Michael asks:
Public choice theory suggests that people vote with their pocketbooks.
How would they explain that more educated people have more liberal
voting preferences?
I hate to rise to the defense of public choice theory. However don't you
find that in Europe (and to some degree Japan) there is (was?) a wider
range of choice and that the pattern is a bit clearer? As a mass
phenomena, urban educated middle class people have tended to range as far
left as the Socialist Party (or in Britain the Liberals and New Labour) -
but no further. In short the center-left.
Slightly less educated middle class people, often more provincial, voted
center-right.
The center-left middle class group has often been employed in fields like
education and health that relied heavily on public sector support or lived
in urban areas that required heavy public investment and guidance. The
center-right middle class group worked in fields like supervisors or middle
managers in the private sector, often living in less urban areas.
Then of course there was that small phenomena (so loved by penl-ers): the
alienated intellectual, often propelled by social exclusion or a
radicalizing experience in their youth.
I suppose in the US the patterns become harder to sort out in a linear
manner. Is this in part the 2 party system which leaves people with only a
binary and not a continuum of choices? Isn't one also struck by the
historical role that plantation slavery/racism continues to play in in
distorting the income/politics correlation? I am always amazed when I
think about what American history would be like (going back to the
Mexican-American War!) if poor Southern whites had sided with their
economic interests. Of course in Europe the race phenomena now starts to
resemble the US and there are great efforts to impose a binary system
centered using the votes of the middle class as the fulcrum. Japan has
resisted the neo-liberal solution for an extraordinary decade and a half of
stagnation, maybe in part because of the social solidarity in a society
lacking that wedge issue.
Paul
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