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Theory: Drawing on theories of group-based effects on political judgments, we argue that group-level economic perceptions may complement the familiar pocketbook and sociotropic indicators as determinants of political evaluations. We examine three processes by which groups may influence political judgement: group membership, group identification, and group comparison. Hypotheses: We hypothesize that people hold group-level economic perceptions that are independent from family-level and national-level appraisals, and that these group-level perceptions influence political judgments. Further, we develop a series of specific hypotheses regarding the influence of group membership, group identification, and group comparison on the link between economic perceptions and political evaluations. Methods: Our dependent variable is the presidential vote choice, with data from the 1984 South Bend Study. We estimate a series of logistic regression models of the presidential vote to explore if and how group-level economic perceptions affect the vote choice. Results: People do hold group-level economic perceptions that are largely independent from economic judgments regarding the family and the nation as a whole. Group-based economic assessments affect the presidential vote choice, but, surprisingly, this influence is not a function of group membership, group identification, or traditional forms of group comparison such as relative deprivation. Instead, findings point to the significance of a unique form of group comparison, sociotropic fairness: voters are substantially more likely to judge the president favorably if they feel that class groups have enjoyed similar rather than dissimilar changes in economic performance.
Mutz et al. (Wed,) studied this question.