In a famous 2002 article in the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, Harvard scholars Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer named the so-called “Curley Effect” after its prototype, James Michael Curley, who served four (non-consecutive) terms as mayor of Boston between 1914 and 1950. This phenomenon, the authors explain, is the strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.” Forbes magazine puts it this way: “A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic growth. Counterintuitively, making a city poorer leads to political success for the engineers of that impoverishment.”
The cliche I often hear is that the Democrat party is for the poor, and the Republican party is for the rich.
My answer to that has always been that if this is true, and if it also true that the party with the most votes wins an election, then the Democrat party has a vested interest in creating more poor people, where as the Republican party has a vested interest in creating more rich people.
I had never heard of the Curley Effect, but it seems to mirror my line of reasoning. It’s nice to have a reference to fall back on.