Abstract

Politics in the United States has become increasingly polarized. Few areas of the political arena better reflect this than discourse on the social welfare state. Are the challenges faced by the working class primarily the result of personal shortcomings or broader systemic inequalities? Are working-class individuals maximizing their bootstraps’ famed potential, or does the dominant narrative around bootstraps serve to mask systemic issues? Is the working class working hard, or hardly working, and how much support, if any, should they receive? From kitchen tables to classrooms to Congress, divergent viewpoints reveal a profound and widening fissure over welfare retrenchment and, more fundamentally, about the sociopolitical and individual influences of poverty and economic inequality. What explains variation in individual perception of these issues? I theorize that gender affects perception of economic issues, with women being more likely than men to see them as systemic. I further hypothesize that education can attenuate these gender differences. I test my claims using responses from 15,728 participants in the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS). Responses did not indicate meaningful relationships between gender or education and perceptions of poverty or economic inequality. Additional investigations of subsets of the sample may uncover evidence of positive relationships that were not explored in my research.

Keywords

politics, poverty, economic inequality, public opinion, perception, gender, education, Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, CMPS, bootstraps, race, class, religion, immigration status, wealth, income, place, political affiliation, sociopolitical, survey, higher education

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