Gone For Good: Deindustrialization, White Voter Backlash, and US Presidential Voting

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
LEONARDO BACCINI ◽  
STEPHEN WEYMOUTH
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity Theory ◽  
Economic Voting ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
Group Status ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Economic Distress ◽  
White Voters ◽  
Black Voters

Globalization and automation have contributed to deindustrialization and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, yielding important electoral implications across advanced democracies. Coupling insights from economic voting and social identity theory, we consider how different groups in society may construe manufacturing job losses in contrasting ways. We argue that deindustrialization threatens dominant group status, leading some white voters in affected localities to favor candidates they believe will address economic distress and defend racial hierarchy. Examining three US presidential elections, we find white voters were more likely to vote for Republican challengers where manufacturing layoffs were high, whereas Black voters in hard-hit localities were more likely to vote for Democrats. In survey data, white respondents, in contrast to people of color, associated local manufacturing job losses with obstacles to individual upward mobility and with broader American economic decline. Group-based identities help explain divergent political reactions to common economic shocks.

scholarly journals The Differential Effects of Economic Conditions and Racial Attitudes in the Election of Donald Trump

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (02) ◽  
pp. 358-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Green ◽  
Sean McElwee
Keyword(s):  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Economic Data ◽  
Economic Distress ◽  
White Voters ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
Zip Code ◽  
Limited Scope

Debates over the extent to which racial attitudes and economic distress explain voting behavior in the 2016 election have tended to be limited in scope, focusing on the extent to which each factor explains white voters’ two-party vote choice. This limited scope obscures important ways in which these factors could have been related to voting behavior among other racial sub-groups of the electorate, as well as participation in the two-party contest in the first place. Using the vote-validated 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, merged with economic data at the ZIP code and county levels, we find that racial attitudes strongly explain two-party vote choice among white voters—in line with a growing body of literature. However, we also find that local economic distress was strongly associated with non-voting among people of color, complicating direct comparisons between racial and economic explanations of the 2016 election and cautioning against generalizations regarding causal emphasis.

White Voters, A Key Piece of the Puzzle: Education, Race, and Electoral Politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (03) ◽  
pp. 517-522
Author(s):  
DeeAnn Grove
Keyword(s):  
School Desegregation ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Black Children ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
School Vouchers ◽  
Campaign Strategy ◽  
The Past ◽  
White Voters ◽  
School Voucher ◽  
Black Voters

ABSTRACTIn 2004, Jennifer L. Hochschild challenged political scientists to give greater attention to education policy and politics. Although it challenges Hochschild’s interpretation of the politics of school vouchers, this article demonstrates her central assertion that the era of school desegregation continues to impact American politics. Internal campaign strategy documents from presidential election campaigns reveal how the two parties have arrived at different school voucher positions because of the different challenges each party faced as a result of the battle over school desegregation. Republican strategists were concerned that white voters believed their candidates did not care about people of color. Supporting vouchers for urban Black children allowed Republicans to reassure white voters of their racial sensitivity. In contrast, Democratic candidates were more concerned that they might alienate white voters by taking another position that seemed to pander to Black voters. Strategists’ perceptions of white voters’ attitudes toward education and race comprise the thread that connects the past to the present.

scholarly journals The Differential Effects of Economic Conditions and Racial Attitudes in the Election of Donald Trump

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Green ◽  
Sean McElwee
Keyword(s):  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Economic Data ◽  
Economic Distress ◽  
White Voters ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
Zip Code ◽  
Limited Scope

Debates over the extent to which racial attitudes and economic distress explain voting behavior in the 2016 election have tended to be limited in scope, focusing on the extent to which each factor explains white voters’ two-party vote choice. This limited scope obscures important ways in which these factors could have been related to voting behavior among other racial sub-groups of the electorate, as well as participation in the two-party contest in the first place. Using the vote-validated 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, merged with economic data at the ZIP code and county levels, we find that racial attitudes strongly explain two-party vote choice among white voters – in line with a growing body of literature. However, we also find that local economic distress was strongly associated with non-voting among people of color, complicating direct comparisons between racial and economic explanations of the 2016 election and cautioning against generalizations regarding causal emphasis.

The Rhetorical Psychology of Trumpism: Threat, Absolutism, and the Absolutist Threat

The Forum ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan Marietta ◽  
Tyler Farley ◽  
Tyler Cote ◽  
Paul Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Original Data ◽  
Perceived Threat ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Personal Safety ◽  
Group Status ◽  
Strategy Analysis ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Electoral Success ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Positive Character

Abstract Conventional wisdom suggests that Donald Trump’s rhetoric – aggressive, insulting, often offensive – would be counterproductive to electoral success. We argue that Trump’s surprising victories in both the primary and general campaigns were partly due to the positive effects of his appeals grounded in the intersection of threat and absolutism. The content of Trump’s rhetoric focused on threats to personal safety (terrorism), personal status (economic decline), and group status (immigration). The style of Trump’s rhetoric was absolutist, emphasizing non-negotiable boundaries and moral outrage at their violation. Previous research has shown perceived threat to motivate political participation and absolutist rhetoric to bolster impressions of positive character traits. Trump employed these two rhetorical psychologies simultaneously, melding threat and absolutism into the absolutist threat as an effective rhetorical strategy. Analysis of Trump’s debate language and Twitter rhetoric, as well as original data from political elites at the Republican National Convention and ordinary voters at rallies in New Hampshire confirm the unconventional efficacy of Trump’s rhetorical approach.

scholarly journals Co-Cultural Theory and Communication

Communication ◽  
2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
Cultural Group ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
Group Status ◽  
Group Members

Co-cultural communication theory, or co-cultural theory for short, emerged from the scholarly research of Mark Orbe in the 1990s. A co-cultural theoretical approach provides a lens to understand how traditionally underrepresented group members communicate within societal structures governed by cultural groups that have, over time, achieved dominant group status. The theory’s foundation was established by Orbe and colleagues by exploring the communicative lived experiences of underrepresented group members in the United States; the earliest work engaged the communication of co-cultural groups defined through race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, disability, and sexual orientation. The theory centralizes the lived experiences of co-cultural group members and focuses on instances when cultural difference is regarded as salient. At its core, co-cultural theory explores one basic question: How do co-cultural group members use communication to negotiate their cultural identities with others (both like and unlike themselves) in a societal context where they are traditionally marginalized? Through discovery-oriented qualitative research, six factors emerged (field of experience, abilities, perceived costs and rewards, communication approach, preferred outcome, and situational context) as central to the selection of specific co-cultural practices. Since its inception, co-cultural theory has been embraced as a core theory for individuals interested in studying the intersection of culture, power, and communication.

Entitlement Makes People Ignorant, Egocentric, and Mean

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-175
Author(s):  
Kristin J. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Better Than

This chapter explores the ways in which entitlement facilitates ignorance, egocentrism, and inconsiderateness. People with power tend to engage in shoddy information processing. Compared to those who are marginalized, dominant group members think in shortcuts. Power emboldens people to be careless about repercussions, at least compared to those without power. Power holders do not feel compelled to view things from another person’s perspective and they do not feel obliged to know much about people with less power. For marginalized people, their very lives depend on understanding the idiosyncrasies of power holders and they understand these dynamics much better than powerful people. Power entitles people to conveniently and self-servingly assume they know more than they actually do when it comes to telling women and people of color how to think about sexism and racism (e.g., mansplaining and whitesplaining). At the same time, power entitles people to claim they know less than they actually do when they are called to account for sexual violence.

For Family and Property

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly M. Welch
Keyword(s):  
People Of Color ◽  
Public Forum ◽  
Property Ownership ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Model Set ◽  
The Law ◽  
Civic Inclusion

When using the courts to protect their family, people of color relied on and deployed a well-used model for litigation and claims-making—a model set by fellow black litigants. This model included several tactics for appealing to the bar: they exploited the language of property and law, rhetoric that was recognizable to their audiences and thus usable and effective. They found ways to make others accountable to them: with their stories and reputations and through their networks. They bound people in relationships of obligation to them—bonds that sometimes upended the southern racial hierarchy. They used property ownership and its associated presumptions about independence and reliability to make their claims and to legitimize and safeguard their families. In so doing, they served as their own advocates, registered their voices in an official, public forum, and laid claim to civic inclusion. This chapter examines how well the model worked. It follows the formation of one family from Iberville Parish, the Belly family, and their efforts to form a family before the law and through property ownership.

Enraged, Rattled, and Wronged

2021 ◽  
pp. 176-217
Author(s):  
Kristin J. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Resistance To Change ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
White People ◽  
Group Position ◽  
Working People ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Divide And Rule

Chapter 6 explores the backlash to social progress by the entitled. Dominant group members are not accustomed to being bossed around. They tend to be ill-equipped to adapt to changing circumstances, and their resistance to change comes in many forms, with a range of consequences to themselves and others. Dominant group members are both highly sensitive to criticism and object to being sidelined. The history of divide and rule by elites toward poor and working people begins Chapter 6. This history helps us understand why a less-educated working- or middle-class White person comes to share a sense of the same group position to that of wealthy and influential Whites rather than working- or middle-class people of color. Some White people have so internalized their superiority over people of color, that even Whites who are in economic distress support legislation and politicians that have no intention of aiding them. They reject government assistance that they desperately need, they refuse to sign up for the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) because they believe that these initiatives help undeserving minorities. These White people are dying of Whiteness. And politicians capitalize on this White racial resentment. The entitled resentment of those who feel their superior status is undermined manifests in various ways. White fragility and fragile masculinity are emotionally hyperbolic reactions by dominant group members when they are asked to acknowledge the existence of racism and sexism.

Political and Econometric Analysis of Party Systems’ Transformation in the EU

2015 ◽  
pp. 5-17
Author(s):  
E. Gromoglasova ◽  
A. Libman
Keyword(s):  
Regional Integration ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Economic Voting ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
Average Level ◽  
National Party ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
The Eu

The paper attempts to study how economic situation in the member countries of the European Union in 2005-2011 affected the national party systems' attitude towards the EU and the European integration (the EU cleavage). The authors made suggestion that economic decline could result in growing Euroskepticism. This hypothesis was derived from three main arguments: economic voting theory, suggesting that voters “punish” the ruling parties in case of economic decline; the role the EU plays in determining national economic policy (specifically, strict austerity requirements); the overall international context of global economic crisis. In order to measure the attitude of the national parties towards the EU, the data from the Manifesto Project Database (MPD), a large scale content analysis database of electoral promises (manifestos) of national political parties was applied. Then the authors looked at 41 elections in the EU member states in 2005-2011, for which MPD data are available, and measured the declared position of the parties participating in the elections regarding the EU. In an econometric study, the proxies of national party systems attitudes were regressed on proxies of economic situation in the EU countries, attempting to test the main hypotheses. Specifically, four proxies of attitude towards the EU were used: the share of votes obtained by euroskeptical parties; the average level of Euroskepticism in national party manifestos of all parties participating in elections; the average level of Euroskepticism of the ruling coalition emerging from elections; the average level of Euroskepticism weighted by the share of votes obtained by particular parties. The results of the estimates do not confirm that economic indicators (especially GDP and inflation) have had a significant impact on the Euroskepticism; the results are not robust and vary from specification to specification. The article shows, however, that higher unemployment levels are negatively correlated with Euroskepticism. The authors explain these findings by the predominance of expressive behavior in voting patterns in Europe. Specifically, they argue that voting was driven primarily by identity issue. However, in this case identity should be related not to ethnic or regional features, but to consumption behavior patterns. The results are also placed in a broader context, attempting to link the EU-specific findings to processes observed in other parts of the world. Acknowledgements. The authors appreciate the valuable comments by E.V. Ananyeva, N.Yu. Kaveshnikov, S.P. Peregudov, M.V. Sterzhneva, A.I. Tevdoi-Burmuli and all participants of the section “Processes of Regional Integration in Big Europe” of the 8th Congress of the Russian Association of International Studies. All mistakes and inaccuracies are the authors’ responibility.

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