Are Income & Political Participation Correlated?Evidence from US during Covid-19

• In Event: Unequal Turnout in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

What is the relationship between income and political participation? Historically, studies have consistently found a positive effect, with richer individuals more likely to vote and engage in other political activities. I address this fundamental question in contemporary United States, an increasingly polarized and divided democracy where scholars have hypothesized that identity politics has supplanted economic considerations in individual political choices. I examine the effect of income changes on a number of political activities, above all turnout to vote and campaign contributions. First, I use nationally representative surveys to describe the relationships between income changes and traditional measures of political participation in the last two decades. Then, I make use of voter files to scrutinize the relationships between the decision to vote and to donate money to a political campaign, with a focus on socioeconomic characteristics. Moreover, I show that the decision to finance politics is positively correlated with income and that the increase in small donations has been balanced by a rise in big contributions from an increasingly smaller set of big donors over time. Finally, I causally estimate the effect of the economic shock due to the pandemic on the decision to donate and turn out to vote for the 2020 election. In this sense, I build plausibly exogenous instrumental variables of economic shocks exploiting the differential impact of the Covid-19 outbreak on the level of connectedness of a local economy. The empirical strategy takes into account, on one side, the disruption of the supply chain and the immediate policy responses to the pandemic, and on the other side the very special circumstances of the 2020 elections, especially the high prevalence of vote-by-mail. Overall, the analysis represents a robust test to the predicted positive relationship between income and political participation in a very polarized political environment and includes heterogeneous findings with respect to income levels, race and areas of the country.

Author

• Alberto Parmigiani, London School of Economics