Replication Data for: Divided by Income? Policy Preferences of the Rich and Poor within the Democratic and Republican Parties

Research consistently demonstrates that differences between the policy preferences of high- and low-income individuals are surprisingly small, at least at the aggregate level. We depart from this work by considering the size of income-based differences in opinion within political parties. To do so, we use responses to 144 policy-specific questions in the 2010-2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES). Our effort demonstrates that differences in opinion among the rich and poor tend to be larger within the parties than in the overall population. Interestingly, these gaps are largest among Democrats. We find that these larger gaps persist even after accounting for the party's racial and ethnic diversity. Furthermore, among Democrats, class-based gaps in opinion are larger than the gaps we observe among other potential intraparty cleavages, such as age, gender, and religiosity. Our results suggest important implications for the growing literature on representational inequality.诸多研究均一致表明，至少在总体层面上，高收入与低收入个体在政策偏好上的差异竟出人意料地微小。本研究跳出此类既有研究的框架，聚焦于各政党内部基于收入差异的观点分歧程度。为此，我们采用了2010-2020年合作选举研究（Cooperative Election Study，简称CES）中针对144个具体政策问题的受访者答复数据。本研究结果显示，相较于整体人群，各政党内部贫富群体间的观点分歧往往更大。值得注意的是，此类分歧在民主党内部最为显著。我们发现，即便在控制了民主党自身的种族与族裔多样性因素后，这类更大的分歧依然存在。此外，在民主党内部，基于阶级的观点分歧要大于我们在其他潜在政党内部裂痕（如年龄、性别与宗教虔诚度）中观察到的分歧。本研究结果对于日益壮大的代表性不平等相关研究领域具有重要启示意义。