Measuring Perceptions of Inequality Using Novel Survey Questions

• In Event: Opinion Formation and the Politics of Group Membership

Abstract

We measure perceptions of economic inequality through a novel set of survey questions asked across a set of 8 national and/or state-level (California) surveys over a six-year period. In addition to asking respondents how the national economy was doing, and about their own pocketbook, we also asked how they thought “people like (you)” are doing, and how specific groups are doing. Moreover, we asked about how specific localities were doing economically: not just the nation, but also “local community” and state. And, we both asked respondents about specific groups, and allowed respondents to provide their view of who “people like (you)” means. By examining respondents on the `off-diagonals’ (e.g., people who offered different evaluations of national economic performance versus group economic performance) we identify people who perceive inequality in economic performance. This allows us to test several hypotheses. First, we are simply able to measure the number of people who know that economic growth has not been equal across different groups. Second, we examine whether whites in the South were more likely to see their own ethnic group as performing differently than the national economy than were whites in the North (thus testing some of the inferences from Hochschild’s work in Louisiana). We also examine whether poor whites were more likely to list their own ethnic group as the group they identified with than were middle-income and wealthier whites (and similarly we compare whites with low levels of education to whites with higher levels of education and test whether perceptions of “falling behind” relative to outgroups predicted resentful voting). We are also able to connect voters’ perceptions that they are doing worse than other groups to their vote choice in 2016, allowing us to test theories that Trump voters were motivated by populist perceptions of inequities in the distribution of economic gains (Cramer, 2016).

Authors

• Suzanna Linn, Pennsylvania State University

• Jonathan Nagler, New York University

• Jan Zilinsky, New York University