Visiting Scholar

Visiting Scholar Wendy Rahn and Philip Chen of University of Minnesota have published a working paper on how voters perceive economic conditions. This is, of course, a crucial question in the midst of an election year, when many assume that that the state of the economy may influence voters' electoral choices. Traditionally, political scientists considering economic voter theories have analyzed three major factors—inflation, unemployment, or economic growth. Rahn and Chen ask whether these models should now also incorporate data on household net worth or the significance of stock assets. Here is an excerpt from the paper's abstract:

American households are buffeted by these macroeconomic forces to different degrees, and when conditions in these various spheres diverge, as in the aftermath of the Great Recession, groups that are differentially affected may respond politically in ways that generate new lines of cleavage that add complexity to our traditional economic voting models. Using monthly survey data from the Michigan Survey of Consumers over the period 1992 to 2011, we examine the impact of unemployment, inflation, house and stock prices, and real income growth on people’s retrospective assessments of family financial well-being. Our innovation is to compare the effects of these variables for different groups of households defined by their asset-holding status: investors (directly or indirectly) in the stock market, homeowners without risky financial assets, and renters. We indeed find that people respond to aggregate economic conditions in heterogeneous ways.

Chris Rhomberg is the author of The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor, a riveting analysis of the 1995 Detroit newspaper strike. An associate professor of sociology at Fordham University, Rhomberg studies issues of race, labor, and urban politics in American political development.

Q: By 1995, when the Detroit strike began, the erosion of collective bargaining rights was already firmly established. What drew you to this newspaper strike as opposed to the many other wrenching labor disputes of the 1980s and early 1990s? What did you hope to learn from Detroit?

More Research on Labor Policy
• RSF Program: Future of Work
• RSF Book: They Say Cut Back, We Say Fight Back! Welfare Activism in an Era of Retrenchment
• RSF Book: Low-Wage America
• RSF Book: America Works: Critical Thoughts on the Exceptional U.S. Labor Market

A: The rise of the current anti-union regime began in the 1980s, but my argument is that such macro-institutional changes do not occur neatly in all places all at once. In the 1990s it was not necessarily clear where things would go next. By that time unions had adopted counter-tactics of community mobilization and striking against unfair labor practices in order to gain some protec-tion against permanent replacement. The National Labor Relations Board became more favorable to unions, under the administration of President Bill Clinton. The labor movement as a whole had begun a progressive revival, symbolized in the October 1995 election of Service Employees International Union president John Sweeney as president of the AFL-CIO.

As Republican voters in Illinois head to the polls, we're pleased to announce a new feature at RSF Review: the Election 2012 series. Through the year, we hope to add insights, data and commentary from our scholars and research programs to the political conversation. In our first installment, RSF Visiting Scholar Delia Baldassarri discusses the conventional wisdom about political polarization in the United States—and why it may be wrong.

More on Polarization
• Website: Delia Baldassarri
• Study: Partisan Joiners: Associational Membership and Political Polarization in the United States (1974–2004)
• Study: Dynamics of Political Polarization (PDF)
• Study: Partisans without Constraint: Political
  Polarization and Trends in American Public Opinion (PDF)

Q: Although it is widely assumed that public opinion in America has sharply polarized over the past 40 years, your analysis of the evidence and scholarly literature suggests a more nuanced conclusion. What does the research show?

A: Over the last four decades, and especially starting in the 1990s, public opinion increasingly divided on a few specific issues, such as abortion, gay rights and the war in Iraq, while we observe relative stability and even depolarization on all remaining economic, civil rights, social, and foreign policy issues. Indeed, Americans are actually less divided in their opinion on the role of women in society, racial integration, and criminality than they were forty years ago. As new generations replace old ones, and women achieve higher positions in society, the collective mood shifts accordingly.

However, there is clear evidence of polarization among political partisans: those who are politically active, who identify with a party or strongly identify as liberal or conservative, tend to have more extreme positions than the rest of the population. In sum, while the distribution of opinions across the population has not changed a lot, with the exception of a few ‘hot-button’ issues, Republicans and Democrats are significantly more divided on a wide range of issues. This is a process of partisan alignment, which is partly consequence of the increased polarization of the parties, Congress, and political activists: since parties are more polarized, they are now better at sorting individuals along ideological lines.

A verdict has been reached in the Dharun Ravi trial. The ex-Rutgers student faced a series of charges, including bias intimidation and invasion of privacy, after he used a webcam to watch his college roommate Tyler Clementi kissing a man. The incident drew international attention after Clementi killed himself, raising difficult questions about homophobia, bullying, and the level of tolerance and diversity in American colleges. This week, we spoke with RSF Visiting Scholar Elizabeth Paluck about the Ravi trial and its implications. Paluck, a social psychologist at Princeton, studies prejudice and intergroup conflict reduction and has used large-scale field experiments to test theoretically driven interventions.

Q: A large part of the Dharun Ravi trial centered on the intentions and actions of Tyler Clementi’s peers—what they thought about his homosexuality, what they said to him and others about it and how they acted around him. What do we know about the importance of peer influence on prejudice and attitudes in school settings?

A: We think that peers have a strong influence, especially because much of the behavior that we care about unfolds in situations that are dominated by peers. Peers exert their influence by setting a standard, through their own behavior or expressions of belief, about what is appropriate and typical to do in that situation. In my field, that is what we call a social norm--a perception of what is appropriate and typical to do in the situation. Sometimes these peer-based social norms are so pervasive across situations that students internalize them as private attitudes. But the powerful thing about peer influence is that it can exert a pressure on students to behave in ways that they normally would not, or that go against the student's private attitudes.

More on Prejudice Reduction
• Website: Elizabeth Paluck
• Study: Peer Pressure Against Prejudice: A High School Field Experiment Examining Social Network change
• Study: What’s in a Norm? Sources and Processes of Norm Change
• Study: Diversity Training and Intergroup Contact: A Call to Action Research

Students report in surveys that they believe if they stand up against prejudice or bias then their peers will not like them as much. Other research shows that they are right! In those studies, students who object to teasing and harassment lose a bit of face, of their reputation, and are liked a little bit less. This is not to say that being an active bystander is a lost cause. Students have ways of shooting down prejudice or bias that can preserve their reputation, and in fact many of them do this every day, by supporting the target of harassment, or calming down someone who is doing the harassment. Many programs that urge students to stand up, speak out, are a bit less sensitive to this fact than they should be. Students can have a major positive influence on one another, and I think they have some great strategies for doing this in a sustainable way.

Q: In a 2011 paper, you looked at whether tolerance could be spread through student leaders who were trained confront expressions of prejudice. Give us a snapshot of some of the major findings and their implications for combating bullying.

The annual SXSW Festival was marred by controversy this week when a marketing company affixed wireless routers to homeless people to provide internet access to festival-goers. Critics said the plan—labeled a "charitable innovation experiment" by organizers—exploited the homeless and dehumanized them. Deplorable as the plan sounds, there is a deeper problem in the way people tend to perceive the homeless. As Nathan Hefleck of Psychology Today reports, neurological research conducted by RSF author Susan Fiske and other social psychologists has shown that people often view social "out-groups" as less than human:

[An] area of the brain called the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC) activates when people do things that involve perceiving and relating to other people, such as recognizing and distinguishing between faces and empathizing. These researchers hypothesized, however, that like objects such as tables, images of certain groups of people—the homeless—would fail to activate the mPFC.

This is exactly what they found. Images of all other groups besides the homeless activated the mPFC. This suggests that the homeless are not recognized as human relative to other groups. They actually are perceived, at least in this area of the brain, more like objects, such as tables.

Fiske elaborated on this finding in an interview with RSF Review last year:

Scorn is simply not paying attention and wishing the other away. Groups are scorned especially if they are low-status and not-us, such as homeless people and drug addicts. Poor people (regardless of ethnicity) and Latino immigrants are also seen this way. Scorn dehumanizes them and makes us neglect them.

What does it mean to 'dehumanize,' or perceive someone as less than human? In her RSF book Envy Up, Scorn Down, Fiske explained:

Karthick Ramakrishnan, a former RSF Visiting Scholar, spoke this month with a local edition of HLN about changing political attitudes among Asian Americans, a group that grew more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2010. "From 1992, Asians were voting about a third for the Democratic candidate for President," he says in the interview. "In the most recent election, two out of three were voting for Obama, so that's a huge shift." Ramakrishnan also shares insights from his RSF book Asian American Political Participation, which he discussed on this blog last year. Watch the interview below:

Julia Ott is an assistant professor of history at the New School. A former RSF Visiting Scholar, Ott is also the author of When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investor's Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2011), which chronicles the initial phase of mass investment at the turn of the 20th century and the issues surrounding it.

Q: Your book starts at the turn of the 20th century, when less than 1 percent of Americans owned stocks or bonds (compared to 50 percent of households in 2007). What was prevailing sentiment about financial securities and markets in that era?

More on Wall Street
• RSF Project: Citizen Investors and American Inequality
• Website: Julia Ott
• Book: When Wall Street Met Main Street

A: No question about it – the prevailing sentiment was negative.

Since the nation’s founding, Americans for the most part had viewed financial securities, the individuals who traded bonds and stocks, and the private associations (like the New York Stock Exchange) that administered securities exchanges as antithetical to their most cherished economic ideals, political values, and savings practices. Popular economic thought held that economic value derived from diligent labor and steadfast thrift—qualities utterly absent in the scuffle of the stock exchanges’ trading floors. American political culture identified ownership and control of real property as the foundation of a citizen’s virtue and independence, of his investment in the nation. Bonds, stocks, and the malefactors who traded them seemed to imperil this ideal of proprietary democracy. The lure of speculative riches subverted the work ethic; it diverted capital from productive pursuits.

At the start of the twentieth century, financial securities and markets played a very limited role in the way in which most Americans saved money and most firms acquired funds. Most people considered the stock and bond markets to be insiders’ games, rigged against investors of modest means who lacked access to adequate information about the corporations whose securities they might purchase. And because New York City banks (which held the reserves of other banks across the nation) loaned money to securities brokers (these brokers’ loans paid a high rate of interested and could be called in at any time), stock market declines produced terrible consequences for the financial system.

Take the Panic of 1907 as one example. In October, an unsuccessful attempt to corner the market in the stock of the United Copper Company ended in the failure of participating brokerages. Frightened depositors clamored to recover their savings from banks associated with the scheme. The resulting collapse of the third-largest trust company in New York City wreaked havoc. Faith in financial institutions evaporated; even depositors at sound banks and trusts lined up to withdraw their money. Depositors’ demands forced regional banks to call in their reserves from the New York City banks. These, in turn, demanded the repayment of loans made to brokers, who sold stock to pay those banks. The stock market plummeted and credit markets froze, driving all kinds of borrowers into bankruptcy. With no central bank to step in, it fell to J. P. Morgan to stem the crisis. Americans weren’t particularly thrilled to discover just how much financial stability depended upon one man.

How has the voting behavior of the white working class changed over the past 40 years? The question has generally divided pundits in two camps: the first, following Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, argues that workers prefer to vote on a values agenda (abortion, for example, or gay marriage) rather than on income-related issues (tax cuts for the wealthy, or higher spending). The other view holds that the data show the white working-class has largely stayed with the Democratic Party outside the South. 

Former Visiting Scholar Dorothy Sue Cobble enters into the fray in the latest issue of Dissent. In a powerful essay, she argues that too many in academia espouse an "anti-worker trope [that] runs deep and wide." She writes:

The popularity on the left of Thomas Frank...is but one example of how the stereotype of the reactionary, irrational worker still resonates. In 2004, surveying the scene in Kansas, Frank sadly concluded that the working classes just don't know their own best interests...This narrative, like all false consiousness narratives, reeks of condescension and arrogance. It presumes, for example, the existence of an obvious correct political alternative--the New Democrats?--and it judges as blind and delusional those who don't see the same mirage as the enlightened storyteller.

Princeton University has published a fascinating profile of Edward Telles, a former RSF Visiting Scholar and co-author of Generations of Exclusions: Mexican Americans, Assimilation and Race. The article briefly explains the story behind the book:

When an old UCLA library was being retrofitted to meet earthquake-related building codes, workers found boxes in the basement with 1,200 surveys done in the 1960s of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in San Antonio and Los Angeles.

Telles and fellow UCLA sociologist Vilma Ortiz decided to follow up with the original respondents, as the surveys provided unique information about assimilation unavailable through census data.

"People were writing about what was going to happen to Mexicans, often with no data," Telles said.

Ruth Grant is a Professor of Political Science at Duke University, specializing in political theory with a particular interest in early modern philosophy and political ethics. A former RSF Visiting Scholar, Grant is the author of Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives (Russell Sage and Princeton University Press, 2011), which "questions whether the penchant for constant incentivizing undermines active, autonomous citizenship."

Q: When you consider the controversies that currently dominate the political debate, the use of incentives isn't high on the list. People seem more vexed about policies like the health care mandate or income taxes than, say, the use of a tax deduction to encourage charitable donations. Why did you become interested in the use of incentives as a form of power, and why do you think we should talk about them more?

More from Ruth Grant
• Strings Attached, Chapter 1 (PDF)
• Academic Website

A: I think that I have always been uncomfortable with certain kinds of incentives in my own experience; for example, incentives in the workplace that undermined team spirit or incentives in my child’s classroom that really made her feel manipulated. Other incentives don’t bother me at all. I began to notice that incentives have become the preferred tool of policy in all kinds of settings – governments, businesses, schools, prisons, hospitals – and it seemed important to think through which uses of incentives are innocuous and which are not. The fact that we have invented a new verb – “to incentivize” – is an indication of how much this approach has seeped into the culture. “To incentivize” is a much narrower concept than “to motivate,” which includes incentives, inspiration, arousing curiosity, etc. Something is lost if we automatically consider only incentives when we want to influence people. It seems important to discuss these issues precisely because incentives are pervasive, but also taken for granted.