Why do affluent, middle-class, and poor voters all seem so exquisitely sensitive to election-year income growth for the wealthiest families?
Oddly, the voting of lower-income voters is relatively insensitive to their own election-year incomes. One option is that media reporting is biased toward coverage of the rich and famous. Another option is that we, as voters, are biased toward considering our pleasure or displeasure with the strength of the high-ranking members of our tribe.
That question is from Larry Bartels’s Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.
Here is a previous installment in the series.
Yes of course people are interested in their reiative positions.
In packs of animals alpha status brings enhanced opportunities
for feeding and breeding.
This is all well established.
Our species of social animal evolve under similar constraints as
other social animals for which alpha status had great advantage.
In Inca society, the Inca had the greatest access to females, and
on down the hierarchy access was directly related to status.
Shawn,
When I start typing in the comments box, the box extends past the right margin into the book adds. So as the cursor moves all the way to the right, it goes out of view even though I am still typing. Perhaps others are having a similar problem. I am using IE6.
Ah, the old “why don’t they vote ‘their interests’” thing. That’s frustrated the American Left for a long time, hasn’t it?
Maybe because lower income voters actually have some practical street smarts and know that soaking higher income voters really isn’t in their long term interest?
Maybe they can sense when lefty politicians are trying to use them to enrich and empower lefty politicians?
1280×1024. I think the formatting is actually the result of people hitting return to avoid the cursur from moving off the screen into the margin. As you can see, my formatting is fine. I just can’t see a portion of what I’ve typed.
It’s the intellectuals and political elites on the left who care. For them, it’s a narrative they can use to justify their policies and defeat the other team. The people only care because that’s what they have been told.
Envy
A more plausible version of this hypothesis is that the media focus on events such as stock market fluctuations that affect the incomes of the rich more than they affect the poor. Or they affect everyone’s income, but the fluctuations show up quickly in the capital gains of the rich and slowly in the wages of the poor, and the poor are reacting to forseeable but not yet measured fluctuations in their own income.
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