"Compensate the Losers?" Economic Policy and the Origins of U.S. Partisan Realignment

Research Question. Why have less-educated voters in the United States abandoned the Democratic Party over recent decades? The paper argues that the Democratic Party’s evolution on economic policy — specifically its retreat from “predistribution” — is a central, previously understudied driver of partisan realignment by education.

Conceptual Framework. The authors distinguish between two categories of egalitarian economic policy: (1) predistribution — policies that alter the pre-tax-and-transfer earnings distribution, including job guarantees, minimum wage increases, union support, and protectionist trade policies (following Hacker 2011); and (2) redistribution — taxes and transfers. The paper’s central claim is that these two types of policy have sharply different educational gradients among voters, and that the Democratic Party moved away from predistribution beginning in the 1970s, triggering educational realignment.

Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice

This paper quantifies the effect of the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges — an intensive two-week economics training program run by the Law and Economics Center from 1976 to 1998 — on the decision-making of U.S. federal judges. The research question is whether exposure to a coherent set of economic ideas can directly shift the policy decisions of sitting policymakers, as distinct from effects operating through partisan affiliation or formal legal rules.

Suresh Naidu | Macro Paper Warehouse

"Compensate the Losers?" Economic Policy and the Origins of U.S. Partisan Realignment

Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice