Hostname: page-component-6766d58669-l4t7p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-20T15:01:31.518Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Desire for Social Status and Economic Conservatism among Affluent Americans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2020

ADAM THAL Open the ORCID record for ADAM THAL [Opens in a new window]
ADAM THAL*
Affiliation:
Yale University
*
*Adam Thal, Postdoctoral Associate, Yale University, adam.thal@yale.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Affluent Americans have disproportionate influence over policymaking and often use their power to advance conservative economic policies that increase inequality. I show that this behavior is partially driven by affluent Americans’ desire for social status. First, I use a new survey scale to show that affluent Americans’ desire for social status strongly predicts their level of economic conservatism. Second, I test my theory experimentally in the context of social media. On sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, affluent Americans compete for social status by sharing curated versions of their lives that highlight their upper-class lifestyle. When I randomly assign affluent Americans to experience this status competition, it causes them to become more economically conservative. The results help us understand the social and psychological origins of economic conservatism among affluent Americans, and provide the first evidence that social media encourages political behaviors that are conducive to inequality.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 426 - 442
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2020 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

I thank Tali Mendelberg, Jacob Hacker, Martin Gilens, Ali Valenzuela, Omar Wasow, Greg Huber, Al Fang, Patrick Tucker, Scott Bokemper, Michael Donnelly, Benjamin Page, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback. I also thank participants at the Princeton American Politics Graduate Research Seminar, the Yale American Politics and Public Policy Workshop, and the Identity Politics Research Group for their suggestions. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GL2WN8.

References

REFERENCES

Bartels, Larry M. 2005. “Homer Gets a Tax Cut: Inequality and Public Policy in the American Mind.” Perspectives on Politics 1 (1): 15–31.Google Scholar
Bartels, Larry M. 2008. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Bonica, Adam, McCarty, Nolan, Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 2013. “Why Hasn’t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 27 (3): 103–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Center for Responsive Politics. 2014. “Personal Finances.” URL: https://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/.Google Scholar
Cramer, Katherine. 2012. “Putting Inequality in its Place: Rural Consciousness and the Power of Perspective.” American Political Science Review 106 (3): 517–32.Google Scholar
Druckman, James N., and Jacobs, Lawrence R.. 2015. Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion, and Manipulation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frank, Robert H. 2005. “Are Concerns about Relative Income Relevant for Public Policy? Positional Externalities Cause Large and Preventable Welfare Losses.” The American Economic Review 95 (2): 137–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frank, Thomas. 2004. “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” In How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company.Google Scholar
Gelman, Andrew. 2008. “Scaling Regression Inputs by Dividing by Two Standard Deviations.” Statistics in Medicine 27 (15): 2865–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gilens, Martin. 2012. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gilman, Nils. 1999. “Thorstein Veblen’s Neglected Feminism.” Journal of Economic Issues 33 (3): 689–711.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guess, Andrew, Nyhan, Brendan, and Reifler, Jason. 2018. “Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the Consumption of Fake News during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign.” Working Paper. URL: https://www.dartmouth.edu/∼nyhan/fake-news-2016.pdf.Google Scholar
Hacker, Jacob S., and Pierson, Paul. 2010. Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Heath, Joseph. 2008. “Thorstein Veblen and American Social Criticism.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, ed. Misak, Cheryl. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 235–53.Google Scholar
Heffetz, Ori. 2011. “A Test of Conspicuous Consumption: Visibility and Income Elasticities.” The Review of Economics and Statistics 93 (4): 1101–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Huberman, Bernardo A. Loch, Christoph H., and Onculer, Ayse. 2004. “Status as a Valued Resource.” Social Psychology Quarterly 67 (1): 103–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, Jessica A., and Kray, Laura J.. 2014. “Who Is Willing to Sacrifice Ethical Values for Money and Social Status? Gender Differences in Reactions to Ethical Compromises.” Social Psychology and Personality Science 5 (1): 52–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lamont, Michele. 1994. Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lea, Stephen E., and Webley, Paul. 2006. “Money as Tool, Money as Drug: The Biological Psychology of a Strong Incentive.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2): 161–209.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lewis, Michael. 2014. The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.Google Scholar
Marshall, Tara C., Lefringhausen, Katharina, and Ferenczi, Nelli. 2015. “The Big Five, Self-Esteem, and Narcissism as Predictors of the Topics People Write about in Facebook Status Updates.” Personality and Individual Differences 85: 35–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Isaac. 2013. Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martinsson, Johan, Dahlberg, Stegan, and Lundmark, Sebastian Oskar. 2013. “Is Accuracy Only for Probability Samples?” Presented at AAPOR Conference. URL: http://docplayer.net/46782451-Is-accuracy-only-for-probability-samples.html.Google Scholar
Marwick, Alice E. 2013. Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Mayer, Jane. 2017. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Anchor.Google Scholar
McCarty, Nolan, Poole, Keith T., and Rosenthal, Howard. 2015. Political Bubbles: Financial Crises and the Failure of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Mujcic, Redzo, and Frijters, Paul. 2013. “Economic Choices and Status: Measuring Preferences for Rank.” Oxford Economic Papers 65 (1): 47–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Page, Benjamin E., and Gilens, Martin. 2017. Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do about I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rhodes, Jesse H., and Schaffner, Brian F.. 2017. “Testing Models of Unequal Representation: Democratic Populists and Republican Oligarchs?” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 12 (2): 185–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schram, Arthur, Brandts, Jordi, and Gerxhani, Klarita. 2019. “Social-Status Ranking: A Hidden Channel to Gender Inequality under Competition.” Experimental Economics 22 (2): 396–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sears, David O., and Funk, Carolyn L.. 1990. “The Limited Effect of Economic Self-Interest on the Political Attitudes of the Mass Public.” Journal of Behavioral Economics 19 (3): 247–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sears, David, Lau, Richard R., Tyler, Tom R., and Allen, Harris M.. 1980. “Self-Interest vs. Symbolic Politics in Policy Attitudes and Presidential Voting.” American Political Science Review 74 (3): 670–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherman, Rachel. 2017. Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Srivastava, Abhishek, Locke, Edwin, and Bartol, Kathryn M.. 2001. “Money and Subjective Well-Being: It’s Not the Money, It’s the Motives.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80 (6): 959–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Taylor, David G., and Strutton, David. 2016. “Does Facebook Usage Lead to Conspicuous Consumption? The Role of Envy, Narcissism, and Self-Promotion.” Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing 10 (3): 231–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trump, Donald. 1987. Trump: The Art of the Deal. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Veblen, Thorstein. 1899. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Weber, Doug, Olsen-Phillips, Peter, Choma, Russ, and Bynder, Sarah. 2015. “The Political One Percent of the One Percent: Megadonors Fuel Rising Cost of Elections in 2014.” URL: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2015/04/the-political-one-percent-of-the-one-percent-in-2014-mega-donors-fuel-rising-cost-of-elections/.Google Scholar
Williams, Alex. 2013. “The Agony of Instagram.” The New York Times.Google Scholar
Wolfers, Justin. 2015. “Fewer Women Run Big Companies than Men Named John.” New York Times.Google Scholar
Zelizer, Viviana A. 1994. The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies. New York: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, Eilene. 2017. “Who Will Listen to a Billionaire’s Troubles?” New York Times.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Thal Supplementary Materials

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GL2WN8
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Thal Supplementary Materials

Thal Supplementary Materials

Download Thal Supplementary Materials(PDF)
PDF 856.6 KB
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.