According to exit polling in the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States, ** percent of surveyed voters making less than 50,000 U.S. dollars reported voting for former Vice President Joe Biden. In the race to become the next president of the United States, ** percent of voters with an income of 100,000 U.S. dollars or more reported voting for incumbent President Donald Trump.

According to exit polling in ten key states of the 2024 presidential election in the United States, 46 percent of voters with a 2023 household income of 30,000 U.S. dollars or less reported voting for Donald Trump. In comparison, 51 percent of voters with a total family income of 100,000 to 199,999 U.S. dollars reported voting for Kamala Harris.

According to a September 2024 survey of adults in the United States, ** percent of those with a household income of over ****** U.S. dollars said that they were definitely voting in the 2024 presidential election. In comparison, ** percent of those making less than ****** U.S. dollars were definitely planning to vote in November.

Affluent Americans used to vote for Republican politicians. Now they vote for Democrats. In this paper, I show detailed evidence for this decades-in-the-making trend and argue that it has important consequences for the U.S. politics of economic inequality and redistribution. Beginning in the 1990s, the Democratic Party has won increasing shares of rich, upper-middle income, high-income occupation, and stock-owning voters. This appears true across voters of all races and ethnicities, is concentrated among (but not exclusive to) college-educated voters, and is only true among voters living in larger metropolitan areas. In the 2010s, Democratic candidates' electoral appeal among affluent voters reached above-majority levels. I echo other scholars in maintaining that this trend is partially driven by increasingly “culturally liberal” views of educated voters and party elite polarization on those issues, but I additionally argue that the evolution and stasis of the parties' respective economic policy agendas has also been a necessary condition for the changing behavior of affluent voters. This reversal of an American politics truism means that the Democratic Party's attempts to cohere around an economically redistributive policy agenda in an era of rising inequality face real barriers.

This graph shows the percentage of votes of the 2016 presidential elections in the United States on November 9, 2016, by income. According to the exit polls, about 53 percent of voters with an income of under 30,000 U.S. dollars voted for Hillary Clinton.

What difference does it make if the state makes people vote? The question is central to normative debates about the rights and duties of citizens in a democracy, and to contemporary policy debates in a number of Latin American countries over what actions states should take to encourage electoral participation. Focusing on a rare case of abolishing compulsory voting in Venezuela, this article shows that not forcing people to vote yielded a more unequal distribution of income. The evidence supports Arend Lijphart’s claim, advanced in his 1996 presidential address to the American Political Science Association, that compulsory voting can offset class bias in turnout and, in turn, contribute to the equality of influence.

In many democracies, voter turnout is higher among the rich than the poor. But do changes in income lead to changes in electoral participation? We address this question with unique administrative data matching a decade of individual tax records with voter rolls in a large municipality in northern Italy. We document several important findings. First, levels of income and turnout both dropped disproportionately among relatively poor citizens following the Great Recession. Second, we show that within-individual changes in income have an effect on participation, which is modest on average due to diminishing returns, but can be consequential among the poor. Third, we find that declining turnout of voters facing economic insecurity has exacerbated the income skew in participation, suggesting that income inequality and turnout inequality may reinforce each other. We discuss the theoretical implications of these results, set in a context with strong civic traditions and low barriers to voting.

Do electorates hold governments accountable for the distribution of economic welfare? Building on the finding of “class-biased economic voting” in the United States, we examine how OECD electorates respond to alternative distributions of income gains and losses. Drawing on individual-level electoral data and aggregate election results across 15 advanced democracies, we examine whether lower- and middle-income voters defend their distributive interests by punishing governments for concentrating income gains among the rich. We find no indication that non-rich voters punish rising inequality, and substantial evidence that electorates positively reward the concentration of aggregate income growth at the top. Our results suggest that governments commonly face political incentives systematically skewed in favor of inegalitarian economic outcomes. At the same time, we find that the electorate’s tolerance of rising inequality has its limits: class biases in economic voting diminish as the income shares of the rich grow in magnitude.

These datasets form the basis of an empirical inquiry into whether income inequality belongs in a macro model of voter turnout. Time series modeling suggests that the Gini coefficient enters nonlinearly in Canada and this finding is confirmed in a panel data model of Indian states.

This statistic shows the results of a survey on the distribution of populism amongst eligible voters in Germany in 2020, by income. In accordance with the definition provided by the study, around 25 percent of respondents with an income of less than 1,500 euros were classified as populist. Of those with an income of more than 4,000 euros, 13.5 percent were classified as populist.

In the postwar era until recently, public-transfer shares of GDP have risen dramatically in every developed democracy. Much positive theory purports to explain this development as a direct consequence of differing distributions of political (votes) and economic (money) resources. This literature concludes, inter alia, that tax-and-transfer-system (T &T) sizes increase in the skew of the income distribution. This paper builds from that basis, suggesting theoretical additions and amendments deriving from further consideration of the democratic processes that transform resources into influence. It especially emphasizes that not everyone participates politically and that who participates is non-randomly selected. This implies that aggregate participation rates will mediate T&T responses to income inequality, and, conversely, that income inequal ity will mediate T&T responses to aggregate participation rates. Specifically, since the relatively wealthy have higher propensity to participate politically, higher aggregate participation rates will generally coincide with increased democratic representation of the relatively less well-off, suggesting that democratic governments will respond to greater inequality with larger T&T increases the higher the participation rate and, vice versa, higher participation induces larger T&T responses the m ore skewed the underlying income distribution. Regression analysis of the postwar T &T experiences of developed democracies support that hypothesis empirically.

Scholars have long attributed the income-participation gap-- which is the observation that the rich participate in politics more than the poor-- to income-based differences in the resources, recruitment, mobilization, and psychology underpinning political behavior. I argue that these explanations require a longer time horizon than the empirical evidence permits. Education, for example, typically ends in young adulthood and so cannot logically mediate the effect of income on participation in late adulthood. To resolve this temporal problem, I propose that there are two income-participation gaps: one based on current economic status and another on childhood economic history. I situate this argument in a developmental framework and present evidence for it using six studies. The results, while mixed at times, indicate that there are two gaps, that the size of each gap changes over the life course, and that their joint effect creates a larger income-participation gap than estimated by prior research.

Several recently published studies analyze the effects of national conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, such as the Brazilian Bolsa Família and the Mexican Oportunidades, on presidential elections. Most of them show that these programs boost incumbents' electoral support among the poor. This research note is the first scholarly attempt to investigate this phenomenon at a lower-level unit of a federal state, by assessing the impact of a municipal cash transfer program on a mayoral election. Specifically, it investigates whether Renda Mínima, the cash transfer program of the city of Sao Paulo, affected beneficiaries' electoral behavior in favor of the incumbent candidate in the 2004 mayoral election. This note analyzes survey data from CEBRAP/IBOPE and shows that cash transfers did, indeed, affect beneficiaries' behavior in the predicted direction, but only in cases where they did not benefit from any other CCT program, such as the federal Bolsa Família or the São Paulo state Renda Cidadã. These results suggest that the pro-incumbent effect of CCT programs may be diluted by similar programs launched by governments at other tiers of a federation, even if they are led by the same party.

Political parties competing in elections for the power to set public policy face the problem of making credible their policy promises to voters. I argue that this commitment problem crucially shapes party competition over redistribution. The model I develop shows that under majoritarian electoral rules, parties' efforts to achieve endogenous commitment to policies preferred by the middle class lead to different behavior and outcomes than suggested by existing theories, which either assume commitment or rule out endogenous commitment. Thus, left parties can have incentives to respond to rising income inequality by moving to the right in majoritarian systems but not under proportional representation. The model also generates new insights about the anti-left electoral bias often attributed to majoritarian electoral rules, and the strategic use of parliamentary candidates as a commitment device. I find evidence for key implications of this logic using panel data on party positions in 16 parliamentary democracies.

This election study was designed as a three-wave panel, with the first wave conducted shortly after the Dutch Provincial Council elections of March 18, 1970 (1,838 respondents), the second wave after the April 1971 parliamentary election (1,262 of the first-wave respondents), and the third wave after the parliamentary election of November 1972 (972 of the original respondents). In addition, a questionnaire was mailed to respondents who had refused an interview in the first or second wave, with a total of 356 responses obtained from this mailing. The study focused on the partisan orientations of the Dutch people. Questions were asked in each wave about party identification, electoral choices in the three parliamentary elections as well as local elections, awareness of candidates, issue importance, and political activities. In addition, Wave Two concentrated on the concept of representation: questions focused on citizens' perceptions of the stance of political parties with respect to national issues such as abortion, civil disturbances, aid to developing nations, income distribution, taxation, and defense spending, as well as respondents' opinions on the responsiveness of representatives to citizen demands. The third wave measured changes in attitudes and opinions during the period covered by the entire study. Many of the questions on public policy stands were repeated. All three waves contain information on respondents' family, sex, religion, marital status, education, and occupation.

This graph shows the percentage of votes of the 2012 presidential elections in the United States on November 6, 2012, by income. According to the exit polls, about 63 percent of voters with an annual income of less than 30,000 U.S. dollars nationwide have voted for Barack Obama.

Descriptive statistics and zero-order correlations between individual measures: The share left to the richer agent in a disinterested dictator game, fatalism (relating performance to 1: chance 7: effort), income equality (from 1: egalitarian to 7: liberal), economic patriotism (from 1: unfavorable to 7: favorable), attitude towards France (from 1: negative to 7: positive), and political position (from 1: extreme left to 7: extreme right) (N = 649).

Abstract (en): Election data for 50 states and the District of Columbia were collected through interviews conducted with voters as they left their polling places on election day, November 4, 2008. Part 1, National Data, contains data collected from a national sample. National sample respondents were asked a series of questions about their electoral choices, the issues surrounding the elections, and the factors that influenced their decisions. Questions focused on the direction of the country, national security, terrorism, the war in Iraq, the state and future of the nation's economy, gay marriage, and the George W. Bush presidency. Demographic variables of national respondents cover age, race, gender, Hispanic descent, sexual orientation, age of children in household, marital status, political party, political orientation, employment status, education, religion, sexual orientation, and family income. Parts 2-52 contain data collected from each state and District of Columbia surveys. Respondents were asked for their opinions of Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, and the United States Congress, as well as for their vote choices in the relevant gubernatorial, senatorial, and congressional elections. Those queried were also asked their opinions of the candidates' spouses, Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama. Demographic variables of individual state respondents cover age, race, gender, education, voter participation history, political party, political orientation, sexual orientation, and family income. Telephone interviews were the only type of interview conducted in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. Telephone interviews were also used to poll absentee voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. National: A sample of exit poll precincts was drawn from each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. A subsample of these precincts was selected to form the national sample. The national survey was administered in a total of 300 sample exit poll precincts. Respondents in the national precincts were given one of four versions of the national questionnaire. The four versions were interleaved on pads that were handed out to respondents. Responses to the four versions are combined into one dataset. All versions have questions in common as well as questions unique to each version. State Data: As mentioned above, a sample of exit poll precincts was drawn in each state. A subsample of these precincts was selected to form the national sample. The remaining precincts in each state made up the state sample and were given questionnaires specific to that state. Because the national questionnaire has several items in common with the state questionnaire, national respondents are included in the state exit poll dataset for these common questions. To determine which questions are on the national questionnaire, simply crosstab each question by QTYPE (found in column 13 of the ascii dataset), indicating whether the respondent completed the state or national survey. If the corresponding item did not appear on that respondent's version of the questionnaire, it was coded as system missing in the SPSS file and will appear as a blank in the ascii dataset. Remember, as noted above, some questions on the national survey appear on multiple versions of the national and some do not. Note that in 2008 all respondents in California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York answered one version of the national questionnaires. The exit poll results are weighted to reflect the complexity of the sampling design. That is, the weighting takes into account the different probabilities of selecting a precinct and of selecting a voter within each precinct. For example, minority precincts that were selected at a higher rate receive a smaller weight than other precincts of the same size. An adjustment is made for voters who were missed or refused to be interviewed, which is based on their observed age, race, and gender. Respondents are also weighted based upon the size and distribution of the final tabulated vote within geographic regions of the state or of the nation. Voters casting a ballot in the 2008 United States general election. The samples were selected in two stages. First, a probability sample of voting precincts within each state was selected that represents the di...

Income inequality has risen dramatically in the United States, with potentially negative social, economic, and political consequences. Governments can use redistributive taxes to combat inequality, but doing so requires public support. When will voters support redistributive taxes? Using the dual-process framework, we make predictions about the conditions under which party cues and/or information about rising inequality affect support for redistributive taxes. We test these predictions by conducting survey experiments in a real-world electoral context. We find that although citizens are misinformed about the extent of inequality, information that corrects their misperceptions helps them express tax policy opinions that are consistent with their preferences for lower levels of inequality. We also find that citizens who are motivated to process inequality information systematically respond to it even when it conflicts with their party’s position. These results identify conditions under which efforts to inform the electorate about inequality can increase support for taxes.

The data contains inequality measures at the municipality-level for 1892 and 1871, as estimated in the PhD thesis "Institutions, Inequality and Societal Transformations" by Sara Moricz. The data also contains the source publications: 1) tabel 1 from “Bidrag till Sverige official statistik R) Valstatistik. XI. Statistiska Centralbyråns underdåniga berättelse rörande kommunala rösträtten år 1892” (biSOS R 1892) 2) tabel 1 from “Bidrag till Sverige official statistik R) Valstatistik. II. Statistiska Centralbyråns underdåniga berättelse rörande kommunala rösträtten år 1871” (biSOS R 1871)

moricz_inequality_agriculture.csv

A UTF-8 encoded .csv-file. Each row is a municipality of the agricultural sample (2222 in total). Each column is a variable.

R71muncipality_id: a unique identifier for the municipalities in the R1871 publication (the municipality name can be obtained from the source data) R92muncipality_id: a unique identifier for the municipalities in the R1892 publication (the municipality name can be obtained from the source data) agriTop1_1871: an ordinal measure (ranking) of the top 1 income share in the agricultural sector for 1871 agriTop1_1892: an ordinal measure (ranking) of the top 1 income share in the agricultural sector for 1892 highestFarm_1871: a cardinal measure of the top 1 person share in the agricultural sector for 1871 highestFarm_1871: a cardinal measure of the top 1 person share in the agricultural sector for 1892

moricz_inequality_industry.csv

A UTF-8 encoded .csv-file. Each row is a municipality of the industrial sample (1328 in total). Each column is a variable.

R71muncipality_id: see above description R92muncipality_id: see above description indTop1_1871: an ordinal measure (ranking) of the top 1 income share in the industrial sector for 1871 indTop1_1892: an ordinal measure (ranking) of the top 1 income share in the industrial sector for 1892

moricz_R1892_source_data.csv

A UTF-8 encoded .csv-file with the source data. The variables are described in the adherent codebook moricz_R1892_source_data_codebook.csv.

Contains table 1 from “Bidrag till Sverige official statistik R) Valstatistik. XI. Statistiska Centralbyråns underdåniga berättelse rörande kommunala rösträtten år 1892” (biSOS R 1892). SCB provides the scanned publication on their website. Dollar Typing Service typed and delivered the data in 2015. All numerical variables but two have been checked. This is easy to do since nearly all columns should sum up to another column. For “Folkmangd” (population) the numbers have been corrected against U1892. The highest estimate of errors in the variables is 0.005 percent (0.5 promille), calculated at cell level. The two numerical variables which have not been checked is “hogsta_fyrk_jo“ and “hogsta_fyrk_ov“, as this cannot much be compared internally in the data. According to my calculations as the worst case scenario, I have measurement errors of 0.0043 percent (0.43 promille) in those variables.

moricz_R1871_source_data.csv

A UTF-8 encoded .csv-file with the source data. The variables are described in the adherent codebook moricz_R1871_source_data_codebook.csv.

Contains table 1 from “Bidrag till Sverige official statistik R) Valstatistik. II. Statistiska Centralbyråns underdåniga berättelse rörande kommunala rösträtten år 1871” (biSOS R 1871). SCB provides the scanned publication on their website. Dollar Typing Service typed and delivered the data in 2015. The variables have been checked for accuracy, which is feasible since columns and rows should sum. The variables that most likely carry mistakes are “hogsta_fyrk_al” and “hogsta_fyrk_jo”.