Thomas Ferguson is a professor of politics and economics at University of Massachusetts at Boston. The author of the “Investment Theory of Party Competition,” he believes that business elites, not voters, are the dominant force in political systems. Together with Joi Chen, he has released an analysis of the Brown/Coakley election, and concludes that the Brown vote correlates strongly with the decline in housing values (PDF):
Our findings about the fall in housing prices point to something much deeper – something that more jobs by themselves are unlikely to fix, though they might dampen it. Our statistical tests indicate that declines in housing values operated independently to depress the Democratic vote share.
We think it is unlikely that the housing variable is merely a proxy for some other unmeasured factor, such as income. Instead, we suspect that our result drives to the heart of the “Tea Party” phenomenon. Put simply, our data are consistent with the notion that a good part of the swing toward Scott Brown came from voters who were not only frightened by high unemployment – their own, or their neighbors’ – but who also suffered large losses in wealth from the collapse of the housing bubble. For most Americans, their greatest economic asset is their house. We thus suspect that the housing collapse is also likely associated with major declines, or potential declines, in retirement incomes. Particularly for older voters, this has to be very alarming.
They conclude that this discontent among older voters has largely taken a right-wing frame because of the impoverished nature of the economic conversation in the media:
At a time when real disposable per capita income minus government transfer payments (or “take home pay minus government assistance”) has sunk to its lowest levels since the giant recession of the early 1970s, most major television and radio networks continue to trumpet both efficient markets and the imagined evils of Keynesian, countercyclical programs. With only modest exceptions, so does the money-driven world of think tanks, the rest of the press, and the government itself.
We are thus driven to conclude that the sometimes wild assertions and arguments advanced by Tea Partiers largely reflect the poverty of economic and political analysis in the establishment media. Indeed, the U.S. case bears an unsettling similarity to the situation in many parts of the parts of the Middle East. Political establishments and governments refuse to countenance critical discussion of social and economic problems. They marginalize alternative views, while beating the drums unceasingly for orthodoxy. When a crisis hits, however, no one believes them. So disaffected citizens set to work with the only tools they have – bits and snatches of traditional economic and political thinking – to analyze their predicament on their own. It should not be surprising that such efforts often end up being hard to tell apart from Alice in Wonderland or even Goya’s Black Paintings.
I’ve put the blame on the “veal pen” in the past, who largely abandoned their Wall Street critiques when the bankers told Obama they didn’t want their bonuses criticized any more. Without the normal liberal validators driving the economic argument from the left, the media is left with little to cover and the danger has always been that all of that discontent would accrue to the right — which is exactly what happened. But credit where credit is due, Fox’s constant “Obama is a socialist” drumbeat has played a huge part in the ridiculously inadequate economic conversation that has driven pissed off old people with declining mortgage values to the right. ...
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