Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Decomposing US Political Ideology: Local Labor Market Polarization and Race in the 2016 Presidential Election

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign highlighted protectionism of US-born workers at a time of growing income inequality, racial tensions, and labor market polarization. Our study investigates if and how voters’ life circumstances affected election behavior between 2012 and 2016, and how voter behavior relates to compositional versus structural change of communities. We relate changes in the Republican vote share between 2012 and 2016 to demographic and economic characteristics of US counties and to rates of return (in terms of vote share) to these characteristics. We find that structural change in how local-level community attributes (most especially race) affect elections played a greater role between 2012 and 2016 than did differences in these community characteristics themselves. We find this more pronounced in battleground states, and in the presidential race as opposed to congressional ones.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Republican presidential vote share in 2012 and in 2016 separately are depicted in Appendix Figures A1 and A2 in the ESM. Figure A3 in the ESM documents county-level majority switch behavior (e.g., moving from being Democratic party dominated to Republican dominated). Parallel figures illustrating Republican House of Representatives vote shares in 2012 and 2016 and county-level majority switches appear as Appendix Figures A4, A5, and A6 in the ESM.

  2. A summary of supporting literature appears in Potrafke (2018).

  3. County-level presidential and House election data were purchased from “Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections” (www.uselectionatlas.org). The data in Shannon county in South Dakota is missing for all years.

  4. Turnout data for North Dakota was not available at the time of this writing. Since registration practices differ by state, we note that some political science research uses the percentage of citizens in the voting age population who voted instead of turnout as defined in Dave Leip’s Atlas. The treatment of turnout as a control is consistent with recent political science research (e.g., Kostelka and Blais 2018), though we acknowledge that changes to the Republican vote share may relate to changes in voting behavior or in the selection of voters. Conditioning on the turnout rate could overcontrol for local economic and demographic attributes on the Republican vote share. If this holds, our conclusions in terms of structural change would be underestimated.

  5. Data are accessed from https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/saipe.html.

  6. Data are accessed from https://www.bls.gov/lau/#cntyaa.

  7. For national analysis including all counties, we use ACS 5-year estimates. For example, 2016 estimates are constructed from surveys from 2012 through 2016. More details about 5-year constructions are at https://www.census.gov/history/www/programs/demographic/american_community_survey.html.

  8. Data are accessed from https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2016/demo/popest/counties-detail.html.

  9. Annual mortality risks by county and age groups are calculated by IHME using death registration data from the National Vital Statistics System. The data period is 1980 through 2014. We use 2014 data for the analysis of 2016 election. Data are accessed from http://ghdx.healthdata.org/us-data.

  10. Other discrete choice models (i.e., Probit) yield similar results.

  11. We identify Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin as the battleground states in 2016 presidential election according to major media. Although there are some differences over time and across media outlets, these eleven states were consistently identified as battlegrounds. For example, the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/15/wonders-never-cease-utah-is-now-a-competitive-state-in-the-2016-presidential-election/?utm_term=.73c865bf9c42.

  12. Given the strong bi-partisan nature of the presidential race (and also for the House), we expect our choice of modeling the Republican share as opposed to the Demographic one to be inconsequential. We tested the sensitivity of our results to his modeling choice and have confirmed that third party candidates did not largely impact margins (not shown).

  13. Freund and Sidhu (2017) also document an association between the share of employment in the manufacturing and the change in the Republican vote share from 2012 to 2016 though their estimates would be more similar methodologically to the characteristic change component (which here is insignificantly different from zero) than the structural component which we separate in this research.

  14. Note that this 5.79 from this difference in Table 1 is equal to the summation of the characteristic (1.66) and structural (5.80) total changes in the final row of Table 2 (with the exception of a small difference due to rounding).

  15. The House election data may have additional variance due to partisan politics at that level and the presence of landslides in races where candidates are not fielded equally across political parties.

  16. Logit regression results for Republican party victories in presidential and House elections overall and across battleground and non-battleground states appear in Table A3 of the Appendix in the ESM.

References

  • Autor DH, Katz LF, Kearney MS. The polarization of the US labor market. Am Econ Rev. 2006;96(2):189–94.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Autor DH, Dorn D. The growth of low-skill service jobs and the polarization of the US labor market. Am Econ Rev. 2013;103(5):1553–97.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Autor D, Dorn D, Hanson G, Majlesi K. Importing political polarization? The electoral consequences of rising trade exposure (No. w22637). Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research; 2016.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Blinder AS. Wage discrimination: reduced form and structural estimates. J Hum Resour. 1973;8(4):436–55.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boxell L, Gentzkow M, Shapiro JM. A note on internet use and the 2016 US presidential election outcome. PLoS One. 2018;13(7):e0199571.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Collingwood, L. (2016). The county-by-county data on Trump voters shows why he won. Washington Post (November 19).

  • Cynamon BZ, Fazzari SM. Inequality, the Great Recession and slow recovery. Camb J Econ. 2016;40(2):373–99.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fairlie RW. The absence of the African-American owned business: an analysis of the dynamics of self-employment. J Labor Econ. 1999;17(1):80–108.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fairlie RW, Robb AM. Why are black-owned businesses less successful than white-owned businesses: the role of families, inheritances, and business human capital. J Labor Econ. 2007;25(2):289–323.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freund, C. & Sidhu D Manufacturing and the 2016 election: an analysis of US presidential election data. Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper, 2017. (17-7).

  • Galbraith JK, Hale JT. State income inequality and presidential election turnout and outcomes. Soc Sci Q. 2008;89(4):887–901.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Holmes N & Berube A. “City and metropolitan inequality on the rise, driven by declining incomes” Brookings Institution Report. 2016

  • Jayadev A, Johnson R. Tides and prejudice: racial attitudes during downturns in the United States 1979–2014. Rev Black Polit Econ. 2017;44(3–4):379–92.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim J, Elliott E, Wang DM. A spatial analysis of county-level outcomes in US Presidential elections: 1988–2000. Elect Stud. 2003;22(4):741–61.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Knuckey J, Kim M. Racial resentment, old-fashioned racism, and the vote choice of Southern and Nonsouthern whites in the 2012 US presidential election. Soc Sci Q. 2015;96(4):905–22.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kochel TR. Explaining racial differences in Ferguson’s impact on local residents’ trust and perceived legitimacy: policy implications for police. Crim Justice Policy Rev. 2017;79:504–23 0887403416684923.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kostelka F, Blais A. The chicken and egg question: satisfaction with democracy and voter turnout. PS: Polit Sci Polit. 2018;51(2):370–6.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lamont M, Park BY, Ayala-Hurtado E. Trump’s electoral speeches and his appeal to the American white working class. Br J Sociol. 2017;68:S153–80.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lichter DT. Integration or fragmentation? Racial diversity and the American future. Demography. 2013;50(2):359–91.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Manza J, & Crowley N Working class hero? Interrogating the social bases of the rise of Donald Trump. In The Forum 2017, (Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 3-28). De Gruyter.

  • Markus GB. The impact of personal and national economic conditions on the presidential vote: a pooled cross-sectional analysis. Am J Polit Sci. 1988;32(1):137–54.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mas A, Moretti E. Racial bias in the 2008 presidential election. Am Econ Rev. 2009;99(2):323–9.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mayda AM, Peri G, & Steingress W. The political impact of immigration: evidence from the United States (No. w24510). National Bureau of Economic Research. 2018

  • McNeeley S, Grothoff G. A multilevel examination of the relationship between racial tension and attitudes toward the police. Am J Crim Justice. 2016;41(3):383–401.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McQuarrie M. The revolt of the Rust Belt: place and politics in the age of anger. Br J Sociol. 2017;68:S120–52.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meyer BD, Sullivan JX. Consumption and income inequality and the great recession. Am Econ Rev. 2013;103(3):178–83.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Monnat, S. M.. Deaths of despair and support for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Pennsylvania State Univ Dep Agric Econ Res Brief, 2016, 5.

  • Moreno-Galbis E, Sopraseuth T. Job polarization in aging economies. Labour Econ. 2014;27:44–55.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morgan SL. Status threat, material interests, and the 2016 presidential vote. Socius. 2018;4:1–17 2378023118788217.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morgan SL, Lee J. The white working class and voter turnout in US presidential elections, 2004 to 2016. Sociol Sci. 2017;4:656–85.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Oaxaca R. Male-female wage differentials in urban labor markets. Int Econ Rev. 1973;14(3):693–709.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pasek J, Tahk A, Lelkes Y, Krosnick JA, Payne BK, Akhtar O, et al. Determinants of turnout and candidate choice in the 2008 US presidential election illuminating the impact of racial prejudice and other considerations. Public Opin Q. 2009;73(5):943–94.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pattie C, Johnston R. The role of regional context in voting: evidence from the 1992 British General Election. Reg Stud. 1998;32(3):249–63.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pattie CJ, Johnston RJ, Schipper M, Potts L. Are regions important in British elections? Valence politics and local economic contexts at the 2010 general election. Reg Stud. 2015;49(9):1561–74.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Perez AD, Hirschman C. The changing racial and ethnic composition of the US population: emerging American identities. Popul Dev Rev. 2009;35(1):1–51.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Peterson RD. Interrogating race, crime, and justice in a time of unease and racial tension. Criminology. 2017;55(2):245–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Potrafke N. Government ideology and economic policy-making in the United States—a survey. Public Choice. 2018;174(1–2):145–207.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rendall M, Weiss FJ. Employment polarization and the role of the apprenticeship system. Eur Econ Rev. 2016;82:166–86.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rothwell JT, & Diego-Rosell P. Explaining nationalist political views: the case of Donald Trump. (2016). Available at SSRN 2822059.

  • Solt F. Economic inequality and democratic political engagement. Am J Polit Sci. 2008;52(1):48–60.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Solt F. Does economic inequality depress electoral participation? Testing the Schattschneider hypothesis. Polit Behav. 2010;32(2):285–301.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stephens-Davidowitz S. The cost of racial animus on a black candidate: evidence using Google search data. J Public Econ. 2014;118:26–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weatherford MS. Economic conditions and electoral outcomes: class differences in the political response to recession. Am J Polit Sci. 1978;22(4):917–38.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We thank Trevon Logan for the outstanding comments on an earlier draft as well as other conference and seminar participants and reviewers in various settings.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA

    Maoyong Fan

  2. Department of Economics, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Anita Alves Pena

Authors
  1. Maoyong Fan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Anita Alves Pena
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anita Alves Pena.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Electronic supplementary material

ESM 1

(PDF 2.30 mb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Fan, M., Pena, A.A. Decomposing US Political Ideology: Local Labor Market Polarization and Race in the 2016 Presidential Election. J Econ Race Policy 4, 56–70 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41996-020-00056-z

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41996-020-00056-z

Keywords

JEL Classifications

Search

Navigation