@article{THESIS,
      recid = {3384},
      author = {Cooley, Richard Scott},
      title = {Inequality, Party Platforms, and Representation},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {89},
      abstract = {Is the U.S. political system necessarily “rigged” in favor  of the affluent? There is no shortage of people, both  inside and outside of political science, who believe so.  Using an underexploited resource, party platforms, I  contend that the Democratic Party generally offers better  representation than Republicans to the non-affluent and  groups such as trade unions—but not in issue domains  outside of economics. Meanwhile, the Republican Party  generally best represents the affluent—but not for areas  such as social issues, where the party’s official stances  are more in line with the preferences of lower-income  Americans. I therefore argue for a more-nuanced view of  inequality and representation, one that focuses not just on  structural factors but on issue types and the contributions  of each major political party.The first essay focuses on  U.S. national party platforms, the importance of which many  professional politicians and political scientists have  disputed. Politicians regularly claim that American party  platforms are irrelevant documents that virtually no one  reads, while some political scientists contend that they  may be nothing more than “cheap talk.” Using data for more  than 2,500 proposed federal policy changes and the  positions of party platforms on those proposed changes, I  find that both major parties’ platforms are positively  associated with the actions they will take in the future.  As a result, I argue that party platforms are an underused  data source for studying both party coalition-building and  topics such as inequality and representation. Based on  interviews with officials involved in the platform-drafting  process, I further argue that platforms represent a key  means of solving coordination problems among key  interest-group stakeholders.
The second contribution  focuses on inequality and representation during the Obama  Administration. Using a new dataset of public opinion data  and federal policy outcomes during the Obama  Administration, I find that federal policy changes during  the Obama years more closely reflect the preferences of  lower- and middle-income Americans, rather than the  preferred policies of the affluent. I find the association  between lower-income Americans’ preferences and policy  outcomes to be strongest for domestic economic issues,  which account for about 70 percent of the issues in the  dataset. These findings complicate the narrative that  structural factors in the American political system  necessarily lead to economic policy outcomes that favor the  affluent.
The third part of the dissertation focuses on the  extent to which the two major American political parties  contribute to unequal representation. Using an  underutilized data source, party platforms, I find that the  Democratic platforms tend to be consistent with the  preferences of lower-income Americans and mass economic  organizations such as trade unions, whereas Republican  platforms generally favor the preferences of the affluent,  and business and socially conservative interest groups. I  further find that, even conditioned on public opinion and  interest group preferences, party platforms have a  statistically significant association with federal policy  outcomes. These results suggest that increasing Democratic  control of the federal government should be associated with  policy federal outputs that favor the non-affluent and mass  economic organizations. However, the strength of this  relationship differs by issue domain. For economic issues,  the non-affluent may receive better representation than  previous research suggests: over a more than thirty-year  period, I find that lower-income Americans achieve their  desired policy outcomes on economic issues just as  frequently as the well-to-do. However, the preferences of  the affluent are strongly associated with policymaking for  foreign policy and social issues, with the latter area  showing that Democratic platform positions are more closely  associated with the preferences of the affluent than of  lower- and middle-class Americans.
},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3384},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3384},
}