Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Citizens' Social Group Stereotypes as a Basis for Political Reasoning.

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Early work in political science indicated that citizens structure their political attitudes around 'visible social groupings' meaning that, in an effort to simplify political choices, citizens turn questions of policy into moral judgments about the groups involved (Converse 1964). However, much of the research on citizens' group-centric attitudes has neglected a primary means by which citizens organize and evaluate one another: economic differences. This oversight is surprising, considering the recent scholarly and media attention given to rising inequality. In order to fill this gap, the Co-PI is undertaking a multi-stage dissertation project that examines the manner in which citizens use stereotypes about economic groups as a shortcut for selecting candidates and determining which policies to support. Using a two-stage data collection project comprised of a nationally representative survey and a follow-up survey experiment, the Co-PI will examine the beliefs that citizens have about these groups and how these beliefs are consequential for political reasoning. The proposed study will address three questions. First, what is the nature of the public's beliefs about economic groups? Second, how are these beliefs consequential for citizens? policy attitudes? Third, recognizing that these attitudes may not be fixed and are susceptible to priming, under which conditions are these beliefs more or less significant for public opinion? This proposal addresses a double-sided blindness in the existing research in political science. While inequality scholars have addressed the institutional causes and consequences of rising inequality, they have been slower to evaluate links between the changing composition of social groups and group-centered political behavior. Conversely, while political psychologists have produced abundant work on racial and gender stereotypes, they have discounted economic differences. The line of questioning proposed here builds on and contributes to key debates in both political psychology and the study of inequality, in addition to identifying the real world political consequences of such attitudes. Broader Impacts Research on economic differences is especially timely. Over the past few decades, inequality has risen at an alarming rate, while mobility has stagnated. The New York Times declaration that we are in a 'New Gilded Age' all suggest that economic-based groupings have become increasingly salient to voters and, in turn, influential for both public opinion and political outcomes. In order to maximize the impact of the proposed study, the Co-PI plans to make the data publicly available as well as easy to incorporate into other datasets. In doing so, this data-collection project will hopefully facilitate a wide array of studies that are not considered in the Co-PI's dissertation and will provide a theoretical and data-driven starting point for additional research on economic status and public opinion as well as (when matched to higher-level data) representation and broader economic factors. The Co-PI will also submit the research proposed here to scholarly conferences and journals in order to disseminate insights about the attitudes that are relevant to political behavior to a wide audience and provide a methodological precedent for future research.