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We Do Actually Know What’s the Matter with Kansas

A decade ago, coastal voters and the political and media elite were banging their heads on their desks with bafflement, wondering why so many Americans were voting against their economic interests. Wasn’t the Democratic Party supposed to be the party for the little guy, and the Republican Party for Wall Street tycoon types? But then why were some of the poorest, hardest-struggling, and bluest-collar regions of the country going red?

Thomas Frank, founding editor of this magazine, set out to answer those questions with his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, published in 2004. Looking through the lens of his own home state, Frank illuminated (among other things) the backlash against “the liberals,” a cultural shift long in the making that was shaping nationwide voter trends.

To many readers, this felt true; Frank’s book was a bestseller. Now, two economists at the University of Illinois say they can empirically prove that the book’s thesis is true. In an article in the Journal of Law and Economics, Stefan Krasa and Mattias Polborn show how they used presidential election data to measure “policy divergence” from 1972 to 2008, and conclude that the “realignment of both parties on cultural issues” is the driving force. The pro-life/pro-choice divide is a huge factor; “big government” is another.

While tallying votes is easy, measuring how people feel is a bigger challenge—but Krasa and Polborn say they’ve found a good method. They write in a post about their study for the London School of Economics website:

It is conceptually challenging to measure the difference between the parties’ positions, especially when we deal with long periods of time. For example, how can we decide whether the policy distance between Ford and Carter in 1976 was larger or smaller than that between McCain and Obama in 2008? Since the relevant policy issues in two different campaigns are usually very different, directly comparing the difference between the candidates’ platforms is impossible.

We approach this problem by combining a theoretical model of voters’ decisions with data from the American National Election Survey, which asks a sample of voters about their political preferences on issues such as abortion or government involvement in the economy, as well as about their vote in the Presidential election.

With this method, the authors say they can show the policy differences that voters perceive between the candidates they vote for—and not just the policy differences between the candidates that win or lose.

In the end, their study shows how, in the 1976 presidential election, “voters split primarily along economic issues, with economic liberals mostly voting for Carter, and economic conservatives mostly voting for Ford,” with social issues playing a smaller role in voters’ decisions. But in the 2004 election, voters appear to have given economic and social issues equal weight when deciding which candidate to vote for. As for why this shift occurred, Krasa and Polborn show how the economic policies of the two major presidential parties actually became less polarized as time went on—just as the parties’ social policies veered ever more sharply away from each other.

And the impact of this divergence is felt nationwide. As the authors write in their article’s conclusion, this analysis can be used to “identify how much party policy divergence and voter radicalization contribute to changes in overall mass polarization.”

With this research, Krasa and Polborn show that criticisms of the book (the most prominent of which was by Larry Bartels in 2005, but many political scientists and left-leaning commentators piled on afterward) are logically flawed. If you want to dive into the data, the entire article, “Policy divergence and voter polarization in a structural model of elections,” is available for free on Polborn’s website.

 

[This post has been updated to add links to criticisms of the book in the years following its publication.]