Dissecting Racial Politicization: Long-Run Evidence from the Food Stamp Program

Abstract

Many public policies -- such as those on immigration, welfare, and policing -- consistently attract partisan political attention, often with a racial dimension. How a public policy becomes politicized along racial lines is the focus of this paper. We develop a framework in which political parties gain electoral advantage by framing policy in political terms. This shows that an ex-ante group-neutral policy can generate political polarization across different voter groups (e.g., by race), that polarization is larger for cohorts learning about the policy at its onset, and that polarization persists over time.  We apply this framework to study the politicization of the Food Stamp program. Using voter roll data for the entire U.S., we show empirically that the introduction of the program increased political polarization across racial groups, that this racial polarization was larger for voters that experienced the FS rollout at its onset, and that this polarization persists today, about a half-century later. More specifically, we show that individuals of voting age at the time of the program's rollout (1961--1975) diverge along racial lines in their likelihood of voting and registering as Republicans or Democrats, with this divergence present but decreasing among younger cohorts. Our design ensures that these findings are not driven by geographic or age-specific racial trends.  We also explore contemporaneous effects and additional contributing factors. First, we show that access to the safety net also had short-run effects on voters' beliefs and turnout, as well as on the ideological composition of Congress. Second, we explore the interaction between Food Stamps and contemporaneous events such as the Voting Rights Act and recessions.

Keywords: Safety Net, Electoral Politics, Political Polarization, Racial Polarization

JEL Classification: D72, P46, J15