Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Citizens' Social Group Stereotypes as a Basis for Political Reasoning.

政治学的早期研究表明，公民围绕着“可见的社会群体”构建他们的政治态度，这意味着，为了简化政治选择，公民将政策问题转化为对所涉及群体的道德判断（匡威，1964）。然而，许多关于公民群体中心态度的研究都忽略了公民组织和评价彼此的主要手段：经济差异。考虑到最近学术界和媒体对不平等加剧的关注，这种疏忽令人惊讶。为了填补这一空白，促进平等共同体正在开展一个多阶段的论文项目，研究公民如何利用关于经济群体的陈规定型观念作为选择候选人和确定支持哪些政策的捷径。使用一个两阶段的数据收集项目，包括一个全国代表性的调查和后续调查实验，共同PI将研究公民对这些群体的信念，以及这些信念是如何影响政治推理。拟议的研究将解决三个问题。首先，公众对经济集团的信念的本质是什么？其次，这些信念对公民有何影响？政策态度？第三，认识到这些态度可能不是固定的，容易受到启动，在什么条件下，这些信念对公众舆论更重要或更不重要？这一建议针对的是现有政治学研究中的一种双重盲目性。虽然不平等学者已经解决了不平等加剧的制度原因和后果，但他们在评估社会群体组成变化与以群体为中心的政治行为之间的联系方面进展缓慢。相反，尽管政治心理学家在种族和性别刻板印象方面做了大量工作，但他们忽视了经济差异。这里提出的问题是建立在政治心理学和不平等研究的关键辩论的基础上的，并有助于这些辩论，此外还确定了这种态度的真实的世界政治后果。在过去几十年里，不平等以惊人的速度上升，而流动性却停滞不前。 《纽约》宣称我们正处于一个“新镀金时代”，这一切都表明，以经济为基础的群体对选民来说变得越来越重要，反过来，对公众舆论和政治结果都有影响力。为了最大限度地发挥拟议研究的影响，Co-PI计划公开数据，并易于纳入其他数据集。在这样做的过程中，这个数据收集项目将有望促进广泛的研究，没有考虑在共同PI的论文，并将提供一个理论和数据驱动的起点，对经济状况和公众舆论以及（当匹配到更高层次的数据）代表性和更广泛的经济因素的额外研究。Co-PI还将向学术会议和期刊提交这里提出的研究，以便向广大受众传播有关与政治行为相关的态度的见解，并为未来的研究提供方法论先例。

Early work in political science indicated that citizens structure their political attitudes around 'visible social groupings' meaning that, in an effort to simplify political choices, citizens turn questions of policy into moral judgments about the groups involved (Converse 1964). However, much of the research on citizens' group-centric attitudes has neglected a primary means by which citizens organize and evaluate one another: economic differences. This oversight is surprising, considering the recent scholarly and media attention given to rising inequality. In order to fill this gap, the Co-PI is undertaking a multi-stage dissertation project that examines the manner in which citizens use stereotypes about economic groups as a shortcut for selecting candidates and determining which policies to support. Using a two-stage data collection project comprised of a nationally representative survey and a follow-up survey experiment, the Co-PI will examine the beliefs that citizens have about these groups and how these beliefs are consequential for political reasoning. The proposed study will address three questions. First, what is the nature of the public's beliefs about economic groups? Second, how are these beliefs consequential for citizens? policy attitudes? Third, recognizing that these attitudes may not be fixed and are susceptible to priming, under which conditions are these beliefs more or less significant for public opinion?This proposal addresses a double-sided blindness in the existing research in political science. While inequality scholars have addressed the institutional causes and consequences of rising inequality, they have been slower to evaluate links between the changing composition of social groups and group-centered political behavior. Conversely, while political psychologists have produced abundant work on racial and gender stereotypes, they have discounted economic differences. The line of questioning proposed here builds on and contributes to key debates in both political psychology and the study of inequality, in addition to identifying the real world political consequences of such attitudes.Broader ImpactsResearch on economic differences is especially timely. Over the past few decades, inequality has risen at an alarming rate, while mobility has stagnated. The New York Times declaration that we are in a 'New Gilded Age' all suggest that economic-based groupings have become increasingly salient to voters and, in turn, influential for both public opinion and political outcomes. In order to maximize the impact of the proposed study, the Co-PI plans to make the data publicly available as well as easy to incorporate into other datasets. In doing so, this data-collection project will hopefully facilitate a wide array of studies that are not considered in the Co-PI's dissertation and will provide a theoretical and data-driven starting point for additional research on economic status and public opinion as well as (when matched to higher-level data) representation and broader economic factors. The Co-PI will also submit the research proposed here to scholarly conferences and journals in order to disseminate insights about the attitudes that are relevant to political behavior to a wide audience and provide a methodological precedent for future research.