Read my paper with Edlin and Kaplan about why it’s rational to vote. It’s not just about consumption.

Kieran,

I think Bryan was making the opposite point, which was that economists traditionally start with such a simplified model that they’re surprised when the real world is more complicated than that.

Bryan,

Yes, I agree. A lot of the voters in the over $200K bracket are in “blue states” such as New York and California where rich people are close to evenly divided between the parties.

Recall, though, as we show in the book, that the approximately 20% difference between the upper and lower third is high in historical terms–it’s as high as it was in the late New Deal period and in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and it’s a higher gap than in most European countries. So, yeah, income in general is less of a huge factor than you might imagine.

As we discuss in the book, the correlation between income and economic ideology is low (and it varies quite a bit by state). On the other hand, it’s a difference of 20% between the high and low end, and that ain’t nothing. It’s the difference between voting like Massachusetts and voting like Texas.

Yes, but as your graphs show, a substantial part of that 20% difference is a proxy for race. And to get that 20% difference, you have to compare the 8% making less than $15k to the 3% making more than $200k. For whites, there’s a huge range from $30k to $200k where Republican voting as a function of income is almost perfectly flat.

Think about it this way: in 2004, the gender gap for Republican voting was 7 percentage points. I’d describe that as a moderate difference. But for white voters, there is only a 6 percentage-point gap between voters in the $30k-50k bracket and voters in the over $200k bracket. Even now, that shocks me.

Pretty funny. “If you start from my totally false priors, the income gap looks tiny!”

First, nobody should vote in Bryan’s model. So why do they? Primarily as a form of consumption, I suspect. We feel good about voting, we it allows us identify with a group. If that’s why we vote, there is no reason to expect rich and poor to divide completely.