Status Threat: The Core of Reactionary Politics

• In Event: How People React to Societal Threats

Abstract

Over the last decade we have witnessed the proliferation of right-wing movements among Western democracies, including the US. The emergence of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement is reshaping the Republican Party, and by extension, American politics at large. From inter-group hostility to stress-testing American democracy, MAGA has exposed the fragility of the liberal social order. What motivates its adherents? In this paper, we hypothesize that status threat—in which dominant groups are threatened by social equality movements and seek a return to the hierarchy of the status-quo ante—is a primary driver of contemporary reactionary American politics. The impetus for our investigation is that “inequality based on differences in esteem and respect [i.e., status]—alongside those based on resources and power” is a driving force in the psychology of politics (see Ridgeway, 2014, p. 1). In concert with Ridgeway (2014) and Lipset & Raab (1978), we propose that status works both as an individual-level motivation for political behavior as well as a broader orientation toward enforcing traditional arrangements.
We develop and test a general measure of the concept. Is status threat a major ingredient in contemporary American public opinion, as we contend? How does it fare once other symbolic predispositions, ones generally associated with group-based intolerance (e.g., racism, social dominance orientation, Christian nationalism, authoritarianism) are considered? Status threat is often used as an umbrella term in studies of social conflict; however, as far as we know, a program of research to establish a reliability and valid scale, as well as assess its antecedents and consequences, has not been conducted. Proxies, instead, are the standard (e.g., Mutz, 2018).
The balance of the paper unfolds as follows. First, we review reactionary movements in the United States. As we shall see, the reactionary right is motivated, in the main, by social change, change that threatens the foundations of the American social hierarchy: white, Christian, patriarchal dominance.

We examine the relevance of status threat by examining its predictive power—net that of other psychological predispositions (e.g., Christian nationalism, SDO, authoritarianism)—over a range of contentious issues, including democratic erosion (e.g., illiberalism, political violence), paranoid social cognition (i.e., belief in conspiracy theories), whether demographic change is harmful or beneficial, whether whites and Christians should continue to have more say in how the country is run than other groups (even as both become a minority), belief in the “Great Replacement” (that non-white immigrants are being brought to America deliberately to replace white Americans), whether men are more likely the victims rather than the perpetrators of sexism, along with attitudes toward the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol.

We expect that in each instance, status threat will strongly predict beliefs and attitudes. To demonstrate discriminant validity, we also examine the impact of status threat on a set of economic policy preference questions, and hypothesize that here, status threat will fall flat, providing further indication that status threat is a predominantly cultural (vs. economic) phenomenon. Prior to all of this, we conduct a series of latent measurement models to demonstrate the unidimensionality and uniqueness of the status threat concept.

We conclude with a discussion of the national and international implications of our findings.

Authors

• Howard Lavine, University of Minnesota

• Christopher Parker, UCSB