Communication Colloquium: American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction
Monday, November 17, 2014 1:30pm to 2:45pm
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View map Free EventAmericans today face no shortage of threats to their financial well-being, such as job and retirement insecurity, health care costs, and spiraling college tuition. While one might expect that these concerns would motivate people to become more politically engaged on the issues, this often doesn’t happen, and the resulting inaction carries consequences for political debates and public policy. Moving beyond previously studied barriers to political organization, I shed light on the public’s inaction over economic insecurities by showing that the rhetoric surrounding these issues is actually self-undermining. By their nature, the very arguments intended to mobilize individuals—asking them to devote money or time to politics—remind citizens of their economic fears and personal constraints, leading to undermobilization and non-participation. I thus highlight distinctly communicative barriers to collective action. The result is that the set of people who become politically active on financial insecurity issues is quite narrow. When money is needed, only those who care about the issues but are not personally affected become involved. When time is needed, participation is limited to those not personally affected or those who are personally affected but outside of the labor force with time to spare. The latter explains why it is relatively easy to mobilize retirees on topics that reflect personal financial concerns, such as Social Security and Medicare. In general, however, when political representation requires a large group to make their case, economic insecurity threats are uniquely disadvantaged.
Adam Seth Levine is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell. He joined the Cornell faculty in 2011 after completing a joint Ph.D. in Political Science and M.A. in Applied Economics at the University of Michigan. He studies political communication, political behavior, and campaigns and has published in a variety of outlets including the Journal of Experimental Political Science, Journal of Politics, National Tax Journal, Perspectives on Politics, Political Analysis, Political Communication, Review of Behavioral Economics, and Southern California Law Review. The work he is presenting comes from a book that is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in 2015. Other work in this research agenda addresses communicative challenges related to climate change, money in politics, homeland security, and same-sex marriage. http://falcon.arts.cornell.edu/asl22/Home.html
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