Power and Need in the American Imagination

• In Event: Divided by Racial Attitudes? The Changing Politics of White Americans

Abstract

When it comes to politics, how does the American public understand which groups are in power and which groups are in need? In this paper, I introduce a novel open-ended measurement tool (Circles of Power and Need, or CPN for short) to capture the diversity of group power and need perception in the U.S. The CPN measurement elicits a hierarchical listing of six groups in power, and six groups in need from each respondent and provides meaningful leverage for validating previous theories about public perception of power and need (e.g. Schneider and Ingram, 1993; Kreitzer and Smith, 2018; Kreitzer, Maltby, Smith, 2022). Using an online convenience sample (n = 955), I demonstrate the merit of CPN as a survey instrument and then investigate how partisanship and other social identities correspond with stratification beliefs and descriptive patterns. I first find that power and need are schematically distinct. Overall, respondents think in terms of institutions, elites, and parties when describing power, and in terms of class, disability, and race / ethnicity when describing need. As expected, stratification descriptions differ by subgroup. White Democrats discuss power and need using terms of race and class at significantly more frequent rates than White Republicans. I conclude the paper with an analysis of how CPN response patterns correspond with racial attitudes and reported protest participation in 2020-2021.

Author

• Eugenia Quintanilla, University of Michigan