<http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/12/wheres_the_american_working_cl.html
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Based on a very quick reading:
The conceptualization and measurement of class offered here seems interesting and useful, though I’m unclear how one would know whether it is more or less useful or appropriate than other measures for addressing this or any other specific political question.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of the statistical analyses. There are no interactions between class status and time, which would be the obvious way to test the propositions about the changing role of class. The year-by-year coefficients in Table 2 bounce around a lot, and it isn’t obvious which (if any) changes are significant. There also seem to be errors in the reported results — odds ratios greater than one with negative Z-scores (though perhaps I am just confused about what the authors are reporting).
Having said that, the general empirical pattern seems to be one of off- setting effects, with white working-class men generally being more Republican and white working-class women generally being more Democratic. For example, for Model 7 in Table 3 (covering 1996-2004, the period in which the class effect is supposed to have kicked in), being a white working-class male apparently made one 17% more likely to vote Republican while being a white working-class female made one 16% more likely to vote Democratic.
If that is right, it is mystifying to me why the authors choose to interpret the evidence as supportive of Frank’s thesis. Readers have interpreted his argument in many different ways, but this is the first time I’ve heard anyone suggest that it should be applied specifically to white working-class men but not to white working-class women (or, at least, that movement in a Republican direction among men should be interpreted as support for the thesis without regard to off-setting movement in a Democratic direction among women).
More broadly, for what it is worth, what seems most interesting to me about Frank’s argument is not the claim that working-class white voters (however defined) have become more likely to vote Republican, but the claim that they have done so specifically in response to Republican appeals to cultural conservatism. The analysis presented here isn’t really designed to shed light on that proposition, but insofar as it does the evidence seems to be to the contrary.