Are Democrats Really the Party of the Poor?

Maks-Solomon, Cory, and Elizabeth Rigby. 2020. “Are Democrats Really the Party of the Poor? Partisanship, Class, and Representation in the U.S. Senate.” Political Research Quarterly 73 (4): 848–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919862623.

• Pre-publication draft can be found here. (And the Online Appendix is available here.)
• Replication materials are available through Google Drive.
• This research received media coverage at Vox and Jacobin.
• This research was previously presented at APSA 2017 and SPSA 2018.

Rich and poor Republicans are more in agreement on social issues than they are on economic issues; meanwhile, rich and poor Democrats are in absolute agreement on economic issues but rich Democrats are more liberal than poor Democrats on social issues.

For each quintile (1 = poor; 5 = rich), the average ideology is plotted with a normally-distributed confidence interval surrounding it. The x-axis represents the percentage of issues that the respondent took a conservative stance, ranging from 0% to 80% of the issues.

Advertisement