The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker

In a small corner of political science, scholars venture out into the world to talk with “real people” in depth and detail about how they think about political issues of the day. A foundation stone for this work is Robert E. Lane's Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does (1962). Lane is not exactly a marginal figure—Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale, a past president of the American Political Science Association (APSA). The APSA hands out an annual award in his honor for the best book in political psychology. Still, few political scientists have followed his lead. One of the rare exceptions has now fortuitously come to general attention. University of Wisconsin political scientist Katherine J. Cramer has added to her 2004 Talking About Politics another work that draws on the same original method, The Politics of Resentment. The distinctive flavor of both works arises from Cramer's choice to talk to “real people” without interviewing them. Instead of interviewing, she listens in—not quite a fly on the wall, but someone who enters into actual, unprompted discussions with people who gather on their own for coffee and for conversation, a “coffee klatch” as it is known, certainly in German-influenced Wisconsin. Cramer joined these gatherings in diners, cafes, McDonald's, and gas stations. She participated in conversations between 2007 and 2012 with 39 different groups in 23 primarily rural Wisconsin communities, returning to some of them half a dozen times. Her book concerns the uses of community and community identity as the ground for understanding politics. Here, she examines how a sense of place and a sense of identity as a rural person give rise to a particular vision of politics that she names “rural consciousness” and that opens up into a “politics of resentment.”