Envy in Politics

Gwyneth H. McClendon

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780691204116, 9780691178653
• eBook ISBN: 9781400889815
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How envy, spite, and the pursuit of admiration influence politics

Why do governments underspend on policies that would make their constituents better off? Why do people participate in contentious politics when they could reap benefits if they were to abstain? In Envy in Politics, Gwyneth McClendon contends that if we want to understand these and other forms of puzzling political behavior, we should pay attention to envy, spite, and the pursuit of admiration--all manifestations of our desire to maintain or enhance our status within groups. Drawing together insights from political philosophy, behavioral economics, psychology, and anthropology, McClendon explores how and under what conditions status motivations influence politics.

Through surveys, case studies, interviews, and an experiment, McClendon argues that when concerns about in-group status are unmanaged by social conventions or are explicitly primed by elites, status motivations can become drivers of public opinion and political participation. McClendon focuses on the United States and South Africa—two countries that provide tough tests for her arguments while also demonstrating that the arguments apply in different contexts.

From debates over redistribution to the mobilization of collective action, Envy in Politics presents the first theoretical and empirical investigation of the connection between status motivations and political behavior.

TWO	Applications

In 2011 the New York Times published an article on the regulation of tombstones and burial sites in Chengdu, China.¹ The local government in Chengdu had imposed limits on the size of burial plots and the height of tombstones, restricting them to 1.5 square meters and 100 centimeters, respectively. Other local governments had placed limits on funeral expenditures and razed elaborate tombs. Public officials were trying to limit the extravagance with which some Chinese elites were burying their dead.

The new local regulations were not motivated by a scarcity of space or the need to generate revenue, the article reported. Instead, public officials were trying to manage the reactions of those being made to feel both poorer and less respected by the burial displays. A local resident interviewed for the article explained, “Ordinary people who walk by and see these lavish tombs might not be able to keep their emotions in balance.” Public officials feared that those left behind by their neighbors might become envious and respond with hostility. Politicians were stepping in because social conventions no longer seemed to be keeping social conflict in check. The article detailed the dramatic ways that economic inequality had increased in these localities in recent decades.² The nouveau riche were behaving in ways that were insensitive to the less well off. Social conventions for managing reactions to inequality were breaking down.

In many ways, this account resonates with insights about status motivations described in the introduction of this volume. People are sensitive to their local relative position, both in terms of their economic standing and in terms of the respect they are shown (or not shown). Government officials seek to regulate visible forms of economic disparities in order to minimize the hostility of neighbors, broadly defined, against neighbors. These efforts arise in the wake of economic and social shifts that have created new patterns of wealth and destabilized social conventions.

But, of course, this example does not on its own establish that the argument advanced in this book is correct. First, it is difficult to verify the role of status motivations in this kind of anecdotal account. The account provides little insight into whether citizens are willing to pay personal costs in order to reduce the position of others and improve their own—that is, whether they are concerned with relative position per se. Second, it might not be all that surprising that status motivations could shape policy in China. China has a communist economic system, where efforts to manage economic disparities might be par for the course.³ The Chinese government has been known to engage in forms of social engineering to manage and shape the behavior and social interactions of citizens,⁴ particularly for the purposes of avoiding eruptions of social conflict.⁵

However, there are ways to look systematically for the political implications of status motivations, and we can look for these observable implications in more surprising places. In the following applications, I look for evidence of the main arguments in two capitalist democracies: South Africa and the United States. I focus on three different political puzzles: Why do some citizens support redistribution and taxation policies that are contrary to their material interests? Why do politicians sometimes fail to implement funded policies that would make most of their constituents better off in absolute terms? Why do citizens participate in contentious politics when it is individually costly to do so? If Lasswell was right that “politics is who gets what, when, and how,” these applications touch on many core areas of political science research.⁶ The findings resonate with the anecdotal account from China even though the applications do not target conspicuous consumption specifically. As in the anecdotal account, people’s concerns for their within-group status have consequences for political preferences and behavior, especially when social conventions for managing status motivations are weak or when elites explicitly prime status rewards.

As discussed in the introduction, the following are essays in the French sense of “attempts.” Rather than examining a single political puzzle and seeking one primary explanation for it, I work the other way around: I start with one insight about human psychology and tease out its implications for several political puzzles. The applications explore why people take political positions and actions that are, on balance, materially costly for them. They share the insight that when status concerns are unmanaged by informal social mechanisms or are explicitly primed by elites, they can lead people to make material sacrifices in order to secure a higher status. Otherwise, the applications proceed quite differently. The puzzles are varied, as are the manifestations of status motivations (envy, spite, the desire for esteem) that I use to explain them. I have pursued diversity, at times at the expense of cohesion. My hope is that the results highlight the disparate domains (and ways) in which status motivations can influence politics.

Preferences over Redistribution

Democratic citizens across the economic spectrum often support redistribution policies that are contrary to their self- and class interests. Many poor people in highly unequal democracies do not support high levels of redistribution, even though they would benefit from such a policy. Likewise, many rich citizens of democracies are content to pay disproportionate levels of income tax, even though such policies leave less money in their pockets.⁷

Indeed, despite high and growing levels of economic inequality in the United States and South Africa, both exhibit considerable variation in the attitudes of the poor toward redistribution, and the rich often support high taxes.⁸ In South Africa, despite a history of extreme economic and racial inequality, Wegner and Pellicer estimated that only a third of poor black South Africans support efforts to increase redistribution while more than half of the rich (black or white) support or are neutral toward such efforts.⁹

An extensive literature examines why some citizens support redistribution policies that would make them materially worse off. Some explanations reconceptualize material self-interest to focus on long-term and group interests, while others reach beyond material interests to focus on alternative motivations such as altruism and a desire for fairness. I do not discount these alternative explanations and discuss them in more detail below. Instead, my goal is to explore the possibility that status motivations are also part of the story.

Progressive taxation and redistribution affect a person’s pocketbook as well as her relative position within local social groups: a person who is rich by national standards is often surrounded in her day-to-day life by even richer people. Even though she is doing well in absolute terms, constant reminders of her local relative disadvantage can affect her happiness and incite her envy. Where she has strong, established ties with her neighbors, there might be social conventions for managing these feelings. In the absence of such mechanisms, more progressive taxation can be a vehicle for reducing some of the disparity between her richer neighbors and herself, thus lessening her envy, even though it is costly to her. Similarly, a person who is poor by national standards is often surrounded by even poorer people. While more progressive taxation would make her better off in an absolute sense, she might oppose such policies because it would reduce her local relative advantage. In short, some variation in preferences over redistribution might be explained by the dynamics of envy and spite within local reference groups.

The main observable implication of this argument is that a citizen’s preferences regarding national distribution policies should be influenced by how well off she is within her local reference group, controlling for alternative factors. The worse off a citizen is compared to neighbors similar to herself, for instance, the more supportive she should be of increasing taxation and redistribution, because it will improve her local within-group status, even if those policie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• One. Introduction: Status Concerns and Political Behavior
• Two. Applications
• Three. Elaborations on the Main Arguments
• Four. Conclusion
• Technical Notes
• Bibliography
• Index