Height, Income and Voting

At the core of political economy theory is the claim that income drives political preferences, yet empirical estimates of income’s effect on political behavior range widely. Drawing from a tradition in economic history and anthropology, we propose the use of height as a proxy for economic well-being. Using data from the British Household Panel Study, we find that taller individuals are more likely to support the Conservative party, support conservative policies, and vote conservative; a one-inch increase in height increases support for Conservatives by 0.6%. As an extension, we employ height as an instrumental variable for income, and find that each additional thousand pounds of annual income translates to a two to three percentage point increase in probability of supporting the Conservatives, and that income also drives political beliefs and voting in the same direction. We thank Larry Bartels, David Lam, Philipp Rehm, Dean Yang, the Editor and three anonymous referees for helpful comments. The data used in this paper are available to eligible researchers through application to the UK Data Archive; all tables and figures can be replicated using Stata do-files provided at the BJPS’s Dataverse site: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS. †Department of Economics, University of Michigan and Bates White, LLC (email [email protected]). ‡Corresponding author: Department of Political Science, The Ohio State University, 2140 Derby Hall, 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus OH 43210-1393 (email [email protected]). At the core of modern political economy theory is the idea that income drives political preferences. Since Downs’ (1957) seminal contribution, the workhorse models of redistributive politics characterize individuals by income to generate key predictions;1 other factors such as ideology or multi-dimensional preferences are then introduced to complicate this basic framework.2 Indeed, the starting point for micro-founded models of all manner of political economy phenomena— including growth, redistribution, and transitions to democracy—is to write a utility function in which agents are differentiated by income. Other literatures, such as class-based interpretations of citizen activism and welfare state expansion, also explicitly or implicitly assume that income plays a key role in driving political behavior.3 Surprisingly, despite its centrality to foundational research agendas in economics, political science, and sociology, we lack clear evidence of income’s effect on political preferences. The range of empirical findings ranges widely; some studies report that income strongly predicts conservative political preferences, while others find small or even negative effects. In the American context, several analyses report relatively small differences between the poor and wealthy with respect to public policy preferences and political party supported.4 Other studies find substantial and increasingly strong income effects, arguing that income predicts Republican partisanship and presidential voting since the 1950s,5 and that support for increased spending on redistributive and welfare state policies declines markedly with income.6 Outside the United States, the evidence is similarly mixed. Single country studies often find that voters’ evaluations of their own personal economic situation are a relatively unimportant determinant of vote choice; cross-country analyses also report weak or even negative effects of income 1Romer 1975; Roberts 1977; Meltzer and Richard 1981. 2Lindbeck and Weibull 1987; Dixit and Londregan 1996. 3Manza and Brooks 1999; Korpi 1983. 4Glaeser, Ponzetto and Shapiro 2005; Ansolabehere, Rodden and Snyder 2006; Glaeser and Ward 2006; Soroka and Wlezein 2008; Ura and Ellis 2008; Bhatti and Erikson 2011; Brunner, Ross and Washington 2013; Rhodes and Schaffner 2013. 5Brooks and Brady 1999; McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal 2003; Stonecash 2006; Bartels 2006; Gelman et al. 2007, 2008; Rehm 2011. 6Alesina and La Ferrara 2005; Gilens 2009; Page and Hennessy 2010; Gelman, Lee and Ghitza 2010; Alesina and Giuliano 2011.