Salle 3001

Nicolas LONGUET-MARX (Columbia University) “Party Lines or Voter Preferences? Explaining Political Realignment”

Abstract: This paper estimates a political equilibrium model to disentangle demand factors (voters) from supply factors (politicians) in shaping political outcomes, focusing on the recent realignment of blue-collar voters away from left-wing parties. I jointly evaluate the impact of changes in voter preferences and voter demographics (demand side) and party positions and party discipline (supply side) on voters’ partisan realignment in U.S. House elections between 2000 and 2020. To measure candidate ideological positioning, I estimate a multimodal text-and-survey model from campaign websites. To estimate voter preferences, I build a new panel of precinct-level election results (N=1.3 million), which allows me to exploit congressional districts’ border discontinuities for identification. The paper  ultimately identifies parties’ stronger polarization on cultural issues compared to economic issues as the main driver of voters’ partisan realignment. In contrast, shifts in voter preferences—particularly the increasing preferences of blue-collar voters for progressive economic policies—have mitigated their defection from the Democratic Party. Absent these demand-side changes, voters’ partisan realignment would have been even more pronounced. Within specific policy domains, the environment emerges as the topic where parties diverge most in economic versus cultural emphasis: Democrats frame it culturally, while Republicans focus on economic aspects. Simulations reveal that a progressive, economically focused environmental policy would gain greater blue-collar voter support than a culturally focused one.

Joint work : Giovanni Paolo Mariani (Université Libre de Bruxelles and ECARES), Clémence Tricaud (UCLA Anderson School of Management)

Organizer : Pierre BOYERhttps: