First, I’m talking about *bias* not absolute choices.
– There will always be other factors at play including, in your examples, the war and a natural preference to an incumbant during strong economic times.
– Also, selecting small sample sizes (7 elections) makes the influence of other factors more likely to muddy the biases.

Second, notice that you cited 2 REelections as violating the theme.
– As REelections, they are more likely to be influenced by incumbant related factors.
– Incidentally, they also won’t impact the trends generated from entrance to exit stats. In this case, the fact that a good economy keeping a democrat in office doesn’t necessarily violate the idea that people will flip parties when given a choice of candidates without any incumbant bias.

What say you?

Families – http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f04.html
Households – http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/h04.html

Some data points

Year Families Households
2007 0.432 0.463
2001 0.435 0.466
2000 0.433 0.462
1993 0.429 0.454
1992 0.404 0.433

So you can see from 1992 (last year of Bush Senior) to 2000 (last year of Clinton), family and household Gini’s rose. From 2000 to 2007 they have been flat. This appears to have been a consequence of a substantial decline for both family and household Gini’s in 2007.

Why the decline in 2007? I don’t know. However, the overall results don’t fit the easy narrative of rising inequality under Bush. Of course, there is other data to support the general thesis of rising inequality (or so I have read).

Yes, but the President chooses those who’ll head the go-vermin Agencies during his mandate. They are the ones making sure that the presidential agenda get done.

Plus, there is not data in Blinder’s study to support his main conclusion.

Now, it is known that “certain factions” in this country do not want equal opportunity for all. They’ve been actively working against the average American in order to accumulate more power, more wealth, and the ability to tap into a docile and unprotected workforce.

Now, does the majority of the electorate wants that? If so, please make room for China and Co. They’ll be more than eager to take our place as #1.

Nevertheless, I think his conclusions are correct primarily because, especially WRT to income disparities, that is the stated goal of the two parties. That is, democrats have always had the goal of reducing income disparities, and republicans have always had the goal of increasing it. Why is it surprising that they were successful at their stated goals?

Furthermore, for all those that believe this is just business cycles and nothing more, there is a logical conundrum based on which premise you start with:

1) Business cycles are not influenced at all by presidential policies. That would imply that business cycles have no reason to conform to 4 or 8 year cycles, and therefore, wouldn’t correlate exactly with presidents coming in and out of power. If they don’t occur with the same periodicity, then over time, both Dems and Repubs would equally experience all parts of the business cycle. Thus, if Dems turned in a higher growth rate despite being exposed equally to all parts of the business cycle (over the span of 50 years), then it speaks well to their capabilities.

2) OTOH, you may believe that business cycles occur in 4 or 8 year periods because they are influenced by Presidential policies (e.g. the usual presidential "goosing" of the economy before elections). In which case, again, the Dems seem to have an advantage since they do a better job with their cycles than the Republicans do.

Clayton-
I don't think it's that simple. Let's look at the record:
1980 -> lousy economy -> Reagan elected.
1996 -> great economy -> Clinton re-elected
2004 -> lousy economy -> Bush re-elected.

That means that 3 of the last 7 elections went opposite to your theory. In many elections, the economy may not be the most important issue (Nixon's impeachment weighing in Carter's election, 9/11 helping Bush get re-elected).

Furthermore, to the average voter, taxes are always too high, and govt programs are always not enough. It doesn't matter whether the economy is doing well or not. Who wins an election is usually based on which guy is able to lie to the public more convincingly when telling them that he will cut taxes and increase spending while lowering the deficit. Sometimes that's the republican, and sometimes that's the democrat. But they usually say the same thing, while trying to paint their opponent as doing the opposite (with the possible exception of Mondale who famously said he'd raise taxes, then went on to lose every state except MN and DC)

However, the Gini data shows that inequality has been flat under Bush after growing rapidly under Clinton.

Go to http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/histinctb.html if you want to check out the numbers.

This is probably the most ignorant and oft-cited fallacies of modern politics. The problem is not the statistics (which I have no doubt are absolutely accurate), but the difference between a correlation and a causal relationship.

As one anonymous poster already pointed out, this can be easily explained by a different causal relationship that arises in voting patterns.

– When the economy is good, people feel rich and vote for Republcians with low taxes and few government programs.
– When the economy is poor, people feel poor and vote for redistributive policies and proactive government support.

I think everyone will agree that this would tend to be the bias of voters. These two, simple facts explain the trends:

– On average, Republicans come into office during strong economies and leave during weak ones…
– On average, Democrats come into office during weak economies and leave during strong ones.

We need NO CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP between political parties and economic performance to produce this relationship. The selection of this fact ex-critical thinking is just the typical confirmation bias at work.