Cross-Cutting Cleavages and Government Spending∗

When racial groups differ in terms of their political sensitivity—the propensity of group members to change their vote based on changes in redistribution promised by a candidate—the racial composition of a political jurisdiction affects redistributive policy even when preferences are correlated only with income. Furthermore, the extent to which race and class are cross-cutting is important. Although the concept of crosscutting cleavages is well-known in political science and sociology, its implications have yet to be analyzed formally. This paper formally defines, develops and tests a model of cross-cutting cleavages to better understand the complex relationships between race, class, preferences, political sensitivity and redistributive policy. I show that the effect of cross-cutting cleavages on redistributive policy depends critically on economic parity—the ratio of average black income to average income. The cross-cutting cleavages model makes six predictions that are all supported by data from large U.S. cities between 1942 and 1972. ∗I thank Keith Krehbiel, David Baron, Gerard Padró-i-Miquel and Romain Wacziarg for their support and insightful comments. This work was supported in part by the SIEPR Dissertation Fellowship through a grant to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.