Who Cares about What? Interest Divisions and Policy Preference Intensities

• In Event: The Politics of Inequality in Polarized Contexts

Abstract

The education polarization sweeping capitalist democracies has brought more affluent voters to center-left parties like the Democratic Party. While shared partisanship unites Democratic voters across educational attainment and affluence on “sociocultural” issues, recent evidence indicates some disagreement on issues of economic redistribution among today’s cross-class Democratic voters (e.g., Broockman and Malhotra 2020; Maks-Solomon and Rigby 2020; Zacher 2023). However, this existing work—and research on voter preferences, broadly—has largely not interrogated the intensity (i.e., strength) of policy preferences. Which policies are intensely favored and disfavored by Democratic voters from various socioeconomic classes is a remaining clue to understanding the puzzle of a cross-class party coalition cohering around some form of a redistributive policy agenda in an era of inequality. In this paper, I analyze original conjoint survey experimental data to understand which public policies are most strongly favored by affluent versus less affluent Democrats. While the results are not yet clear, I hypothesize that affluent, educated Democrats more intensely favor liberal sociocultural policies (e.g., immigration reform, gun control) than do non-affluent Democrats, and affluent Democrats more intensely favor moderate economic reforms (e.g., slight minimum wage increases) over more significant reforms (e.g., large progressive tax increases, single-payer healthcare). These findings will carry important implications for preference measurement, the effects of sociocultural polarization, and the politics of redistribution in the Democratic Party.

Author

• Sam Zacher, Yale University