The Effect of Social and Economic Change on Whites’ Civic Life

• In Event: Race-Class Divides in Political Life

Abstract

In this paper we examine what has happened to the political and civic participation of white Americans who graduated from high school in 1965, as a window to the way whites have responded to the increasing rights of people of color and women, and the simultaneous increase in economic challenges for many people. We use and build on panel survey data from Jennings et al.’s Youth-Parent Political Socialization Study, a four-wave survey of a national sample of people who graduated from high school in 1965. We combine the insights gleaned from surveys conducted with this cohort in 1965, 1973, 1982, and 1997 with in-depth interviews conducted with 33 of the respondents between 2018 and 2021. We examine changes in the Class of 1965’s conceptions of citizenship, trust and faith in different levels of government, and civic and political participation. We focus on the way civic and political participation diverged over time according to social mobility and to literal interpretations of the Bible, in an attempt to understand the combined influence of economic and cultural forces on individuals’ engagement with each other and their governments.

Authors

• Katherine J Cramer, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Larry M. Bartels, Vanderbilt University