Marco Aviña, "On the ‘Great Awokening’"
Recent scholarship hails rising racial liberalism among white Democrats as a racial reckoning and even a “Great Awokening.” Yet it overlooks crucial variation within this group. In this paper, I show affluent Americans have driven these changes, which I argue has major implications for the politics of racial and economic inequality in the US. I first document a class gap in racial liberalism going back 50 years. I then leverage George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests as a natural experiment. Using regression-discontinuity, difference-in-differences, and instrumental variable approaches, I find that previously reported shifts in public opinion and political behavior were strongest among affluent white Democrats. Moreover, high-income Americans were most likely to become Democrats as a result of the protests, and the protests’ impact on the 2020 presidential election was greatest in high-income counties. To probe mechanisms, I leverage data on local context and individual issue priorities. I adjudicate between competing theoretical accounts and provide evidence in support of opportunity hoarding and virtue signaling. These findings underscore class tensions deep within the Democratic coalition---how can a party increasingly reliant on affluent voters focused on identity politics also champion economic redistribution to the working class?
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel room K354 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20251007T160000Z DTEND:20251007T180000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR