A reader sent me a link to this chart/blog post from/about Larry Bartels’ new book. The gist of it, according to Dani Rodrik:

What it shows is the difference that the President’s party affiliation makes to the distribution of income during the four years of the president’s term. (The distributional outcomes are shown with one year’s lag.) When a Republican president is in power, people at the top of the income distribution experience much larger real income gains than those at the bottom–a difference of 1.5 percent per year going from the bottom to the top quintile in the income distribution. The situation is reversed when a Democrat is in power: those who benefit the most are the lower income groups. If you are in the bottom quintile, the difference between having a Democratic or a Republican president in office is an income gain (or loss) of more than 2 percent per year! Strikingly, compared to Republicans, Democratic presidents generate higher income gains for all income groups (although the difference is statistically significant only for lower income groups). Bartels shows in his book that this difference is not a statistical artifact or a fluke. It is not the result of Democrats coming to power during better economic times, or of Republicans reining in the unsustainable excesses of Democratic administrations they replace. (It turns out that the same pattern prevails even when a Republican president is succeeded by another Republican.) These numbers are real and they are the outcome of partisan differences in policy. So if you are one of those who have bought the story that income distribution is the result of pure market forces and technological changes, with politics playing no role–think again.

Me: Obviously, I am not an economist, and Bartels may indeed have done all of his homework here. But I’m very skeptical. Presidents have influence over economic trends, of course, but it’s usually (but not always) diffuse, sporadic, unintentional, reactive or short-lived. This is particularly true in the areas where presidents can act alone. Congress, recall, legislates. And countless government-economic actors exert their influence outside of the direct control of Congress or the President. Given the massive impacts that globalization, technological innovation, demographics and the like have on these sorts of trends, I would be much more inclined to believe that to the extent there’s a strong correlation between presidents and income the causality goes the other way: We elect certain kinds of president because of the economy as opposed to we have certain kinds of economies because of presidents.

Again, I haven’t read the book and this is somewhat above my pay grade, but I bet Bartels’ data, assumptions and conclusions will come in for some serious scrutiny.