>at http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol3/iss3/art4/
>
>i cannot access the full article (could anyone provide to the
>commons?), but from the abstract one would argue that stonecash 's
>view doesn't differ from bartel's.
>
>Thomas Frank argues that Republicans are able to use cultural issues
>to suppress class divisions. They appeal to religiously conservative
>working class voters by opposing abortion and homosexuality. The
>difficulty is that the evidence of the last 40 years shows a growing
>class division in American politics, with less affluent whites more
>supportive of Democrats now than 20 - 30 years ago. Indeed, even in
>Kansas less affluent legislative districts are much more supportive
>of Democrats than affluent districts.
The article is a copy-protected PDF. I know there are ways to crack Acrobat files, but I'm too lazy to find out how. In any case, the paper makes arguments similar to Bartels' paper. Some highlights:
* "neither Frank's evidence or other evidence supports this argument.... Frank makes bold claims and offers limited and dubious evidence."
* The increasing salience of cultural politics originates in a 1975 book by Carl Ladd, which argued for a "class inversion" - workers voting R and elites voting D - driven by a post-material dominance of culture.
* The argument was developed by Greenberg, Edsall, and the rest: D's were too friendly towards blacks and were alienating working-class whites.
* Frank, following Teixeira, defines class by education (no college) rather than income, which, Stonecash argues is a cultural, not economic, definition.
* Stonecash (like Bartels) argues from the National Election Studies that the upper class is more likely to vote R and the lower more likely to vote D now than in the 1950s and 1960s; "the image that class divisions were once considerable and are now declining is exactly the opposite of what has happened. The reality is that the bottom and top thirds are growing farther apart in their partisan support."
* On Kansas itself, Stonecash says that the extent of Frank's quantitative analysis extends to the voting patterns of 12 wards in three *Republican* primaries. An analysis of voting patterns by poverty rate in Kansas electoral districts shows that the poorer a district, the more likely it is to vote D.
* Stonecash concludes by noting that the very analysts who are bemoaning the lack of a class message are the ones who are saying that it's faded in relevance. "Accepting this book may be dangerous to the health of Democrats. The more interesting quesetion is why such analyses are being pushed, why they are received as credible, and why are Democrats believing them without serious analysis."