The President's Party Affiliation and Changes in Inequality
April 01, 2008 Will Wilkinson says he has questions about a result in Larry Bartels' new book concerning the relationship between changes in inequality and whether the president is Republican or Democrat: Unequal Democracy, by Will Wilkinson : I’m three pages into the first chapter of Larry Bartels’ forthcoming Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age and I have questions: My examination of the partisan politics of economic in equality, in chapter 2, reveals that Democratic and Republican presidents over the past half-century have presided over dramatically different patterns of income growth. On average, the real incomes of middle- class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans. These substantial partisan differences persist even after allowing for differences in economic circumstances and histor...