The change in the connection between education and party--a shift of educated voters towards the Democrats and less educated voters towards the Republicans--has received a lot of attention. One popular view is that working class voters have moved away from the Democrats because the party no longer pays attention to their economic interests. Writing in the New York Times, Pamela Paul says "When it comes to economics, the authors say, Democrats have too often pursued the interests of their own elites and donors. Since the 1990s, the party has pursued policies that worsen the economic plight of Americans who are not well off." However, although you can find examples that arguably support this analysis, if you look at spending on a range of social programs, the idea that the Democrats have stopped trying to help people with low and moderate incomes doesn't hold up: see this post. A new paper by Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet Marx & Suresh Naidu offers a more promising idea: that education affects relative support for "predistribution"--policies designed to affect jobs and wages--versus "redistribution." Less educated people tend to favor predistribution, while more educated people favor redistribution, so as educated people have come to have more influence in the Democratic party, policies have shifted towards redistribution. Thus, although they are still trying to help the working class, they're doing it in a way that has less appeal to the working class.
As an example of the effect of education on different kinds of opinions, here is the percent of college graduates and others who take the liberal position on some questions from a 2015 CBS News/NY Times survey:
Not grad grad Difference
Tax stock transactions 35 39 4
Tax million incomes 69 69 0
sick leave 86 85 -1
caregiver leave 83 79 -4
Union power 45 40 -5
trade restrictions 69 64 -5
Minimum wage $15 40 35 -5
Minimum wage $10 75 69 -6
limit CEO pay 56 45 -11
schedule notice 78 66 -12
Distribution fair 75 63 -12
Positive numbers in the "difference" column mean that college graduates are more liberal than less educated people; negative numbers mean they're more conservative. Most of the figures are negative, but if you look more closely there's a pattern--more educated people are equally or more liberal when it comes to raising taxes on people with high incomes, but more conservative on things that involve direct regulation. The biggest difference ("schedule notice") is for a question about whether hourly workers should be given two weeks notice of any change in hours worked or compensated with overtime pay.* None of the differences are especially large, but they are consistent, so they can contribute to a general image of the parties.
I think that their analysis explains at least part of the shift in party support, and I've made a similar but less systematic account in this paper, although I think that the effect of education on economic opinions has also shifted in a liberal direction--definitely on redistribution, but probably on predistribution as well. Finally, there's a question of whether the shift led to a change in overall support for the parties? A New York Times article by Peter Coy on the Kuziemko et al. paper says it does--the title is "How Democrats Lost Voters With a ‘Compensate Losers’ Strategy." But the paper doesn't actually discuss this issue, and in principle it could go in either direction--the gains among educated voters could be bigger, smaller, or equal to the losses among less educated voters. I'll discuss this point more in a future post, but at this point I'll just observe that the assumption that this shift is bad for the Democrats is revealing in itself--there is now a general idea that it's better to appeal to the "working class" than to "elites." So Democrats worry about the shift, while Republicans are proud of it.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
* I take support for trade restrictions as the liberal position. In addition to the policy questions, I also show the results for a question on whether the overall distribution of income is fair.
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