During the Fordist era, politics broke down clearly by income and occupation – that is along class lines. Blue-collar working class people voted Democrat, or in other other countries Labor or Socialist or even Communist. But these voting patterns and political blocs have shifted over the past two or three decades with the rise of the creative economy, increased occupational differentiation and what Ronald Inglehart dubs the rise of post-materialist political values. Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman has been at the forefront of tracking the political implications of income and occupation.
Here are some recent graphs on income by state, Gelman writes:
The patterns are pretty striking: the high end has increased pretty consistently
in almost all the states, and the low end increased a lot in poor states,
especially for the first half of the series. … All states have been getting richer over the decades (as measured by average real incomes). Up until about 1980, income inequality between states decreased, then since then it’s increased slightly.
Gelman and Yu-Hsieh are using data from the National Election Studies to examine the relationship between occupation and voting. Have a look at the fascinating graphs, here. Within each occupational class they’re plotting Republican presidential vote (relative to the national mean each year). And they are finding some striking patterns with professionals (doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc) going to the Democrats and
business owners going to the Republicans.
It is pretty clear to me that a key way to understand the politics of the creative economy is to understand the role of occupations. More from this fascinating line of research as it develops.
