Larry Bartels

Larry M. Bartels is an American political scientists, currently serving as Donald E. Stokes Professor of public policy and internation relations at Princeton University and director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received his BA in political science at Yale in 1978, his M.A. in political science, also from Yale in 1978, and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkley in 1983. He has published three books, "Unequal democracy: the political economy of the new gilded age" (Princeton, 2008), "Campaign reform: Insights and evidence", edited with Lynn Vavreck (University of Michigan Press, 2000), and "Presidential primaries and the dynamics of public choice" (Princeton, 1988). According to his official biography,

His first book, Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice (Princeton University Press, 1988), received the American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the year's best book on government, politics, or international affairs. He has also received the APSA's Franklin L. Burdette and E. E. Schattschneider Awards and the Best Paper Award from the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior Section (three times), as well as major grants and fellowships from the Carnegie Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995.

He is well-known for his rebuttal to Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?", entitled "What's the matter with What's the matter with Kansas" published in the Journal of Political Science in 2006. While Frank asserts that the conservative Republican party has been able to lure working class voters away from the liberal Democratic Party, which better represents their economic interests, with value issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, Bartels points out that the working class, despite being socially more conservative, is still overwhelmingly Democratic - more so than in the past.Krugman, P. (2007). "The conscience of a liberal". New York: W. W. Norton.] In his empirical analysis Bartels finds that both, college graduates and working class people are mostly democratic (the former having become more Democratic over the past years). He attributes the gain made by Republicans to the loss of the solid South, with middle and high income whites from Southern states, standing out as having become more Republican.Bartels, L. M. (2008). "Unequal democracy: The political economy of the new gilded age". Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.]

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