How Political Narratives about Economic Inequality Influence Public Opinion

• In Event: Elite Discourse about Inequality and Framing Effects

Abstract

Scholars have been confounded by many Americans’ lack of concern about economic inequality and even denial of its prevalence. Common explanations for this phenomenon include citizen ignorance of economic facts as well as psychological biases, such as the tendency to engage in system justification. However, an alternate explanation for why public beliefs about the extent and nature of economic inequality are divorced from reality is that they are influenced by party propaganda. To justify their redistributive agenda, Democratic Party elites have tended to convey pessimism about “the American Dream,” resulting in a Democratic rank-and-file more critical of economic inequality. To justify their anti-redistributive agenda, Republican Party elites have historically conveyed greater optimism about Americans’ ability to get ahead via hard work, resulting in a Republican rank-and-file resistant to concerns over rising inequality. Finally, in recent years, a Trumpian Republican Party has offered a third ideology: justifying a nationalistic agenda by arguing globalization and immigration harm American workers.

Although observational studies support the above account, no scholar has tested this framework experimentally. As a result, its causal claims are open to the usual criticisms of observational data: are political elites in fact able to persuade citizens to deny, or acknowledge, that economic inequality is a social problem? If so, does changing public beliefs in this way have the intended downstream effect of encouraging people to adopt associated policy and candidate preferences?

In this experimental project, I test the power of politicized narratives to both inform public beliefs and condition their responses to accurate real-world information. Participants will first read a neutral economic account of economic inequality or they will be assigned to a control article. Next, participants in each experimental arm will be randomly assigned to an explanation for economic inequality: that the U.S. economy is meritocratic, meaning those who earn more work harder and are more skilled; that it is not meritocratic, meaning inequalities are structural; that low- and middle-income wages are suppressed due to globalization and immigration; or a control article. Finally, half of participants who read each economic narrative will be asigned the appropriate partisan cue.

Following the experiment, participants’ beliefs regarding the severity, causes, and perceived fairness of economic inequality will be assessed. The experimental design will conclude with a battery of economic policy attitudes and candidate preferences to test the real-world political influence of shifting beliefs about the economy.

This study will allow us to understand whether politicized narratives about economic inequality bias how Americans interpret economic data and influence relevant policy and candidate views. Manipulating the presence and absence of party cues will shed further light on the extent to which these narratives’ influence changes depending on a person’s shared partisan affiliation, or lack thereof, with a messenger. The results promise to shed light on the mystery of Americans’ muted response to inequality, Democrats’ increasing concerns over inequality, as well as working class Republicans’ surprising devotion to Donald Trump.

Author

• Elizabeth Suhay, American University