Nationally poor, locally rich: Income and local context in the 2016 presidential election
Section snippets
Local income distributions and vote choice
Objective as well as subjective considerations suggest that local income distributions are relevant to economic circumstances. An individual's place in their local income distribution may be particularly crucial because some very important elements of social identity and material comfort, from home size to access to highly-rated education for children, are structured by local economic positionality rather than absolute resources (Frank, 2007).
Americans may gather information about inequality
Data and methods: the white vote in 2016
The analyses presented here primarily employ Cooperative Campaign Election Studies (CCES) data from 2016. Respondents were asked questions about their income (in dollars) and about many political subjects, including their vote choice in 2016.7
In previous elections, higher levels of income have been associated with white support for Republican candidates (Bartels, 2008; Stonecash, 2000),
Analysis
Fig. 3 shows the national distribution of family income, the standard measure of income in the literature, among white CCES respondents. As one might expect in a national sample, there is substantial variation in the figure; more important for our purposes is that this standard measure masks variation in many Americans’ local income position.
Fig. 4 depicts the joint distribution of our national and local income measures, plotting the distribution of the local income percentiles for respondents
Conclusion
This study uses observational survey data from presidential elections since 2000 to examine the relationships between income and vote choice among white voters. Previous studies examining the relationship between income and vote choice do not account for how local variation in income distributions may affect that relationship. Prompted by an apparently new phenomenon in the 2016 election, when rich whites were relatively unlikely to support Trump (Reny et al., 2019), we find that local income
Declarations of interest
None.
Notes
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