TY  - JOUR
AU  - Kantor, Shawn
AU  - Fishback, Price V
AU  - Wallis, John Joseph
TI  - Did the New Deal Solidify the 1932 Democratic Realignment?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18500
PY  - 2012
Y2  - November 2012
DO  - 10.3386/w18500
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18500
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18500.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Shawn E. Kantor
Department of Economics
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306
Tel: 850-644-1650
E-Mail: skantor@fsu.edu

Price V. Fishback
Department of Economics
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ  85721
Tel: 520/621-4421
Fax: 520/621-8450
E-Mail: pfishback@eller.arizona.edu

John Joseph Wallis
Department of Economics
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Tel: 301/405-3552
Fax: 301/405-3542
E-Mail: wallis@econ.umd.edu
M1  - published as Shawn Kantor, Price V. Fishback, John J. Wallis. "Did the New Deal Solidify the 1932 Democratic Realignment?," in Price Fishback, organizer, "The Microeconomics of New Deal Policy" Elsevier, Explorations in Economic History, 50(4) (2013)

AB  - The critical election of 1932 represented a turning point in the future electoral successes of the Democrats and Republicans for over three decades.  This paper seeks to measure the importance of the New Deal in facilitating the Democrats' control of the federal government well into the 1960s. We test whether long-differences in the county-level electoral support for Democratic presidential candidates after the 1930s can be attributed to New Deal interventions into local economies. We also investigate more narrowly whether voters rewarded Roosevelt from 1932 to 1936 and from 1936 to 1940 for his efforts to stimulate depressed local economies.  Our instrumental variables estimates indicate that increasing a county's per capita New Deal relief and public works spending from nothing to the sample mean ($277) would have increased the long-run support for the Democratic party by 10 percentage points.  We further find that the long-run shift toward the Democratic party after 1928 was not a function of the Roosevelt landslide victory in 1932.  Roosevelt's ability to win over voters during the 1936 and 1940 elections, however, did matter for the long-term.
ER  -