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Title: Long-Term Causes of Partisanship: Evidence from Linked Census and Voterfile Data
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2018
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Abstract: The central role of partisanship in shaping political behavior and attitudes is wellestablished in research on political behavior in the United States. Partisan identification is highly stable, even in the face of changes to context and individual traits, after adolescence. But what shapes partisanship before it becomes stable? Can early life experiences produce enduring political affiliations? We examine the long-term determinants of partisan identification through an unprecedented individual-level dataset that links contemporary voterfiles to the 1940 U.S. Census. Linking these two datasets allows for novel analysis of the connection between early life experiences and presentday political behavior, providing new insights on classic questions about the nature of early-life socialization and partisanship. We investigate the effect of childhood exposure to people of different races and incomes, exploiting the ordering of households on the 1940 U.S. Census enumeration sheets to construct individual-level measures of racial and inequality exposure. We find that, among whites, early-life exposure to Black neighbors predicts Democratic partisanship over 70 years later. On the other hand, early life exposure to inequality, in the form of a neighbor of a greatly different income, has no long-term effect on partisanship. We discuss the implications of these findings and potential for the broader research paradigm to yield additional insights.
Url: https://jamesfeigenbaum.github.io/research/pdf/BrownEnosFeigenbaumMazumder.pdf
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Authors: Brown, Jacob, R; Enos, Ryan, D; Feigenbaum, James; Mazumder, Soumyajit
Publisher: Harvard University
Data Collections: IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data
Topics: Housing and Segregation, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other, Race and Ethnicity
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