Both Black and White voter turnout increases 2–3 percentage points with each Black Democrat on the ballot. Given the groups' representations in the population, the White response is numerically greater. Whites of both parties are less likely to vote for their parties' candidate when s/he is Black. The turnout findings are not explained away by voter, election, or politician characteristics. However, the fact that there is no turnout response to Black Republicans suggests that a perception of Blacks' ideology may be a factor.

Economists have long concerned themselves with environmental influences, such as neighborhood, peers and family on individuals' beliefs and behaviors. However, the impact of children on parents' behavior has been little studied. Parenting daughters, psychologists have shown, increases feminist sympathies. I test the hypothesis that children, much like neighbors or peers, can influence adult behavior. I demonstrate that the propensity to vote liberally on reproductive rights is significantly increasing in a congress person's proportion of daughters. The result demonstrates not only the relevance of child to parent behavioral influence, but also the importance of personal ideology in a legislator's voting decisions as it is not explained away by voter preferences.

A long-standing debate in political economy is whether voters are driven primarily by economic self-interest or by less pecuniary motives like ethnocentrism. Using newly available data, we reexamine one of the largest partisan shifts in a modern democracy: Southern whites' exodus from the Democratic Party. We show that defection among racially conservative whites explains the entire decline from 1958 to 1980. Racial attitudes also predict whites' earlier partisan shifts. Relative to recent work, we find a much larger role for racial views and essentially no role for income growth or (non-race-related) policy preferences in explaining why Democrats “lost” the South.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, called one of the most effective pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history, generated dramatic increases in black voter registration across the South. We ask whether the increase in black voting rights was accompanied by an increase in blacks’ share of public spending. We exploit a key provision of the act—removal of literacy tests at registration—for identification. Employing a triple-difference framework over a 20-year period, we find that counties with higher black population shares in former literacy test states saw greater increases in both voter turnout and state transfers than comparison counties in non–literacy test states, a finding that is consistent with models of distributive politics.

Why have white, less-educated voters left the Democratic Party? We highlight the role of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In event-study analysis, we demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries vulnerable to NAFTA suffered large and persistent employment losses after its implementation. Voters in these counties (and protectionist voters regardless of geography) turned away from the party of President Clinton, who promoted the agreement. This shift is larger for whites (especially men and those without a college degree) and social conservatives, suggesting that racial identity and social-issue positions mediate reactions to economic policies.

Using California ballot proposition returns and exogenous shifts to labor demand, we provide the first large-scale causal evidence of the impact of economic conditions on policy preferences. Consistent with economic theory, we find that positive economic shocks decrease support for redistributive policies. More notably, we find evidence of a need for cognitive consistency in voting behavior as economic shocks have a smaller significant impact on voting on noneconomic ballot issues. While we also demonstrate that positive shocks decrease turnout, we present evidence that our results reflect changes in the electorate's preferences and not simply to its composition.