Status Aspirations: Decoding the right-wing populist appeal for poor minorities in India, United States and Brazil
Once in power, how do economically center-right Right-wing Populist leaders attract poor and minority voters to their social coalition?
Together, these two papers investigate the political behavior and attitudes of low-status and high-status groups in unequal societies - including how an individual's social status shapes self-concept and its consequent impact on voting behavior and redistributive attitudes.
Why do symbolic national status appeals resonate with citizens at the bottom of social hierarchies? Existing explanations emphasize status threat among dominant groups or focus on material incentives among the poor, but offer limited insight into the motivations of those occupying the lowest positions in entrenched hierarchies. I argue that cues portraying the nation as rising in global standing elevate individuals’ subjective social status, particularly among low-status groups. A field survey experiment with 2,240 low-income respondents in India shows that such cues increase perceived personal status and narrow baseline status gaps. They also increase support for the incumbent among aspirational low-status voters—those who expect upward income mobility—with the strongest effects when national status gains are explicitly linked to group identity. The results identify subjective status gains as a demand-side mechanism through which symbolic national appeals can generate political support.
How does social privilege shape perceptions of economic standing? Using nationally representative data from the United States and India, two democracies structured by durable hierarchies of race and caste, I show that socially dominant groups (white Americans and upper-caste Indians) place themselves higher on the economic ladder than minorities with comparable incomes and report greater financial satisfaction. I term this pattern rank inflation. Mediation analyses demonstrate that subjective economic standing partly explains stronger anti-redistributive attitudes among high-status groups. The findings suggest that economic self-perception is shaped not only by material resources but also by inherited social status, extending beyond class identification to perceptions of relative income and financial satisfaction. The results clarify how social identity conditions perceived economic standing and highlight that survey measures of relative income and financial well-being may reflect the imprint of social hierarchy as much as material position.
Together, these two papers describe how expectations and experiences of economic mobility influence what policies people expect from the state using observational data from United States and India.
How can transparency strengthen regulation without expanding formal authority? This paper examines the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s public consumer complaint database and argues that transparent disclosure can operate as a capacity-enhancing form of regulation. By making complaint data publicly available, the CFPB transformed individual grievances into a shared informational infrastructure. This infrastructure enhanced internal regulatory intelligence, enabled distributed analysis by external actors, and reshaped firm and consumer behavior through public visibility. Together, these effects plausibly strengthened the Bureau’s ability to detect emerging problems, prioritize supervisory attention, and shape market conduct, even without new rules or sanctions. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative case study, the paper shows how transparency can generate informational effects that strengthen regulatory capacity over time. The findings extend scholarship on transparency and policy feedback by demonstrating how disclosure reshapes the informational and behavioral environment in which regulation operates, offering a distinct pathway through which states can regulate markets under resource constraints.
Populist leaders in power reshape not only domestic institutions but also the strategic environment in which firms operate. This article develops a framework of business response to populists in power. Drawing on contemporary cases, the article illustrates the distinction between dominant mechanisms: discretionary institutional control versus market politicization under continuing institutional constraints.
Why do some populist incumbents capture media and oversight institutions, while others engage primarily on rhetorical attacks against them (for instance, calling media organizations "fake news")? The paper describes institutional "Narrative Capture", constraints on such capture, and downstream implications on trust in media in democracries. The paper shows how the political economy of changing media business models, amongst other constraints that limit the power of the executive, has in turn enabled these diverging pathways that influence the content and coverage of political information in democracies.