The Political Psychology of Scarcity in American Society
A Study of Culture, Discourse, and Public Opinion
A Study of Culture, Discourse, and Public Opinion
In the United States, the construct of scarcity is often casually understood in essentialist terms -- that is, as a straightforward characteristic of the natural world that is typically a source of social conflict. In this article, I complicate taken-for-granted constructions of scarcity by analyzing the influence of culture through an historical lens. Towards this end, I conduct a narrative analysis of primary source texts, including John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population. In my analysis, I approach these texts as cultural artifacts embodying the worldview of settler-colonial America and its cultural progenitors. Using this approach, I examine the cultural schemas by which scarcity psychology has shaped American political development, highlighting the contingent nature of scarcity constructs in traditional American thinking and contrasting them with alternative conceptions that emphasize cooperative responses to scarcity. This analysis culminates in a study of U.S. welfare policy, where I examine how cultural schemas linking scarcity with competition and hierarchy have shaped episodes of welfare contraction throughout American history.
Broadly speaking, scarcity is a psychological phenomenon in which one perceives there is not enough of some good for a given need or objective. While this definition of scarcity is relatively straightforward, the political implications of scarcity are far from clear, particularly insofar as they unfold in the context of the American racial hierarchy. Research in social psychology demonstrates that perceptions of scarcity increase racial discrimination while escalating orientations of competitiveness and amplifying selfish behavior. To what extent do these effects translate to political attitudes, and how does a person's racial positionality shape this dynamic? As a first step towards answering this question, my research leverages original survey data on the attitudes of white Americans and demonstrates the nuanced patterns by which perceived scarcity reduces support for redistribution and welfare while increasing economic system justification attitudes, racial resentment, and perceptions of racialized competition. These patterns play out in ways that may defy expectations, with Democrats most consistently exhibiting hierarchy-enhancing responses to scarcity in their political attitudes.
The perception of scarcity – in relation to myriad objects such as money, jobs, resources, etc. – powerfully influences cognitive dynamics of attention, such that a given scarcity object may capture one’s focus when primed and shape one’s political priorities. Following this insight, and considering the threat salience of scarcity in American political culture, I develop a theory of scarcity framing in which actors rhetorically set the scope of the policy agenda by problematizing specific objects of scarcity with political meanings that are congenial to their ideological leanings. I examine this theory through a content analysis of opinion pieces covering the COVID-19 pandemic in the liberal-leaning New York Times and the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal. While the literature focuses on economic scarcity, I inductively conceptualize two main categories of scarcity framing pertaining to objects of both economic scarcity and socio-material scarcity. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the frequency with which each scarcity object is emphasized is partially correlated with publication ideology. Taken as a whole, the content analysis demonstrates the overall prevalence of scarcity framing in media commentary and lays the groundwork for future research regarding the role of scarcity framing in opinion formation.