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Title: Cross-Cutting Cleavages and Government Spending

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2007

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Abstract: When racial groups di ffer in terms of their political sensitivity-the propensity of group members to change their vote based on changes in redistribution promised by acandidate-the racial composition of a political jurisdiction a ects redistributive policy even when preferences are correlated only with income. Furthermore, the extent to which race and class are cross-cutting is important. Although the concept of cross-cutting cleavages is well-known in political science and sociology, its implications have yet to be analyzed formally. This paper formally defi nes, develops and tests a model of cross-cutting cleavages to better understand the complex relationships between race, class, preferences, political sensitivity and redistributive policy. I show that the effect of cross-cutting cleavages on redistributive policy depends critically on economic parity-the ratio of average black income to average income. The cross-cutting cleavages model makes six predictions that are all supported by data from large U.S. cities between 1942 and 1972.

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Authors: Snowberg, Erik

Publisher: Stanford University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Other

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