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Mar 21, 2024 · A recent working paper charts the surprising politics of zero-sum thinking — or the belief that one individual or group’s gain is another’s loss — with a goal of offering fresh insight into our nation’s schisms. The buzzworthy paper was co-authored by Stefanie Stantcheva, the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy and founding ...
- Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides
the non-immigrants’ expense. Similarly, Republicans with a...
- Zero-sum thinking and political divides - Harvard Kennedy School
November 15, 2023, Paper: "An individual’s views on economic...
- Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides
Jul 23, 2021 · As she bustled around the kitchen, Biden recited a line that seemed so familiar that she nearly dropped her wineglass. “We’ve bought the view that America is a zero-sum game in many cases ...
Step 2: Make American politics feel higher-stakes, even more divisive. Step 3: Support candidates who reduce politics to winning and losing, and make everything feel zero-sum. Because America has a divided two-party system, such a strategy would make American politics more polarized and leave less middle ground. And because the American system ...
Dec 18, 2019 · To examine whether zero-sum thinking is distinct from simply siding with black Americans’ fight for equality, we ran a conceptual replication of study 5A (see study S3) in which participants read statements depicting racial progress in a manner that suggests a zero-sum dynamic (e.g., “Since the early 1960s, the amount of influence that black people have in politics has expanded at the ...
- Shai Davidai, Martino Ongis
- 2019
- Respondent Background
- Policy Views
- Zero-SumMindset
- Survey responses versus revealed preferences
- Robustness checks
- A. Political Preferences
- B. Policy Views
- Correlations of zero-sum thinking with policy views
- General zero-sum thinking versus domain-specific, mechanical link
- D. Zero-Sum Thinking and Puzzles Related to U.S. Politics and Policies
- Preferring policies against one’s economic self-interest
- Estimating equation
- = Respondent Experience +
- Grandparents Experience
- Direct effects
- Survey questions about ancestors
- Appendix B. Data Construction and Description
- Appendix C. Appendix Tables and Figures
- Appendix D. Robustness to Keeping Only the Most Attentive Respondents
- Petition to raise taxes
- Appendix G. Survey questionnaire
- Consent
- Please tell us whether you agree with the following statement:
Demographics Political Views Gender, age, household income, race, family situation, Party affiliation, voting record immigration history, employment, education
Perceptions of fairness and mobility Views aboutredistribution Views about government Factors contributing to economic Desired levelsof government and political issues status, mobility opportunities of intervention for income inequality Trustworthiness of government, of children, attitudes toward wealth and equality ofopportunity for others, views ...
Views on whether one group’s gains imply another group’s losses Ø Ethnic: “If one ethnic group becomes richer, this comes at the expense of other groups.” Ø Citizenship: “If non-U.S. citizens do better economically, this comes at the expense of U.S. citizens.” Ø Trade: “In trade, if one country makes more money, then another country makes less mone...
A natural question is to what extent self-reported beliefs and policy views reflect respondents’ true attitudes. We therefore include a series of “real-stakes” questions that ask respondents to engage in costly actions (such as donating to organizations or signing a petition in line with the policy views expressed). We describe these questions in A...
In addition to many robustness checks related to different parts of the analysis in Appendix C, we perform two in-depth checks on our main results in Appendix D, where we restrict the sample to the most attentive and careful respondents, and in Appendix E, where we test alternative formulations of the zero-sum questions that account for the possibi...
Although the raw data shows a significant positive relationship between the zero-sum index and Democratic affiliation, zero-sum thinking is not mainly explained by partisan attachment. In Figure 5, we show that although the average level of the zero-sum index is somewhat different between Democrats and Republicans, the distributions are approximate...
We next examine the association between our measure of zero-sum thinking and views about politics and policy. Our estimating equations take the following form: Yi = s(i) + Zero Sumi + XiG + "i (1) where i indexes individuals and s their state of residence. Zero Sumi is our measure of zero-sum thinking for individual i. s(i) denotes state-of-residen...
Figure 6 shows the correlations of zero-sum thinking with important policy views. We compute indices that measure the respondents’ pro-redistribution preferences as well as their race, anti-immigrant, and gender attitudes using the first principal component of the relevant questions from our survey. The questions that constitute each of the indices...
The estimates capture an association between our generalized zero-sum measure and policy views, rather than mechanical relationships between the topic or domain that is part of the zero-sum measure and the domain of the policy view. The results are similar and remain highly significant when we remove from the baseline zero-sum index the question th...
As we have seen, zero-sum thinking is not primarily a partisan issue. Instead, it appears to correlate with politics and policy views in more complex ways. In this section, we further develop this aspect of zero-sum thinking by highlighting cases where it helps to better understand some aspects of U.S. political and policy views.
The patterns documented here also suggest that zero-sum thinking might help to explain why groups sometimes have policy preferences that appear to cut against their own material interests. For example, it is often noted that the white, rural population tends to oppose government redistribution and social programs such as universal healthcare even t...
Our primary analyses consider the determinants of zero-sum thinking that emerge from individ-uals’ own experiences, which affect their values and beliefs and are then transmitted (vertically) to their descendant, the respondent. The equations we estimate take the following form: Zero Sumi
i p Parents Experience gp Grandparents Experience + XiG + s(i) + r(i) + "i (3) where i indexes survey respondents, r denotes their race, and s denotes their state of residence at the time. The variable Respondent Experiencei is a measure of the past experience of respondent i. Parents Experiencei and Grandparents Experiencei denote the measured exp...
i will measure ancestral exposure to certain environments. In these cases, the interpretation of p and gp is that they capture the influence on the parents or grandparents and the subsequent transmission of the traits from them to the respondent. The vector Xi,c,t includes the following controls: respondent i’s age, age squared, an indicator for th...
The final factor that we consider – a particularly important one in the U.S. historical context – is enslavement. Because of its close ties with race, we begin by examining the relationship between race and zero-sum thinking. We estimate a variant of equation (3) where the independent variables of interest are indicator variables for the race of th...
For each of six of the respondent’s ancestors – mother, father, paternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, and maternal grandmother – we ask three sets of questions aimed at collecting information about their year of birth, residential history, and other relevant characteristics like education and occupation. Specifically, we...
Variable Description Zero-sum index Pro-redistribution index Anti-immigration index Race attitudes index Gender attitudes index Luck more important than effort Perceived mobility Universalist morals Tradition is important Generalized trust Zero-sum thinking (WVS) First principal component of agreement with the following state-ments: “If an ethnic g...
Table C1: Correlations Among Zero-Sum Questions Notes: (+) and (-) indicate whether the question is increasing or decreasing in zero-sum views. Table C2: Correlations Among Location Questions Notes: The table shows the proportion of respondents for whom the indicated own or ancestral location variables (at the county level) are the same. For each c...
We next examine the robustness of our main results to the respondents’ level of attentiveness and care in answering the survey. To do so, we implement four stringent criteria that help us flag the most attentive respondents. Note that these criteria are intentionally strict for the sake of checking the robustness of our results, and respondents who...
Finally, we asked whether respondents were willing to sign a petition asking Congress to raise taxes on high-income households: Now we would like to ask you about a petition that we will send to the federal government. When the survey is complete, we will send the results to Congress, informing them what share of people who took this survey were wi...
By default, the questions were asked in all survey waves. Brackets indicate variations in the questions between survey waves, where [WX] means that a given question or answer choice was used in the survey wave X and [WX-WY] means it was used in survey waves X to Y.
1. We are a group of non-partisan academic researchers. Our goal is to understand how the external environment of an individual and their ancestors influences their views on policies. By completing this survey, you are contributing to our knowledge as a society. The survey also gives you an opportunity to express your own views. If you do not feel ...
“It is easy to find accurate and reliable information in the media these days”. Strongly agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly disagree
Mar 21, 2021 · This, McGhee argues, is the story of American politics in microcosm. The entire country is now one giant drained pool. ... namely that politics is a zero-sum contest in which one group’s gain ...
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November 15, 2023, Paper: "An individual’s views on economic policy could be shaped by ‘zero-sum thinking’: the view that any gain by one party necessitates a corresponding loss by another. This column explores the prevalence of zero-sum thinking in the US and its impact on policy preferences, through a survey of over 20,000 individuals. A zero-sum mindset is associated with more support ...
