Professor Andrew Gelman and Columbia Ph.D.'s Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, and David Park are authors of
Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state: What's the matter with Connecticut?, a paper that E.J. Dionne, writing in the
Washington Post, says is "one of the hottest political science papers floating around the political world." Dionne describes how, through statistical analyisis of voting data, the paper "comes close to solving the mystery of how Democrats can do so well in certain well-off places and still not be the party of the rich."
The paper's abstract states:
We find that income matters more in “red America” than in “blue America.” In poor states, rich people are much more likely than poor people to vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but in rich states (such as Connecticut), income has a very low correlation with vote preference. In addition to finding this pattern and studying its changes over time, we use the concepts of
typicality and
availability from cognitive psychology to explain how these patterns can be commonly misunderstood. Our results can be viewed either as a debunking of the journalistic image of rich “latte” Democrats and poor “Nascar” Republicans, or as support for the journalistic images of political and cultural differences between red and blue states— differences which are not explained by differences in individuals’ incomes.
For decades, the Democrats have been viewed as the party of the poor, with the Republicans representing the rich. Recent presidential elections, however, have shown a reverse pattern, with Democrats performing well in the richer “blue” states in the northeast and west coast, and Republicans dominating in the “red” states in the middle of the country. Through multilevel modeling of individual-level survey data and county- and state-level demographic and electoral data, we reconcile these patterns.
A blog entry on the paper by Professor Gelman, with a link to his slides, can be found
here.
