Are Democrats Really the Party of the Poor? Partisanship, Class, and Representation in the U.S. Senate

• Author: Elizabeth Rigby,Cory Maks-Solomon
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912919862623
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919862623

Political Research Quarterly

2020, Vol. 73(4) 848 –865

© 2019 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912919862623

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The conventional wisdom among political scientists and

journalists alike is that Democrats are the party of the

poor, and Republicans are the party of the rich. To be

sure, this conventional wisdom is motivated by party

platforms: Democrats typically support redistribution of

income while Republicans oppose such redistribution.

However, this conventional wisdom seems to be at odds

with Democrats’ efforts to push for liberal moral poli-

cies—such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage—

despite the fact that lower-class Americans are more

conservative on these issues (Ansolabehere, Rodden, and

Snyder 2006; Bartels 2009; Flavin 2012; Gilens, 2005,

2009). At least on social issues, the Democratic Party’s

platform seems to be more reflective of the preferences of

the rich than the poor.1

To reconcile the conventional wisdom with this real-

ity, we must carefully examine policy positions held by

different subgroups. Our analysis is motivated by the fol-

lowing questions: do rich Democrats share the same pol-

icy preferences as rich Republicans? On what issues do

they agree and on what issues do they differ? It is also

necessary to advance the extant literature by probing dif-

ferences in representational inequality between a sena-

tor’s geographic constituency and co-partisans in their

state. If we want to truly understand representational

inequality, then our analysis must reflect the fact that

senators represent those who put them in office; senators

do not typically make decisions in an effort to win over

strong partisans of the opposite party.

In this paper, we take on these questions and investi-

gate representational inequalities in the U.S. Senate by

political party. Using Cooperative Congressional Election

Study (CCES) survey data on Senate roll call votes from

2006 to 2014, we examine rich-poor differences in policy

preferences and representation. We find that, on eco-

nomic issues, the Republican rich are more conservative

than the Republican poor, and Republican senators over-

represent the preferences of the rich when compared with

the poor. Conversely, the Democratic rich and poor are

largely in agreement on economic issues, so there is little

room for the rich to be overrepresented vis-à-vis the poor.

However, on social issues, we see that the Republican

rich and poor are largely in agreement with one another,

yet the Democratic rich are more liberal than the poor,

and Democratic senators overrepresent the preferences of

rich co-partisans on these social issues.

Once we look within each party, we see that both

Democrats and Republicans consistently represent the

862623PRQXXX10.1177/1065912919862623Political Research QuarterlyMaks-Solomon and Rigby

research-article2019

1George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Cory Maks-Solomon, Department of Political Science, George

Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA.

Email: cmaks@gwu.edu

Are Democrats Really the Party of

the Poor? Partisanship, Class, and

Representation in the U.S. Senate

Cory Maks-Solomon1 and Elizabeth Rigby1

Abstract

Scholars have identified partisan differences in policy representation—with Republicans more often found to represent

the rich, while Democrats align with the preferences of less affluent voters. This paper explores these partisan

differences, questioning this simple conclusion on both theoretical and methodological grounds. Instead, we develop

and test a theory in which elected officials of both parties represent their co-partisans, who agree with one another

on many policy issues. Yet, on a subset of issues, upper class and lower class co-partisans have diverging policy

preferences: rich and poor Democrats disagree on social issues while rich and poor Republicans disagree on economic

issues. We analyze roll call voting in the U.S. Senate and find that, in these cases, senators of both parties better

represent the preferences held by affluent members of their party. Our findings underscore the value in examining the

content of policy debates and theorizing about different forms of representation.

Keywords

inequality, political parties, representation, Congress

Maks-Solomon and Rigby 849

rich better than the poor when rich and poor co-partisans

have diverging policy preferences. We are also able to

further extend our analysis to examine the specific votes

taken by Members of Congress. This issue-specific anal-

ysis allows us to compare the magnitude of preference

gaps and the level of representational inequality on the

same policy issue. This is an important extension to mod-

els often used in the literature, which rely on scaling tech-

niques that capture aggregate policy liberalism (such as

state parties’ electoral platforms examined by Rigby and

Wright [2013] and Wright and Rigby [forthcoming]).

Furthermore, we demonstrate a nearly one-to-one

relationship between the degree to which the rich dis-

agree with the poor and the degree to which the rich are

better represented than the poor. This analysis suggests

that senators of both parties are highly attuned to the pol-

icy preferences of the rich, and their roll call voting

behavior deliberately reflects the wishes of rich co-parti-

sans. In an era of polarized political parties, this means

that both parties are more extreme than they otherwise

would be if they weighted the policy preferences of the

poor equally with those of the rich: Republicans are more

conservative on economic issues and Democrats are more

liberal on social issues than they would be if they listened

to the poor as much as the rich.

An Often-Biased Political System

Recent empirical investigations have illustrated uneven

responsiveness of policymakers to citizens from different

income groups (Bartels 2009; Druckman and Jacobs

2011; Gilens 2005; Gilens and Page 2014; Jacobs and

Page 2005; Rigby and Wright 2011). Together, these

studies suggest that American democracy is falling far

short of its ideal of political equality due to policymakers’

heightened attention to more affluent constituents and

political elites at the expense of the poor. In a seminal

work—also examining the U.S. Senate—Bartels (2009)

found a strong relationship between the voting records of

U.S. senators and the ideology of their more affluent con-

stituents; this relationship was weaker for middle-income

constituents, and nearly nonexistent for opinions held by

the poorest groups. Later, Hayes (2013) examined this

question across multiple Congresses and also found con-

sistent overrepresentation of upper income constituents

relative to lower income ones in senators’ voting records.

Examining policy outcomes of the federal govern-

ment, Gilens (2009, 2012) finds that when the views of

low- or middle-income Americans diverge from those

held by the affluent, there is virtually no relationship

between the policy preferences held by those less advan-

taged and the rate or direction of policy change adopted at

the federal level. The rich are also overrepresented at the

state level (Flavin 2012), and biases in representation

may begin early on in the policy process, as candidates’

platforms are better reflective of the preferences of the

rich (Rigby and Wright 2013), and state legislators are

more likely to introduce bills that reflect the policy priori-

ties of the rich (Flavin and Franko 2017).

It is important to note that a necessary precondition of

the overrepresentation of the rich is divergent preferences

between the rich and poor. This point was made elo-

quently by Soroka and Wlezien (2008) after finding a

great deal of similarity in preferences for increasing or

decreasing spending across income groups in the General

Social Survey. Soroka and Wlezien concluded that this

congruence of average opinion across socioeconomic

groups places a “healthy limit” on the representational

inequality that can occur, as even if the poor are entirely

ignored by their elected officials, they will still get what

they want—to the degree that their preferences overlap

with groups that are better represented in the political sys-

tem. Enns (2015) points out that even when the rich and

poor disagree, the majority of the rich and majority of the

poor still both support (or oppose) the issue. Because of

this, the poor find themselves represented in American

public policy outputs even if politicians are not paying

active attention to their interests. On a wide range of

issues, Branham, Soroka, and Wlezien (2017) find that

across income groups, disagreement between income

groups in the public is rare; and they find that, because of

this, public policy is only slightly more conservative than

it would be if politicians listened to the median as much

as they listen to the rich. Likewise, Tausanovitch (2016)

finds that the rich are better represented than the poor in

Congress, but only to a small degree.

Because the degree to which scholars find representa-

tional inequality depends upon where one looks, paying

attention to the issues included in a study of representa-

tion is vital. On some issues, representational inequality

exists—the rich and poor disagree, and the rich are repre-

sented much better than the poor. Yet, on many other

issues, representational inequality is negligible, which

may reflect the reality that, on those issues, the rich and

poor are mostly in agreement with one another.

Partisan Differences in Unequal

Representation

A number of studies have identified greater differential

responsiveness from Republican parties, Republican pol-

icymakers, and Republican-controlled government. For

example, Bartels (2009) found differential responsive-

ness for both parties; yet, the greatest skew was among

Republican senators. Gilens (2012) similarly found that

income-based biases in representation were greatest

under Republican control of the federal government when

the preferences of the rich and poor diverge, although