Sociology Department Colloquium: Jeff Manza

Please join us for a colloquium being given by Jeff Manza, Professor of Sociology at New York University.

Prisoners of the American Dream? Public Response and Nonresponse to Rising Inequality

How have Americans responded to rising income inequality? Many theories of public opinion and political economy anticipate that in the face of an ongoing shift in distributional outcomes such as we have seen over the past four decades, the mass public should demand more redistribution. Yet we find little evidence that such a shift in attitudes has occurred. Two factors stand out as limiting such a response: partisan polarization and persisting support for the American Dream. We propose a theory of motivated reasoning to understand why these factors have been powerful sources of public attitudes towards rising inequality.