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

Authors:

Carlos F. Avenancio-León, University of California San Diego
Troup Howard, University Of Utah
William Mullins, University of California San Diego

Abstract:

We explore long-run racial polarization induced by the original Food Stamps Program: a major policy choice to expand the social safety net in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Combining the county-level rollout with an experience-exposure DiD design, we use voter microdata for 175M Americans as of 2020 to compare lifetime voting patterns between those who experienced this expansion of the safety net as adults and those who came of age in a world where Food Stamps was an established feature of the redistributive landscape. Exposure to Food Stamps rollout generates racial political polarization that persists fifty years later: White voters who experienced rollout are more likely to register and vote as Republicans, and treated Black voters are more likely to register and vote as Democrats. These effects are not driven by age, historical experiences, life cycle factors, or changing racial attitudes over the 20th century. We link these findings to a model of partisan competition which illustrates why parties may seek advantage by deliberately politicizing voter perceptions of public policies. Using congressional speeches, survey data, and voting outcomes from the rollout period, we show that short-run evidence is consistent with polarization unfolding as suggested by our model. Our results suggest that today’s politicization of public policies can be highly consequential tomorrow: in this setting, we find electoral impacts persisting for at least a half-century.