The title here is also the title of a Slate article from 2014. The article links to a study published by the American Political Science Association's journal, Perspectives on Politics. The author rightly notes that there's a considerable amount of uncertainty involved given the way politics interacts with the economy. But the study appears to show that minorities do indeed "do better under Democrats," based on which party is in the White House and shifting by a year or two into each administration to determine the "starting point" for when the administration's policies began to have major impact. Visuals help me quite a bit, and they may help you, as well.
Some things I notice about this: A *lot* of percentage growth in black median family income occurs under "JFK/Johnson." Now, one thing JFK did that present-day Democrats wouldn't do is cut income taxes from a top marginal rate of 91 percent to 70 percent. (That would be a more than tripling of the after-tax return on marginal income.) Just as the numbers boom, right around the same time, there was also passage of Civil Rights legislation (opposed by southern Democrats, as it happens). Then, right around the time both these things were happening, the Moynihan Report (discussed at the Salon link above) pointed to what appeared to be disturbing trends in the black community as they relate to family structures. Since that time the family structures among all demographics in America showed a trend toward more single-parent families. This is believed by many social researchers to contribute to criminality and inter-generational poverty. Combine this with policies supported on both sides of the aisle aimed at getting "tough on crime," including the failed Drug War with all its well-known disparate impacts on minorities.
(As far as toughness on crime goes, national murder rates peaked in the early '90s. Prison populations have swelled since then; can that be interpreted as tough-on-crime policies working, or massively unjust criminal-justice policies that victimize the incarcerated even as crime rates fall? How do we go about interpreting that sort of thing?)
So that's a lot to put into the mixer as we try to figure out which administrations had which effects at which periods of time. The economic situation from roughly 1969 to roughly 1983 appeared to have especially ravaging effects on the economic well-being of black people. During that period there were both Democratic and Republican administrations, while Democrats controlled Congress. (Well, the GOP controlled the Senate for a short period of time in the '80s.)
During all that time, all over the country, Democrats have usually been running the big-city political machinery. They've been more or less running the schooling system. (I hesitate to call it an education system. You have to qualify things and address complexities to separate the educational aspects from the non-educational ones. You have to note the irony of a dialectically-impoverished 'democratic socialist' with a BA in Econ from Boston U. saying in the latest episode of '60 Minutes' that the USA pays more for healthcare and education than anyone else while seeing middling results.) It is decidedly non-conservative cultural movements that legitimized promiscuous sex and single-parenting.
We could also think this thing through from the standpoint of economic-theoretical understanding (which helps to make sense of the data). What is it about Democratic economic policies, as they contrast with Republican ones, which would leave one to believe that one is more likely to improve the situation of minorities than the other? But we should also apply the standpoint of cultural-theoretical understanding: do the sorts of norms associated with Democrats (e.g., their supposedly superior but limited moral compass) tend to improve people's circumstances, economically or otherwise?
Social science is ripe for partisan exploitation. So we'd better be careful in assessing the social-scientific evidence if we don't want to be one of those exploiters. (And how exactly should social science inform our values, anyway? Does it tell us whether individuals' lives are exclusively their own to dispose of, or can agents of the state or demos rightly dispose of them if 'social science tells them to'?) How careful would you say today's partisans are? Do you find the study to be as persuasive in its findings as the Slate author does?
[Addendum: More things to throw into the mix: (1) The Volcker Fed's monetary tightening which was the primary cause of the deep 1981-82 recession occurred during both Carter and Reagan administrations, making the negative numbers for either president's tenure in this case pretty irrelevant from a policy standpoint; monetary policy was the dominant factor here. Things like the negative consequences of Carter- and Democrat-supported windfall profits taxes, causing long lines at gas stations for instance, didn't help matters. Reagan's 1981 tax cuts did help matters considerably as much research has shown, starting with, say, Lindsey. (google it ffs) (2) Among confounding effects to avoid as we seek to establish proper controls/variables: the more relevant number here would be economic improvement for blacks relative to whites under Democratic vs. Republican administrations, as that would tell you whether there are different impacts on otherwise comparable economic groups under different administrations. Getting clear on "economic groups" would mean distinguishing between whites taken as a whole vs. blacks taken as a whole, and whites compared to economically-comparable blacks (this being relevant since blacks taken as a whole are less well off than whites, and so Democratic policies may be titled toward benefiting the poor relative to the rich, which might well be the real signal involved? From (2) we get: (3) It makes better sense to view this from the perspective of Democrats posing as defenders of 'underdogs' and the downtrodden and so on, and they seem more concerned about doing more to correct what they see as a historical injustice that hasn't been corrected enough yet. (If they want to take a look at the whole picture, the Dems should also take into account the possibility of their own policy and cultural failures in failing to advance the overall position of minorities in the last half century as much as they had hoped; the remaining shortcomings they attribute mainly and primarily to "vestigal white racism." So instead of taking seriously Republican critiques of Democratic (and/or D.C. Establishment) policy and cultural failings, the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates pin the whole Trump phenomenon on race factors.) From (2) and (3) we get (4) Even if Democratic economic-social-cultural policies and values do tend to benefit poorer and minority populations relative to the rich and whites, and therefore a move toward greater equality in economic outcomes, what about the absolute benefit for blacks and minorities? Why, after such a big jump in median family income - note the metric involved here, median family income, the bourgeois-values social conservatives would point out - in the 1960s would there be such a (relative to before) stalling under the stewardship of plenty of both parties, etc. (5) Another confounding factor is that the breakdown of family structures over the last half century that the social conservatives are always haranguing about has occurred among both minority and white populations, even though the Moynihan Report was reporting on a trend in the black community, before the Sexual Revolution really began to kick in. So this breakdown of family structures problem didn't happen uniquely with blacks, although the rates of single parenting were and remain higher compared to whites. (6) Anyway, the best thing the Dems and everyone else can do to really advance the condition of minorities and everyone else is to implement a philosophy for children program. Surely all the Democrats running the schools with all their intellectual and moral resources/superiority are most capable of implementing such a no-brainer idea as soon as yesterday. So why haven't they yet?]
