Larry Martin Bartels (born December 16, 1956)[1] is an American political scientist and the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and Shayne Chair in Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University.

Prior to his appointment at Vanderbilt, Bartels served as the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public Policy and International Relations and founding director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

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.

[3] In his 2008 book, Unequal Democracy: The political economy of the new gilded age, Bartels demonstrates that income inequality expanded under Republican presidential administrations and narrowed under Democratic presidential administrations since the early 1970s, when income inequality first started to expand.

In other words, had Democratic presidents been in office since the 1970s, income inequality may have lessened since the 1950s instead of growing into what Bartels calls "The New Gilded Age" of the early 21st century.