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“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群体的道德判断(匡威1964)。然而，许多关于公民以群体为中心的态度的研究忽略了公民相互组织和评估的一个主要手段：经济差异。考虑到最近学术界和媒体对日益加剧的不平等的关注，这种疏忽令人惊讶。为了填补这一空白，联合和平研究所正在进行一个分多个阶段的论文项目，研究公民如何利用对经济群体的刻板印象作为选择候选人和确定支持哪些政策的捷径。利用一个由全国代表性调查和后续调查实验组成的两个阶段的数据收集项目，联合-PI将检查公民对这些群体的信念，以及这些信念如何对政治推理产生影响。拟议的研究将涉及三个问题。首先，公众对经济群体的信仰的性质是什么？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，容易被启动，在什么条件下，这些信念对公众舆论是更重要还是更不重要？这一建议解决了现有政治学研究中的双面盲目。尽管研究不平等的学者探讨了不平等加剧的制度原因和后果，但他们在评估不断变化的社会群体构成与以群体为中心的政治行为之间的联系方面进展较慢。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。这里提出的问题路线建立在政治心理学和不平等研究的关键辩论的基础上，并有助于识别这种态度在现实世界中的政治后果。广泛影响对经济差异的研究尤其及时。在过去的几十年里，不平等以惊人的速度加剧，而流动性却停滞不前。《纽约时报》宣称我们正处于一个新的镀金时代，这一切都表明，以经济为基础的群体在选民中变得越来越重要，进而对公众舆论和政治结果产生了影响。为了最大限度地发挥拟议研究的影响，联合PI计划将数据公之于众，并便于纳入其他数据集。通过这样做，这一数据收集项目有望促进联合--非政府组织的论文中没有考虑到的各种研究，并将为进一步研究经济状况和民意以及(如果与更高级别的数据相匹配)代表性和更广泛的经济因素提供一个理论和数据驱动的起点。联合国际还将把这里提出的研究提交给学术会议和期刊，以便向更广泛的受众传播关于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.