False Consciousness or Class Awareness? Local Income Inequality, Personal Economic Position, and Belief in American Meritocracy

American Journal of Political Science

Volumn 59, Issue 2, 2015, Pages 326-340

  Newman, Benjamin J ^a   Johnston, Christopher D ^b   Lown, Patrick L ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT   (United States)

^b DUKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84926422134     PISSN: 00925853     EISSN: 15405907     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12153     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. Alesina, Alberto, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote . 2001. "Why Doesn't the US Have a European-Style Welfare System?" Brookings Paper on Economics Activity (Fall): 187-278.
2. Alesina, Alberto, and Eliana La Ferrara . 2005. "Preferences for Redistribution in the Land of Opportunities." Journal of Public Economics 89(5-6): 897-931.
3. Alesina, Alberto, Rafael Di Tella, and Robert MacCulloch . 2004. "Inequality and Happiness: Are Europeans and Americans Different?" Journal of Public Economics 88(9): 2009-42.
4. Anderson, Christopher J., and Jonas Pontusson . 2007. "Workers, Worries and Welfare States: Social Protection and Job Insecurity in 15 OECD Countries." European Journal of Political Research 46(2): 211-35.
5. Aronson, Eliot. 1999. The Social Animal. New York: Worth.
6. Bartels, Larry. 2008. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
7. Bénabou, Roland, and Efe A. Ok . 2001. "Social Mobility and the Demand for Redistribution: The POUM Hypothesis." Quarterly Journal of Economics 116(2): 447-87.
8. Bénabou, Roland, and Jean Tirole . 2006. "Belief in a Just World and Redistributive Politics." Quarterly Journal of Economics 121(2, May): 699-746.
9. Brody, Richard A., and Paul M. Sniderman . 1977. "From Life Space to Polling Place: The Relevance of Personal Concerns for Voting Behavior." British Journal of Political Science 7(3): 337-60.
10. Chong, Dennis, Jack Citrin, and Patricia Conley . 2001. "When Self-Interest Matters." Political Psychology 22(3): 541-70.
11. Citrin, Jack, and Donald P. Green . 1990. "The Self-Interest Motive in American Public Opinion." Research in Micropolitics 3(1): 1-28.
12. Dallinger, Ursula. 2010. "Public Support for Redistribution: What Explains Cross-National Differences?" Journal of European Social Policy 20(4): 333-49.
13. Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. Boston: Addison-Wesley.
14. Feldman, Stanley. 1982. "Economic Self-interest and Political Behavior." American Journal of Political Science 26(3): 446-66.
15. Feldman, Stanley, and Marco R. Steenbergen . 2001. "The Humanitarian Foundation of Public Support for Social Welfare." American Journal of Political Science 45(3): 658-77.
16. Foner, Eric. 1984. "Why is There No Socialism in the United States?" History Workshop 17: 57-80.
17. Fong, Christina. 2001. "Social Preferences, Self-Interest, and the Demand for Redistribution." Journal of Public Economics 82(2): 225-46.
18. Gilens, Martin. 1999. Why Americans Hate Welfare. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
19. Gilens, Martin. 2012. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation.
20. Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson . 2011. Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. New York: Simon & Schuster.
21. Hall, Elaine J., and Myra Marx Ferree . 1986. "Race Differences in Abortion Attitudes." Public Opinion Quarterly 50(2): 193-207.
22. Hasenfeld, Yeheskel, and Jane A. Rafferty . 1989. "The Determinants of Public Attitudes toward the Welfare State." Social Forces 67(4): 1027-48.
23. Hochschild, Jennifer L. 1981. What's Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
24. Hochschild, Jennifer L. 1995. "What Is the American Dream?" In Facing Up to the American Dream, ed. Jennifer L. Hochschild . Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 49-62.
25. Huddy, Leonie. 2003. "Group Identity and Political Cohesion." In Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis . New York: Oxford University Press, 511-58.
26. Hunt, Matthew O. 2004. "Race/Ethnicity and Beliefs about Wealth and Poverty." Social Science Quarterly 85(3): 827-53.
27. Huntington, Samuel P. 1981. American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
28. Imai, Kosuke, Gary King, and Olivia Lau . 2012. Zelig: Everyone's Statistical Software. Available at: http://r.iq.harvard.edu/docs/zelig/4.1-3/zelig_core_reference.pdf
29. Isaac, Jeffrey C. 2013. "The Politics of Inequality in the Face of Financial Crisis." Perspectives on Politics 11(1): 1-7.
30. Jaeger, Mads Meier. 2006. "What Makes People Support Public Responsibility for Welfare Provision: Self-Interest or Political Ideology? A Longitudinal Approach." Acta Sociologica 49(3): 321-38.
31. Jost, John T., Diana Burgess, and Cristina O. Mosso . 2001. "15 Conflicts of Legitimation among Self, Group, and System." In The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice, and Intergroup Relations, ed. John T. Jost and Brenda Major . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 363-88.
32. Jost, John T., and Mahzarin R. Banaji . 1994. "The Role of Stereotyping in System-Justification and the Production of False Consciousness." British Journal of Social Psychology 33(1): 1-27.
33. Jost, John T., Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Brian A. Nosek . 2004. "A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo." Political Psychology 25(6): 881-919.
34. Jost, John T., and Orsolya Hunyady . 2005. "Antecedents and Consequences of System-Justifying Ideologies." Current Directions in Psychological Science 14(5): 260-65.
35. Jost, John T., Sally Blount, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Gyorgy Hunyady . 2003. "Fair Market Ideology: Its Cognitive-Motivational Underpinnings." Research in Organizational Behavior 25: 53-91.
36. Kelly, Nathan J., and Peter K. Enns . 2010. "Inequality and the Dynamics of Public Opinion: The Self-Reinforcing Link between Economic Inequality and Mass Preferences." American Journal of Political Science 54(4): 855-70.
37. Kenworthy, Lane, and Jonas Pontusson . 2005. "Rising Inequality and the Politics of Redistribution in Affluent Countries." Perspectives on Politics 3(3): 449-71.
38. Kenworthy, Lane, and Leslie McCall . 2008. "Inequality, Public Opinion and Redistribution." Socio-Economic Review 6(1): 35-68.
39. Key, Valdimer Orlando. 1961. Public Opinion and American Democracy. 1st ed. New York: Knopf.
40. Kinder, Donald R., and D. Roderick Kiewiet . 1979. "Economic Discontent and Political Behavior: The Role of Personal Grievances and Collective Economic Judgments in Congressional Voting." American Journal of Political Science 23(3): 495-527.
41. Kinder, Donald R., and Nicholas Winter . 2001. "Exploring the Racial Divide: Blacks, Whites, and Opinion on National Policy." American Journal of Political Science 45(2): 439-56.
42. Kluegel, James R., and Elliot R. Smith . 1986. Beliefs about Inequality: Americans' Views of What Is and What Ought to Be. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.
43. Kreidl, Martin. 2000. "Perceptions of Poverty and Wealth in Western and Post-Communist Countries." Social Justice Research 13(2): 151-76.
44. Kruglanski, Arie W. 1996. "Motivated Social Cognition: Principles of the Interface." In Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles, ed. E. Tory Higgins and Arie W. Kruglanski . New York: Guilford Press, 493-520.
45. Lau, Richard. 2003. "Models of Decision Making." In Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, ed. David O. Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis . New York: Oxford University Press, 19-59.
46. Lerner, Melvin J. 1980. The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. New York: Plenum Press.
47. Mahutga, Matthew C., and Judith Stepan-Norris . 2007. "Ideological Hegemony." In Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, ed. George Ritzer . London: Blackwell, 2227-30.
48. Mansbridge, Jane J., and Aldon Morris . 2001. Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
49. Margalit, Yotam. 2013. "Explaining Social Policy Preferences: Evidence from the Great Recession." American Political Science Review 107(1): 80-103.
50. McCarty, Nolan, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal . 2006. Polarized America: The Dance of Political Ideology and Unequal Riches. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
51. McCloskey, Herbert, and John R. Zaller . 1984. The American Ethos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
52. Moene, Karl Ove, and Michael Wallerstein . 2001. "Inequality, Social Insurance, and Redistribution." American Political Science Review 95(4): 859-74.
53. Mondak, Jeffery J., Dianna C. Mutz, and Robert Huckfeldt . 1996. "Persuasion in Context: The Multilevel Structure of Economic Evaluations." In Political Persuasion and Attitude Change, ed. Diana C. Mutz, Paul M. Sniderman, and Richard A. Brody . Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 249-66.
54. Mutz, Diana C. 1994. "Contextualizing Personal Experience: The Role of Mass Media." The Journal of Politics 56(3): 689-714.
55. Nteta, Tatishe. 2013. "United We Stand? African Americans, Self-Interest, and Immigration Reform." American Politics Research 41(1): 147-72.
56. Oliver, J. Eric, and Tali Mendelberg . 2000. "Reconsidering the Environmental Determinants of White Racial Attitudes." American Journal of Political Science 44(3): 574-89.
57. Oorschot, Van Wim, and Loek Halman . 2000. "Blame or Fate, Individual or Social? An International Comparison of Popular Explanations for Poverty." European Societies 2(1): 1-28.
58. Pines, Christopher L. 1993. Ideology and False Consciousness: Marx and His Historical Progenitors, Vol. 8. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
59. Scheve, Kenneth, and Matthew J. Slaughter . 2004. "Economic Insecurity and the Globalization of Production." American Journal of Political Science 48(4): 662-74.
60. Schlozman, Kay Lehman, and Sidney Verba . 1979. Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class, and Political Response. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
61. Schumaker, Paul, Dwight C. Kiel, and Thomas W. Heilke . 1996. Great Ideas/Grand Schemes: Political Ideologies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: McGraw-Hill.
62. Sears, David O., and Carolyn L. Funk . 1991. "The Role of Self-Interest in Social and Political Attitudes." Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 24(1): 1-91.
63. Sears, David O., Colette Van Laar, Mary Carrillo, and Rick Kosterman . 1997. "Is It Really Racism? The Origins of White Americans' Opposition to Race-Targeted Policies." Public Opinion Quarterly 61(1): 16-53.
64. Sears, David O., Richard R. Lau, Tom R. Tyler, and Harris M. Allen Jr. 1980. "Self-Interest vs. Symbolic Politics in Policy Attitudes and Presidential Voting." American Political Science Review 74(3): 670-84.
65. Sniderman, Paul M., Louk Hagendoorn, and Markus Prior . 2004. "Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrant Minorities." American Political Science Review 98(1): 35-49.
66. Walker, Iain, and Thomas F. Pettigrew . 1984. "Relative Deprivation Theory: An Overview and Conceptual Critique." British Journal of Social Psychology 23(4): 301-10.
67. Young, Robert L. 1991. "Race, Conceptions of Crime and Justice, and Support for the Death Penalty." Social Psychology Quarterly 54(1): 67-75.
68. Zaller, John. 2003. "Coming to Grips with V. O. Key's Concept of Latent Opinion." In Electoral Democracy, ed. George Rabinowitz and Michael B. MacKuen. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 311-36.