Red state, blue state, rich state, poor state: Why Americans vote the way they do

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages

  Gelman, Andrew ^a  

^a NONE

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References (290)

1. For further information on what we did, see our article "Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state: What's the matter with Connecticut?" published in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the book Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models by Andrew Gelman and Jennifer Hill. Other information is at our Web site, http://redbluerichpoor.com, and some related discussion is at http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/.
2. See Bertin's 1967 book Semiology of Graphics [translated by William Berg]
3. Tufte's Envisioning Information from 1990.
4. We have also benefited from the accumulated wisdom of decades of survey research. Political scientists have been interested in patterns of voting by income or social class for as long as there has been mass voting, and we do not attempt to review the literature here.
5. A few references that are particularly relevant to our discussion are Robert Alford's "The role of social class in American voting behavior," from the Western Political Quarterly in 1963
6. V. O. Key's The Responsible Electorate, posthumously published in 1966
7. Gerald Wright's "Level-of-analysis effects on explanations of voting" in the British Journal of Political Science in 1989
8. John Filer, Lawrence Kenny, and Rebecca Morton's 1993 American Journal of Political Science article "Redistribution, income, and voting"
9. Statehouse Democracy: Public Opinion and Policy in the American States, by Robert Erikson, Gerald Wright, and John McIver (1993)
10. Clem Brooks and David Brady's "Income, economic voting, and long-term political change in the U.S., 1952-1996," published in Social Forces in 1999
11. Class and Party in American Politics, by Jeffrey Stonecash (2000)
12. Morris Fiorina, Samuel Abrams, and Jeremy Pope's 2005 book, Culture War? The Myth of Polarized America
13. Stephen Ansolabehere, Jonathan Rodden, and James Snyder's 2006 article, "Purple America," in the Journal of Economic Perspectives
14. the 2006 book, Polarized America: The Dance of Political Ideology and Unequal Riches, by Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal.
15. In addition, the volume, Red and Blue Nation? Characteristics and Causes of America's Polarized Politics, edited by Pietro Nivola and David Brady in 2005, is a wide-ranging collection of articles by journalists and political scientists.
16. Page 3: Tucker Carlson made his statement about rich Democrats on his show Tucker on 16 October 2007.
17. Page 8: In this initial scatterplot (but not most of the others in the book), we have adjusted the positions of some of the state abbreviations slightly so they don't overlap.
18. Page 9: Thomas Frank's invocation of the hardworking Americans and the liberal elite appeared in his article "What's the matter with liberals?" in the New York Review of Books on 12 May 2005.
19. Page 10: The 2004 exit poll data by income can be found at CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html.
20. Additional exit poll data can be found at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, http://www.icpsr.org, study number 4183.
21. Page 10: David Brooks's description of upscale areas supporting the Democrats comes from his article, "One nation, slightly divisible" in the Atlantic Monthly in December 2001.
22. Sasha Issenberg responded a few months later with a dissenting take, "Boo-Boos in paradise," a few months later in Philadelphia Magazine.
23. More recently, Mark Liberman discussed the "stir-fry/bbq index" at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005326.html.
24. Pages 12 and 13: We took the income data from Texas and Maryland counties from the U.S. Census. The county-level election results used here and elsewhere come from David Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, http://uselectionatlas.org.
25. Page 13: The poll asking about which party looks out for the economic interest of the average American was conducted by CNN from 10-22 October 2006.
26. Page 14: We have discussed What's the Matter with Kansas? in the context of divisions between Democrats and Republicans, but Frank's book focuses more on the fight between moderates and conservatives within the Republican Party and the presence of class-based, anti-elitist language in conservative thought and writing.
27. Income is not the same as wealth, which in turn does not completely align with social class; for a recent analysis of these differences, see Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz's 2008 article "The decline of the white working class and the rise of a mass upper middle class," to appear in The Future of Red, Blue, and Purple America.
28. For another take on Frank's arguments, see Larry Bartels's "What's the matter with What's the Matter with Kansas?"' which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science.
29. For more on the populist appeal of Nixon and other mid-century Republicans, see, for example, McCarthy and His Enemies by William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell (1954)
30. Senator Joe McCarthy by Richard Rovere (1959)
31. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right by Lisa McGirr (2001)
32. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein (2002)
33. Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image by David Greenberg (2003).
34. Page 15: The "tax and tax, spend and spend" quote has been attributed to Harry Hopkins. For example, see E. J. Dionne's New York Times article "Let Democrats be Democrats" from 15 November 1987.
35. Page 15: James Carville is reported to have put a sign reading "The economy, stupid" in Bill Clinton's office to remind him to focus on economic issues during his presidential campaign.
36. Page 17: David Brooks's description of zip code areas with affluent professionals appeared in his New York Times column under the title "Bitter at the top" on 15 June 2004.
37. Page 17: Matt Bai wrote about Bush's red zones in a Newsweek article analyzing the 2000 election.
38. Page 24: Nicholas Kristof wrote about the yuppification of the Democratic Party in a column, "Living poor, voting rich," in the New York Times on November 3, 2004.
39. Page 24: Michael Barone's remarks appear in his article "The trustfunder left" at http://www.realclearpolitics.com on 21 March 2005. His Almanac of American Politics has been published every two years since 1973.
40. Page 24: See page 144 for some data on the voting patterns of the richest Americans.
41. Page 25: For more on the distinction between individual and grouplevel analyses of elections, see Gerald Kramer's article "The ecological fallacy revisited: Aggregate-versus individual-level findings on economics and elections, and sociotropic voting," which appeared in the American Political Science Review in 1983.
42. Page 25: For more on political participation by different groups, see the 1995 book, Voice and Equality, by Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry Brady.
43. Page 26: Eleanor Rosch and Carolyn Mervis's article "Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories," which appeared in Cognitive Psychology in 1975, is an important work on people's understanding of typicality.
44. Political journalists have long explored the psychological effects of the branding of political parties and candidates. Thomas Edsall's 2004 book Building Red America discusses the efforts of the two parties to associate themselves with popular attitudes.
45. Westen wrote in his 2007 book The Political Brain that "a substantial minority of Americans hold authoritarian, intolerant ideologies driven by fear, hate and prejudice that are fundamentally incompatible with Democratic (and democratic) principles."
46. Our point in this chapter is that psychological associations can be affecting journalists' perceptions of Democrats and Republicans beyond whatever effects these categorizations might be having on voting decisions.
47. Page 26: Thomas Fitzgerald wrote about microtargeting in the Houston Chronicle on 29 October 2006
48. see also political consultant Mark Penn's 2007 book Microtrends.
49. Page 27: Our graphs of voting by occupation use data from the National Election Study, extending an analysis by Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza in their 1999 book Social Cleavages and Political Change.
50. See also the discussion of occupation, income, social class, and voting in Paul Abramson, John Aldrich, and David Rohde's 2002 book Change and Continuity in the 2000 Election.
51. Page 28: E. J. Dionne's comments on income and class appear in his analysis of 2004 exit poll results, "Polarized by God: American politics and the religious divide," in Red and Blue Nation.
52. Page 28: We compiled the counts of news mentions using Nexis.
53. Page 29: Nixon described his wife's coat while defending himself against charges of corruption during the famous press conference in which he also mentioned his children's dog, Checkers. The speech was broadcast live on television on 23 September 1952.
54. Page 30: We got the Wal-Mart data from http://www.walmartstores.com/FactsNews/StateByState/ and Starbucks data from its Web site.
55. Page 31: Dan Quayle described his middle-American upbringing in his acceptance speech delivered at the Republican National Convention on 20 August 1992.
56. Page 31: Toni Morrison is an African American novelist and Nobel Prize winner whose description of Bill Clinton's cultural "blackness" appeared in the New Yorker on 5 October 1998.
57. In August of that year, comedian Chris Rock was quoted as calling Clinton "the first black president" in an article by David Kamp in Vanity Fair.
58. Page 32: Dan Quayle made the "rubber ducky" comment at a campaign stop in Milwaukee on 13 September 1988.
59. Page 32: The survey on attitudes about racial groups was reported by Richard Morin, "A distorted image of minorities; poll suggests that what whites think they see may affect their beliefs" in the Washington Post on 8 November 1995.
60. Page 34: The results on public opinion about immigrants come from the unpublished article "How large the huddled masses? The causes and consequences of public misperceptions about immigrant populations" by John Sides and Jack Citrin.
61. Page 34: The opinions on foreign aid are presented in the report "Americans on foreign aid," published by the Program on International Policy Attitudes in 1995.
62. Page 34: Michael Finnegan's analysis of Bustamante's weight loss appeared in the Los Angeles Times article "Election 2006: The California vote" on 9 November 2006.
63. Page 35: For our thoughts on the predictability of voters, see the paper "Why are American presidential election campaign polls so variable when votes are so predictable?" by Andrew Gelman and Gary King, published in the British Journal of Political Science in 1993.
64. Page 35: Matt Franklin prepared a map of the 2004 election with a red dot for every 2,500 Bush voters and a blue dot for for every 2,500 Kerry voters; see http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/07/voting_map_with.html.
65. Page 36: Apparently, Pauline Kael never made the celebrated statement of surprise at Nixon's victory; see Steven Rubio's discussion: http://begonias.typepad.com/srubio/2004/12/kaelnixon_updat.html.
66. Page 36: Michael Barone's statement about the superaffluent people of fashion appeared in a U.S. News and World Report column from 14 September 2005 entitled "Adam Smith, political pundit."
67. Page 36: For more on the availability bias and the belief that others are similar to oneself, see "The false consensus effect: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution process" by Lee Ross, David Green, and Pamela House, from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 1977
68. "The truly false consensus effect: An ineradicable and egocentric bias in social perception" by Joachim Krueger and Russell Clement, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1994.
69. See also the critique "The false consensus effect and overconfidence: Flaws in judgment or flaws in how we study judgment?" by Robyn Dawes and Matthew Mulford, which appeared in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 1996.
70. Page 36: The survey of journalists was a Poynter survey, "The face and mind of the American journalist," conducted at Indiana University and reported at Quicklink A28235, 10 April 2003; see here: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=28235.
71. see, for example, chapter 5 of the book Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment by Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, from 1980.
72. For more general discussions of psychological biases, see the classic collection of articles Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, edited by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, from 1982
73. the recent book Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely.
74. Page 38: The Pew survey on happiness is described here: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/301/are-we-happy-yet.
75. Page 38: The Gallup survey on party identification and mental health is described here: http://www.gallup.com/poll/102943/Republicans-Report-Much-Better-Mental-Health-Than-Others.aspx.
76. Arthur Brooks discusses these and similar poll findings in his recent book Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America, and How We Can Get More of It.
77. In their unpublished article, "Why are conservatives happier than liberals," Jaime Napier and John Jost attribute these differences to different attitudes about economic inequality.
78. Page 38: Geoffrey Wheatcroft's quote is from his fascinating book The Strange Death of Tory England.
79. Page 39: In his notorious "malaise" speech on 15 July 1979, Jimmy Carter referred to "a crisis of confidence ... that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will."
80. Page 39: The 2007 book Why Do Welfare States Persist? by Jeff Manza (reviewed by Andrew Gelman in 2008 in Political Science Quarterly) discusses reasons for the longstanding stable differences in welfare policy in Europe and the United States.
81. Page 39: G. K. Chesterton's discussion of happiness in the twelfth and twentieth centuries appears on the final page of his book Bernard Shaw from 1910.
82. Page 43: Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi is a book-length development of the theme that what seems eternal is often ephemeral.
83. Page 45: We exclude third party votes except for 1948, where we count the Republican vote share as votes for Thomas Dewey divided by votes for Harry Truman plus votes for Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond (to account for Truman not being on the ballot in several southern states).
84. Page 47: In their article "Class polarization in partisanship among native Southern whites, 1952-1990," published in the American Journal of Political Science in 1993
85. Richard Nadeau and Harold Stanley discuss how, in recent years, rich and poor people vote more differently in the South than in the rest of the country.
86. See also their 2004 follow-up, written with Richard Niemi and Jean-Francois Godbout, "Class, party, and South/non-South differences: An update," in American Politics Research.
87. Page 47: In The Responsible Electorate, V. O. Key analyzes voting and income data from the 1930s through 1960 and finds that the gap between how rich and poor voted increased during the New Deal period and declined in the 1950s.
88. Page 47: In Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics, Robert Huckfeldt and Carol Kohfeld discuss the importance of class-based voting during the New Deal period.
89. The sizes of the circles on the graph on page 50 are based on Census estimates of the proportion of each state's families that were in each of the income categories, compared to the number of families in each category in the entire United States in that year.
90. Page 53: For our historical comparisons of rich and poor, we pool National Election Study data for each pair of decades. The sample size varies from survey to survey, and we reweight so as to count each election year equally.
91. Page 54: The 2006 U.S. House exit poll data broken down by region are available at http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html
92. Pages 55-56: Our estimates of historical trends in the House and the Senate come from the National Election Study.
93. Page 58: The graph on income inequality in the United States and other countries comes from "The evolution of top incomes: A historical and international perspective," by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, appearing in the American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings in 2006.
94. For a recent review, see Edward Glaeser and Kristina Tobio's unpublished article "The rise of the sunbelt," which argues that, from the 1950s through the 1970s, southern economic growth was driven by increasing productivity, with growth since 1980 being supported by a more elastic housing supply.
95. Page 62: The Tax Foundation study of tax receipts and federal spending in the states appears at http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html.
96. Page 63: Edward Glaeser and Bryce Ward's comment about rural and urban states comes from their article "Myths and realities of American political geography," which appeared in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2006.
97. Page 64: We use the revised 2004 version of the cost of living index developed by William Berry, Richard Fording, and Russell Hanson and described in the paper "An annual cost of living index for the American states, 1960-95," which appeared in the Journal of Politics in 2000.
98. The difference may lie in how the indexes account for housing costs; further discussion appears at http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/09/update_on_cost.html.
99. Page 64: Todd Wasserman's comparison of incomes in different states comes from his article "Divided we brand" in the advertising trade magazine Brandweek on 17 June 2002.
100. Page 65: Michael Barone's remarks are taken from his aforementioned article "The trustfunder left."
101. as described in the 2008 Statistics in Medicine paper "Scaling regression inputs by two standard deviations" by Andrew Gelman
102. Page 70: The saying about Pennsylvania including Alabama within it is also attributed to many people in politics; see, for example, the article "The 10 regions of US politics" by Robert Sullivan, in the Boston Globe on 18 January 2004.
103. Jonathan Rodden discusses some of the implications of the political differences between rural, suburban, and urban areas in America and elsewhere in his forthcoming book Political Geography and Electoral Rules: Why Single-Member Districts Are Bad for the Left; see http://web.mit.edu/polisci/research/rodden/ucsd_07.pdf.
104. Page 71: Thomas and Mary Edsall's description of how the Democratic Party is viewed comes from their 1991 book Chain Reaction.
105. Page 71: In their 1996 American Journal of Political Science paper "Will the real Americans please stand up: Anglo and Mexican-American support of core American political values," Rodolfo de la Garza, Angelo Falcon, and F. Chris Garcia discuss the relation between cultural values and voting among these groups.
106. Page 72: See Matthew Lassiter's 2007 book The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South, for more on that region's transition from the Democratic to the Republican Party.
107. Page 76: George H. W. Bush's statement about atheists was reported by Robert Sherman of the American Atheist news journal on 27 August 1987.
108. Page 76: John Podesta was quoted by Gail Russell Chaddock in the Christian Science Monitor on 9 June 2004.
109. Page 76: In the 1992 book The Churching of America, 1776-1990:Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy
110. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark study "how and why America shifted from a nation in which most people took no part in organized religion to a nation in which nearly two-thirds of American adults do."
111. Page 77: There is a large literature comparing the United States to other less religious developed countries. The graph of religiosity and income across countries is adapted from the Pew Global Attitudes Project report of 4 October 2007, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=258. Religiosity is measured by survey responses to three questions involving faith in God, the importance of religion, and daily prayer. Some of the country names on the scatterplot have been moved slightly to avoid overplotting.
112. Page 78: Robert Putnam told us about the frequent pattern of people changing their church attendance to fit their political views.
113. Page 78: The statistics on divorces come from a New York Times article "To avoid divorce, move to Massachusetts" by Pam Belluck, 14 November 2004.
114. Page 78: We estimated the probability of voting for Bush given religion and religious attendance using a multilevel logistic regression fit to the 2004 Annenberg pre-election survey. Polls from 2000 gave similar results except that the line for Jews was flat, with essentially no correlation between synagogue attendance and vote for Bush or Gore.
115. Page 79: Alan Wolfe's comment about lifestyles in red and blue America comes from his article "Myths and realities of religion in politics" in Red and Blue Nation.
116. Page 79: Jean Baudrillard's quote about joggers appears in his book America, translated by Chris Turner.
117. Page 80: Alan Wolfe's statement about bowling alone but praying together comes from his aforementioned article "Myths and realities of religion in politics."
118. Page 80: For more on people overreporting church attendance, see http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/07/counting_church.html.
119. In their paper "Why more Americans have no religious preference: Politics and generations," published in 2002 in the American Sociological Review, Michael Hout and Claude Fisher attribute the increase in the rate of religious nonattachment to demographic shifts, including delayed marriage and parenthood, and report that "Most people with no preference hold conventional religious beliefs, despite their alienation from organized religion....The increase in 'no religion' responses was confined to political moderates and liberals; the religious preferences of political conservatives did not change."
120. Page 82:We constructed the graphs of income and church attendance and born-again status from the 2004 Annenberg survey. The bornagain question was asked only of survey respondents who had described themselves as Protestant.
121. Page 83: We took the data on prayer and the importance of religion from the World Values Survey, pooling data from 1980 through 2004. A similar graph appears in Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's 2005 book Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide.
122. Page 84: E. J. Dionne made this statement about the paradox of the Religious Right in his book Why Americans Hate Politics.
123. Page 84: In computing the correlations of religious attendance and income, we pooled the responses from the 2000 and 2004 Annenberg surveys.
124. Page 85: In his 1997 autobiography, Jerry Falwell wrote of Roe v. Wade: "The Supreme Court had just made a decision by a seven-to-two margin that would legalize the killing of millions of unborn children. In one terrible act they struck down all the state laws against abortion and legalized infanticide across the land. I could not believe that seven justices on the nation's highest court could have so little regard for the value of human life. Apparently, there were others who shared my disbelief." (Quoted by Michael Foust in the Baptist Press, 15 May 1997.)
125. Pages 85 and 86: The time trends in voting by religion come from the National Election Study, which has asked about religious denomination and religious attendance from the beginning.
126. Pages 88 and 92: We computed Bush's vote by income and religious attendance from the 2004 Annenberg survey.
127. Page 89: E. J. Dionne's analysis of geography and religious voting appear in his article "Polarized by God" in Red and Blue Nation.
128. Page 91: A fuller version of the Karl Marx quote, from his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, has been translated as, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people."
129. Page 93: Linguist Mark Liberman writes, "I suspect that it remains true in the U.S. that on average, lower-income people are more likely to have local accents."
130. See http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/03/who_talks_like.html
131. Page 94: Denise Dresser wrote about the close election in the article "Ocho lecciones" in Reforma, 3 July 2006.
132. Page 94: James McKinley's overview of Mexico's political geography appeared in "Mexico faces its own red-blue standoff," in the New York Times, 9 July 2006.
133. Page 96: A good sample of works studying the variation in voting behavior in recent Mexican elections are the edited volume by Jorge Domínguez and Chappell Lawson, Mexico's Pivotal Democratic Election: Candidates, Voters, and the Presidential Campaign of 2000
134. the book by Domínguez and James McCann, Democratizing Mexico: Public Opinion and Electoral Choices
135. Alejandro Moreno's El Votante Mexicano: Democracia, Actitudes Políticas y Conducta Electoral; and México 2006: Los Ciudadanos Ante las Urnas, edited by Ulíses Beltrán from Mexico's Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas.
136. Page 96: We give state-level GDP in purchasing-power-parity 2000 U.S. dollars
137. see Informe sobre desarrollo humano: Mexico 2002, published in 2003 by Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo.
138. Page 98: Ricardo Alemán's conclusions about the reality of social polarization appeared in El Universal, "Itinerario político: no gana pero arrebata," 3 July 2006.
139. Page 98: Adapting Joseph Klesner's 2004 article "The structure of the Mexican electorate" in Mexico's Pivotal Democratic Election: Candidates, Voters, and the Presidential Campaign of 2000, we define the regions of Mexico as follows.
140. Page 98: Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan write in their 1996 book Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation
141. Page 99: Our central model is a varying-intercept, varying-slope logistic regression predicting vote choice from individual income and GDP per capita, which we fit to data from Mitofsky International for 1994, Consulta Mitofsky-Televisa for 2000, and BGC Ulíses Beltrán y Asocs. for 2006, excluding those respondents who did not report for whom they voted or who supported parties other than the PAN, PRI, or PRD. This left us with 4,213 responses for 1994, 24,584 for 2000, and 3,709 for 2006, with sample sizes within states ranging from 23 in Quintana Roo in the year 1994 to 3,947 in Guanajuato in 2000.
142. Further analysis appears in our unpublished paper "One vote, many Mexicos: Income and vote choice in the 1994, 2000, and 2006 presidential elections" by Jeronimo Cortina, Andrew Gelman, and Narayani Lasala.
143. Page 101: William Gibson is the author of Neuromancer and other science fiction books. His statement about the future being unevenly distributed has been much quoted, for example in the article "The future catches up with novelist William Gibson" by Fiona Morrow in the Toronto Globe and Mail, 3 October 2007.
144. Page 103: Within each country, we collapse the five income categories of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems into three and then take the difference of conservative vote in the highest and lowest of the three income categories.
145. Page 105: In his 2002 book Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies, Russell Dalton contrasts politics in predominantly Catholic countries with those of mixed religions.
146. In the article "Activists and partisan realignment in the United States," published in the American Political Science Review in 2003, Gary Miller and Norman Schofield trace in general terms the changing bases of support of the two parties during the twentieth century, considering positions in the economic and social dimensions.
147. Page 111: Barry Goldwater is a conservative icon today, but back when he was running for president he was notorious for his seemingly effortless ability to offend large segments of the American population. Richard Rovere's 1965 book The Goldwater Caper has many more examples.
148. Page 111: Rodney King made his famous statement after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. For more on King and how his quote has been remembered, see http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/la_riot/article/0,28804,1614117_1614084,00.html.
149. Page 111: In a CNN poll from January 2005, 49% of respondents thought Bush was a "uniter," 49% thought he was a "divider," and 2% had no opinion: http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/19/poll/. For a whole book on the topic, see Gary Jacobson's book A Divider, Not a Uniter: George Bush and the American People.
150. Page 112: The much-emailed Jesusland map was created by G. Webb on 3 November 2004.
151. Page 113: The "feeling thermometer" series come from the National Election Study.
152. Page 113: The idea that voters have sorted by party is developed by Matthew Levendusky in the article "Sorting, not polarization: The changing nature of party ID and ideology in the U.S. electorate," presented at the 2004 meeting of the American Political Science Association, and by Morris Fiorina, Samuel Abrams, and Jeremy Pope in the 2005 book Culture War? The Myth of Polarized America.
153. In their 2006 American Journal of Political Science article, "Changing sides or changing minds? Party identification and policy preferences in the American electorate," Thomas Carsey and Geoffrey Layman have found that for issues that are not particularly salient, people may change their issue stances to conform with their existing partisan preferences rather than the reverse.
154. Page 114: McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, in their Polarized America book, and David Brady and Hahrie Han, in their article "Polarization then and now," in Red and Blue Nation, provide evidence that members of single-issue-based interest groups tend to hold extreme positions.
155. See also James Campbell's discussion of Brady and Han in that same volume.
156. Furthermore, as Alan Abramowitz and Bill Bishop write in their column "The myth of the middle" in the Washington Post from 1 March 2007, "the divisions between the parties weren't limited to Iraq....For example, 69 percent of Democratic voters chose the most strongly prochoice position on the issue of abortion, compared with 20 percent of Republican voters
157. only 16 percent of Democratic voters supported a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, while 80 percent of Republican voters did
158. Page 115: Partisan differences in political perceptions are not new. For example, in their article "Misperceptions about perceptual bias," from the 1999 Annual Review of Political Science
159. Alan Gerber and Donald Green note the striking finding from V. O. Key's Public Opinion and American Democracy: "Early survey researchers noted in 1936 that 83% of Republicans felt that President Roosevelt's policies were leading the country down the road to dictatorship, a view shared by only 9% of Democrats." Gerber and Green connect this to psychological research on cognitive dissonance and stability of attitudes.
160. Page 116: The poll data from Korea and Vietnam come from the American Institute of Public Opinion surveys and were reported by Shapiro and Bloch-Elkon, who got the data from John Mueller's 1973 book, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion.
161. Page 117: The data on perceptions of inflation come from the 1988 National Election Study, as reported by Larry Bartels in his article "Beyond the running tally: Partisan bias in political perceptions," published in Political Behavior in 2002.
162. Page 117: Senator Santorum made his famous statement about "man on dog" in an Associated Press interview on 7 April 2003.
163. Page 118: The trends on abortion attitudes come from the National Election Study and are reported in Joseph Bafumi and Robert Shapiro's unpublished article "A new partisan voter."
164. Page 118: The survey on 9/11 conspiracies was conducted by the Rasmussen survey group in May, 2007. As noted, Republicans overwhelmingly disagreed with the claim that George W. Bush knew about the attacks in advance. Among Democrats, 35% thought that Bush knew, while 39% did not agree (26% were not sure)
165. details are at http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/general_current_events/president_bush/22_believe_bush_knew_about_9_11_attacks_in_advance.
166. see http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/timespoll/la-980823raidpoll-415pa1an,1,7942692.htmlstory.
167. Page 119: Edward Glaeser and Bryce Ward recount geographic variation in opinions in their article "Myths and realities of American political geography." In their unpublished paper "Public opinion and policy responsiveness: Gay rights in the states" Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips connect state-by-state variation in attitudes to differences in state policies.
168. Page 119: The material on voters' perceptions of economic issues is taken from Joseph Bafumi's unpublished article "The decline of economic retrospections." This is part of a literature showing evidence for the increasing importance of partisan lenses during the current era of partisan polarization. For example, Shapiro and Bloch-Elkon find that foreign policy stances are more painted by partisan allegiances than ever before, and Gary Jacobson shows this for a variety of issues in A Divider, Not a Uniter. Also relevant to this discussion is Morris Fiorina's 1981 book Retrospective Voting in American National Elections.
169. Page 119: Carl Cannon presents his views on excess partisanship in his article in Red and Blue Nation.
170. Page 123: The data and graphs on ideological positions of congressmembers come from McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal's book Polarized America, which itself draws upon earlier work of these researchers on aligning legislators using roll call votes.
171. Brady and Han further discuss historical patterns of polarization in their article "Polarization then and now."
172. Page 123: Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo published the paper "The Great Compression: The wage structure in the United States at midcentury" in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1992.
173. In The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman draws upon that work in giving his perspective on the trends in political and economic inequality over the past half century.
174. In "The American wage structure, 1920-1947," published in the journal Research in Economic History in 1999, Thomas Ferguson and James Galbraith discuss the roles of unionization and Keynesian economic policies in setting America up for a period of full employment.
175. Page 124: Richard Nixon's statement about the universality of Keyenesian economics is mentioned in Time magazine's profile of John Maynard Keynes at http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/keynes03.html.
176. Pages 125 and 131: The graphs showing simultaneous positions of voters and politicians are adapted from the 2007 paper "Preference aggregation, representation, and elected American political institutions" by Joseph Bafumi and Michael Herron. That paper also presents estimates for the positions of Congress before and after the 2006 election and for the estimated median voter in individual states.
177. Page 125: The claim that citizens who are more politically involved tend to be more extreme than the electorate comes from Bafumi and Herron, who estimate the ideological positions of the survey respondents who have contributed financially to political campaigns.
178. Page 126: We estimate the rate of split-ticket voting using responses to the National Election Study in each presidential election year.
179. Page 126: The statement about "liberal voters leaving the Republican party and conservatives leaving the Democrats" is supported by an analysis by Bafumi and Shapiro, who fit a logistic regression predicting party identification from self-declared ideology (on a liberal-conservative scale) and several demographic predictors, fitting separately to pre-election poll data from each election since 1972.
180. Page 127: Half a year after his celebrated convention address, Barack Obama said, "Since that election, that gay couple I knew in the red states? They've moved back to the blue states," in a speech at the Gridiron Club in Washington, D.C.
181. Page 127: The data on the diversity of partisan opinions in multiple dimensions come from the National Election Study. Social scientists have a long tradition of debate about the level of incoherence in American opinions, dating back at least to Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes's 1960 book The American Voter, and Philip Converse's paper "The nature of belief systems in mass publics" in the 1964 volume Ideology and Discontent.
182. Since then, important research in this area includes Christopher Achen's 1975 American Political Science Review article "Mass political attitudes and the survey response"
183. Robert Erikson's 1979 British Journal of Political Science article "The SRC panel data and mass political attitudes"
184. Norman Nie, Sidney Verba, and John Petrocik's 1979 book The Changing American Voter
185. John Zaller and Stanley Feldman's 1992 American Journal of Political Science article "A simple theory of the survey response: Answering questions versus revealing preferences"
186. Zaller's 1992 book The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
187. Diana Mutz's 1998 book Impersonal Influence: How Perceptions of Mass Collectives Affect Political Attitudes; and much other work.
188. Page 129: Robert Erikson, Gerald Wright, and John McIver demonstrate the sorting of voters by party in their 1993 book Statehouse Democracy.
189. Page 129: Our analysis of issue polarization using time trends in correlations follows the article "Partisans without constraint: Political polarization and trends in American public opinion" by Delia Baldassarri and Andrew Gelman, to appear in the American Journal of Sociology.
190. Page 130: Alan Abramowitz and Kyle Saunders wrote about the differences between red and blue state voters in the article "Is polarization a myth?" in the Journal of Politics in 2006.
191. In looking at correlations among issues, we also consider the approach of aggregating survey items to create a single measure for each issue domain. Following this strategy, we confirm the findings of Stephen Ansolabehere, Jonathan Rodden, and James Snyder in their unpublished 2006 paper "Issue preferences and measurement error": when we look at averages and when the number of items increases, we see higher constraint between issue domains.
192. Page 134: John Kenneth White's comment about parallel universes was quoted in the article "Democrats are slow to connect with voters" by Bill Lambrecht in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 14 August 2005.
193. Page 134: In their paper, "Dynamics of political polarization," forthcoming in the American Sociological Review, Delia Baldassarri and Peter Bearman set up a model in which people can overestimate the amount of polarization because they unwittingly limit their political discussions to topics on which they agree.
194. Page 135: The summaries of Bush voters knowing Bush voters and Gore voters knowing Gore voters are based on data from a special set of questions asked in the 2000 National Election Study. First, each respondent was asked about up to four people with whom they "discuss government, elections, and politics." Then, for each of the names that was given as a discussion partner, the survey respondent was asked, "How do you think voted in the election? Do you think he/she voted for Al Gore, George Bush, some other candidate, or do you think didn't vote?" We computed proportions by combining the information from all respondents, excluding those contacts whose vote preferences were unknown.
195. Page 135: Stephen Ansolabehere, Jonathan Rodden, and James Snyder wrote that most Americans are ideological moderates in their article "Purple America," which appeared in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2006. Here, they "put issue cleavages and electoral maps into historical perspective and demonstrate that over the course of the twentieth century there has been a noteworthy political convergence between the states. Compared to the past, the political geography of the United States today is purple."
196. Page 136: Paul DiMaggio, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson discuss trends in distributions of attitudes is their 1986 article "Have Americans' social attitudes become more polarized?" published in the American Journal of Sociology, and updated by John Evans in Social Science Quarterly in 2003.
197. Also see chapter 7 of Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro's 1992 compendium The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences.
198. Page 136: In "How polarization affects political engagement," from Red and Blue Nation, Marc Hetherington argues that "elite polarization has stimulated participation at the mass level even though the masses remain relatively moderate."
199. Page 136: We generally agree with Fiorina's claims about moderate voters and polarized politics, but there is some dispute over this topic in political science
200. see, for example, the discussion of Fiorina and Levendusky's article in Red and Blue Nation, Abramowitz and Saunders's aforementioned "Is polarization a myth?" and Gary Jacobson's A Divider, Not a Uniter.
201. Page 137: The Los Angeles Times editorial on the red-blue schism appeared on 4 November 2004.
202. Page 137: Tom DeLay gave his thoughts on partisanship in his farewell speech upon his retirement from the House of Representatives
203. the scene is described in Ronald Brownstein's 2007 book, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Polarized Washington and Polarized America
204. Page 139: Will Rogers's statement about the Republicans is included in his posthumous collection Never Met a Man I Didn't Like.
205. Colin Bingham's 1982 book Wit and Wisdom: A Public Affairs Miscellany)
206. William Safire's "On language" column in the New York Times, 21 June 1992).
207. The Homer Simpson paper has been incorporated into Bartels's new book Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.
208. For more on the politics behind the inheritance tax battle, see Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro's 2005 book Death by a Thousand Cuts.
209. Page 141: Larry Bartels's graph of income growth under Democratic and Republican presidents appears in Unequal Democracy and is reproduced here courtesy of the Russell Sage Foundation. The graph here shows pre-tax income; Bartels also presents post-tax comparisons. In their 2002 book Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters, Donald Green, Brad Palmquist, and Eric Shickler discuss how Republicans could dominate presidential voting during the forty-year period where Democrats were the majority in congressional voting and party identification.
210. Page 141: The discussion of economic growth under Democratic and Republican presidents is related to the political business cycle theory in economics and political science. In their paper "Political parties and the business cycle in the United States, 1948-1984," published in the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking in 1988, Alberto Alesina and Jeffrey Sachs wrote
211. The most famous attempt to model the relationship between political and economic cycles is the "political business cycle" theory formulated by Nordhaus (1975) and MacRae (1977). Three crucial assumptions underlie this approach: (i) the parties care only about winning the elections, as in Downs (1957)
212. (ii) the voters have short memories and can be systematically fooled
213. For a recent review of the research in this area, see Allan Drazen's article "The political business cycle after 25 years" (with accompanying discussion by Alberto Alesina and CarlWalsh) in the NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000.
214. Page 142: Douglas Hibbs's work on economic performance and incumbent party vote for president has appeared in his 1982 paper with Douglas Rivers and Nicholas Vasilatos "On the demand for economic outcomes: Macroeconomic performance and mass political support in the United States" in the Journal of Politics, his 2000 article
215. "Bread and peace voting in U.S. presidential elections" in Public Choice, and his recent update
216. "Implications of the 'bread and peace' model for the 2008 U.S. presidential election."
217. Steven Rosenstone's 1984 book Forecasting Presidential Elections remains an excellent overview of the topic.
218. For some more recent discussions of election forecasting, see the symposium published in the October 2004 issue of the journal PS: Political Science and Politics.
219. Page 143: George Bush made his joke about the "haves and the havemores" at the Al Smith memorial dinner in New York City on 19 October 2000.
220. Page 143: Bill Clinton's statement on Marc Rich was quoted from a New York Times op-ed, "My reasons for the pardons," 18 February 2001.
221. Page 143: Thomas Frank made this point about upper-class conservatives in his article "Class dismissed."
222. Page 144: We are grateful to Thomas Ferguson for summarizing his research results for us here. Some of Ferguson's work on political contributions appears in "Blowing smoke: Impeachment, the Clinton presidency, and the political economy" in the 2000 volume The State of Democracy in America
223. "Globalization, religion, and politics in the 2004 election" in the 2005 volume A Defining Election: The Presidential Race of 2004. A longer version of the latter article is available at the University of Texas Inequality Project.
224. Page 144: Verba, Schlozman, and Brady's Voice and Equality presents data showing that higher-income people participate more in politics.
225. Page 145: Thomas Edsall quotes labor leader Andy Stern in his article, "Party hardy" in the New Republic, 25 September 2006.
226. Page 146: The advice to move to the extreme in the primary and the center in the general election has also been attributed to many others.
227. Page 146: George H. W. Bush made his notorious "no new taxes" pledge at the 1988 Republican national convention.
228. Page 146: John Kerry's statements on the Iraq War are collected in "Kerry's top ten flip-flops": http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/29/politics/main646435.shtml.
229. "Bush's top ten flip-flops" are at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/28/politics/main646142.shtml.
230. Page 146: The median voter theorem dates back to Harold Hotelling's 1929 paper "Stability in competition" in the Economic Journal, was elaborated upon by Anthony Downs in his 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy, and has been studied extensively since then.
231. Particularly relevant to our discussion here are "Valence politics and equilibrium in spatial election models" by Stephen Ansolabehere and James Snyder, published in Public Choice in 2000
232. "A model of candidate location when one candidate has a valence advantage" by Tim Groseclose, published in the American Journal of Political Science in 2001; and the 2004 article "Beyond the median: Voter preferences, district heterogeneity, and political representation" by Elisabeth Gerber and Jeffrey Lewis, from the Journal of Political Economy. Important earlier references include Gerald Kramer's 1971 article "Short-term fluctuations in U.S. voting behavior, 1896-1964" and Robert Erikson and David Romero's 1990 article "Candidate equilibrium and the behavioral model of the vote," both of which appeared in the American Political Science Review.
233. Page 148: The analysis reported here comes from the article "Should the Democrats move to the left on economic policy?" by Andrew Gelman and Jeff Cai and appearing in the Annals of Applied Statistics in 2008.
234. Page 149: The correlation between political attitudes and views of the candidates can be understood in terms of the assimilation and contrast effects, which have been studied in social psychology;
235. see, for example, the article "Assimilation and contrast effects in voter projections of party locations: Evidence from Norway, France, and the USA" by Samuel Merrill, Bernard Grofman, and James Adams, published in the European Journal of Social Research in 2004.
236. Page 150: In their aforementioned "Purple America" article, Stephen Ansolabehere, Jonathan Rodden, and James Snyder also find economic issues to be more important than social issues in predicting vote choice.
237. Page 153: We do not discuss voter turnout here, but it can make a difference. In their 2001 article "The political implications of higher turnout" in the British Journal of Political Science, Benjamin Highton and Raymond Wolfinger estimate that under 100% turnout, the Democrats would receive about three percentage points more of the national vote-not a lot, but enough to have swung the Bush-Gore and Bush-Kerry contests. Beyond this, election campaigns are not static.
238. In their paper "Who votes now? And does it matter?" presented at the 2007 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Jonathan Nagler and Jan Leighley show that nonvoters care about different issues than voters, and they conjecture that increased turnout would raise the profiles of these issues in the campaign.
239. Page 153: At the 1964 Republican national convention, Barry Goldwater said, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
240. Page 153: Steven Levitt, in his 1996 paper "How do senators vote?" in the American Economic Review
241. Robert Erikson and Gerald Wright, in their paper "Representation of constituency ideology in Congress" (which appeared in 2000 in the volume Continuity and Change in House Elections), provide evidence that congressmembers balance their goals and their constituents' preferences.
242. Page 153: In his article "The polarization of American parties and mistrust of government," from the 1997 book Why People Don't Trust Government, David King discusses the increasing polarization in political debate.
243. Page 153: In their article "Toward depolarization" in Red and Blue Nation
244. Pietro Nivola and William Galston write, "the most conspicuous losers in 2006 were not the perpetrators of a 'radical experiment' but the GOP's moderates." The general phenomenon of moderates losing in swing elections is no surprise, given that moderates are more likely to be representing marginal districts where both parties are competitive. Congressmembers with more extreme ideologies are more likely to sit in safer seats.
245. Pages 155-156: In their 2002 book Elbridge Gerry's Salamander: The Electoral Consequences of the Reapportionment Revolution, Gary Cox and Jonathan Katz discuss the connections between political competition, ideological polarization, and incumbency in Congress.
246. Page 156: We estimated the benefits of moderation by fitting a linear regression to predict the vote shares of congressmembers running for reelection in each year. The summaries here average over parties and election years in each decade.
247. Page 157: Hubert Humphrey delivered his speech on states' rights and human rights at the 1948 Democratic national convention.
248. Page 158: Ansolabehere and Snyder discuss the switch to the oneperson, one-vote system in their book The End of Inequality.
249. Page 158: Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro's defense of public opinion comes from their 1992 book The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences.
250. Page 159: Here is a list of all the U.S. presidential elections that were decided by less than 1% of the vote: 1880, 1884, 1888, 1960, 1968, 2000. We have been living in an unusual period of partisan balance.
251. Page 160: Nicholas Kristof wrote about Democrats and the heartland in his New York Times column from 3 November 2004, "Living poor, voting rich."
252. Page 160: Some discussion of the idea that parties reward their supporters as well as compete for swing voters appears in the articles "Electoral politics as a redistributive game" by Gary Cox and Matthew McCubbins in the Journal of Politics in 1986
253. "The determinants of success of special interests in redistributive politics" by Avinash Dixit and John Londregan in that same journal and year
254. "Vote buying or turnout buying? Machine politics and the secret ballot" by Simeon Nichter in the American Political Science Review in 2008.
255. In the unpublished article "Republican vote buying in the 2004 U.S. presidential election" Jowei Chen argues that disaster aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the Florida hurricanes in 2004 increased turnout among Republican homeowners in the affected areas of the state.
256. Page 160: An example of a Democrat supporting rich voters in a rich state is Senator Charles Schumer's opposition to a tax on hedge funds
257. see Raymond Hernandez and Stephen Labaton's article "In opposing tax plan, Schumer breaks with party" in the New York Times on 30 July 2008.
258. Page 164: In their unpublished article "State parties, polarization, and representation of the poor," Elizabeth Rigby and Gerald Wright analyzed the positions of 16,000 state legislative candidates from the Project Vote Smart surveys and found that these politicians' attitudes on economic redistribution were highly correlated with their general liberal-conservative positions.
259. Page 165: As of this writing, we still have mechanical lever voting machines in New York State.
260. Page 168: The Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder quote on the growing culture war is taken from their paper "Purple America."
261. Rentfrow, Jost, and Gosling's study is described in their unpublished article with the descriptive title "Regional differences in personality predict voting patterns in 1996-2004 U.S. presidential elections."
262. In "The end of the end of ideology," which appeared in the American Psychologist in 2006, Jost reviews research correlating political attitudes with personality traits.
263. See also Jost's paper with Jaime Napier "The 'anti-democratic personality' revisited: A cross-national investigation of working class authoritarianism," to appear in the Journal of Social Issues.
264. Page 169: Migration by choice was studied by Charles Tiebout in his article "A pure theory of local expenditures" in the Journal of Political Economy in 1956.
265. Page 169: James Gimpel and Jason Schuknecht report their findings on moving and politics in "Interstate migration and electoral politics," which appeared in the Journal of Politics in 2001.
266. See also "Regional shifts in America's voting-aged population," a research report by demographer William Frey published by the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan.
267. As Alison Stein Wellner wrote in 2006 in her article "The mobility myth" in Reason magazine, America is often described as an increasingly mobile society, but, actually, based on current U.S. trends, "a person born today is more likely to remain near his birthplace than a person born in the 19th century."
268. Some recent research in this area is summarized in Claude Fischer's "Ever-more rooted Americans," published in the journal City and Community in 2002
269. Patricia Kelly Hall and Steven Ruggles's 2004 article, "'Restless in the midst of their prosperity': New evidence on the internal migration of Americans, 1850-2000," in the Journal of American History
270. Joseph Ferrie's unpublished 2005 paper "The end of American exceptionalism? Mobility in the U.S. since 1950." When reading this literature, be careful to distinguish claims about moves between counties, states, and regions of the country.
271. Page 170: The differences in income between people who move to red and blue states are not large: it's the forty-eighth percentile of income compared to the fifty-second percentile.
272. Page 170: Steve Sailer wrote about his affordable family formation hypothesis in an article, "Values voters" in The American Conservative on 11 February 2008.
273. In a related article, "Why do gay men live in San Francisco," from the Journal of Urban Economics in 2002, Dan Black, Gary Gates, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor argue that gay men disproportionately move to more attractive cities because they are less likely to have children and thus are more able to afford high housing prices.
274. Also relevant to this discussion is Richard Florida's latest book, Who's Your City? on the topic of how people are now choosing where to live.
275. Page 171: Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote's model appears in their unpublished paper "Aggregation reversals and the social formation of beliefs."
276. Page 171: David Brooks's comments on the influence of the upper middle class come from his article "The Democratic party gets a brain-and loses its mind" in the Weekly Standard on 26 January 1998.
277. E. J. Dionne discusses the perspectives of Brooks and others in his article "Polarized by God" in Red and Blue Nation.
278. Page 172: In the International Political Science Review in 1985
279. Muller-Rommel was referring to the 1976 article "Party identification, ideological preferences, and left-right dimension among western publics" by Ronald Inglehart and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, published in the volume Party Identification and Beyond.
280. Scholars such as Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales (in their 2003 paper "The great reversals: The politics of financial development in the twentieth century" in the Journal of Financial Economics) and Thomas Piketty attribute the postwar European economic consensus to the fact that the continent was starting from scratch after the devastation of two world wars.
281. Page 172: For more on the increasing importance of both class and culture in voting, see Mark Brewer and Jeffrey Stonecash's 2007 book Split.
282. Page 173: Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder's quote is from their article "Purple America."
283. Page 173: Matthew Fellowes, Virginia Gray, and Davie Lowery's discussion of post-materialist politics appears in their article, "What's on the table? The content of state policy agendas," published in Party Politics in 2006.
284. Page 175: A key book on race and postwar American politics is Edward Carmines and James Stimson's Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics from 1989.
285. Page 175: In their unpublished article "International polarity and domestic polarization: Explaining American disunity," Joseph Parent and Joseph Bafumi present the unipolarity theory, arguing that the end of the Cold War around 1990 and the associated removal of an external threat reduced the incentives for political leaders to coordinate and allowed for a new era of polarization that persists today.
286. Page 175: The effects of the new ideological media are discussed in Gary Jacobson's 2007 book A Divider, Not a Uniter, and three articles in the Red and Blue Nation volume: "Polarizing the House of Representatives: How much does gerrymandering matter?" by Thomas Mann
287. "Disconnected: The political class versus the people" by Morris Fiorina and Matthew Levendusky
288. "How the mass media divide us" by Diana Mutz.
289. Markus Prior provides a thorough treatment of these issues in his 2007 book Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections.
290. Page 176: As Carl Cannon points out in his article in Red and Blue Nation, recent political polarization is all the more striking considering the general economic prosperity of the past few decades.