of evangelicals), together with racial division, has always had an unusually powerful influence on U.S. political culture.3 For the period 1972–1992, we have demonstrated the importance of the race issue in U.S. politics (Lee and Roemer 2006). Today, however, the “values ” issue may be more important, although the race issue and the values 188 Woojin Lee and John Roemer issue are often interlinked, as can be seen in the case of the Ku Klux Klan movement in the 1920s and the prevalence of racially segregated religious schools.4 In this chapter, we study the electoral consequence of the moral-values issue in the 2004 presidential election by distinguishing what we call the policy bundle effect (PBE) from the moral Puritanism effect (MPE). Our model provides a theoretical explanation for the “what’s the matter with Kansas” problem (Frank 2005). There are at least two distinct ways in which the influence of values on equilibrium political outcomes might occur. First, because the Republican Party is identified with...