Here's my take. The chart and table on p. 7 basically tell the story: In 1972, the white male working class (WMWC) were significantly less likely than average to vote Dem. Then in 1976 they were significantly more likely (by roughly the same margin). Then in the Reagan-Bush elections they went back to their 1972 levels. In 1992 they went to par, voting Dem at exactly the same rate as the general electorate. Then the deluge: In 1996, 2000 and 2004 Dem support from the WMWC experienced a horrendous collapse to levels far worse than the McGovern blowout.
Later in the paper, they show that attitudes on wedge issues (abortion, death penalty, assistance to blacks), while more reactionary among the WMWC than the general pop, cannot explain the below-average support for Dems.
Given the timing and the lack of effect from wedge issues, my interpretation is that Lane Kenworthy was right: His paper [http://tinyurl.com/6du6xw] concludes that the WC shift against Dems was caused
> perhaps most importantly by changes in working-class
> whites' confidence in the Democrats' ability to deliver the goods on
> particular
> issues. The key issues were material ones.
Given that Brady et. al's paper shows a huge collapse that clearly started between the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, it would be reasonable to suppose that Clinton's first term (NAFTA, failure of health reform) might be the culprit, as many have alleged.
SA
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Frank vs. Bartels update Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:33:39 -0500 From: SA <S11131978 at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/12/wheres_the_american_working_cl.html
Where's the American Working Class?
One of the few recent examples of political scientists engaging with broader public debates was the disagreement of Larry Bartels with Thomas Frank over whether the non-Southern white working class had started voting for Republicans. The debate ended up being in part an argument over how best to define the working class: through looking at people’s education, income, or some combination of the two. David Brady, Benjamin Sosnaud and Steven Frenk have recently published a piece arguing that neither segmenting by education or income really captures the working class properly, and that political scientists should learn from sociologists, by adopting a measure that defines the working class as people belonging to a specific set of occupational groups. On the basis of this measure, they come up with some interesting findings. Their arguments don’t support Frank’s underlying thesis about why the male white working class has gone Republican (they don’t find evidence that religion and wedge issues played a role), but they do find contra Bartels that the effect isn’t a simple product of regionalism. In their words:
> The White male working class has moved suddenly and massively towards
> the Republican Party since 1992. Our dating of this transition roughly
> coincides with Frank’s identification of the early 1990s as the point
> when the White working class began to dealign from the Democratic
> Party (Frank, 2004, 91, 98). In sharp contrast to Bartels, we
> contradict claims that the White working class shift towards
> Republicans is isolated to the South. Moreover, we demonstrate that
> his proxies for class are not adequate and that theoretically
> justifiable measures of class are essential. Ultimately, at least for
> men, our study supports Frank’s claim that the White working class has
> dealigned from the Democratic Party.
Their results also suggest that there is a significant divergence between white working class men and women - while the former are clearly more likely to support Republicans, the latter, if anything, are more likely to support Democrats. I’d be interested to see a public response from Bartels, if he’s so inclined.