How are Americans’ perceptions of their economic lives related to their perceptions of their agency (internal efficacy) and institutional responsiveness (external efficacy) in the political realm? We use the American Voices Project data to listen to such perceptions using in-depth, holistic analysis of a subsample of cases. We find that individuals’ understandings of their place in the economy resemble the sense of efficacy they express with respect to politics, with those with extreme economic insecurity talking about politics as a world removed from their own. These views are a stark indicator of the compounding effects of economic and political disaffection.
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- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2024.10.4.05
- ISBN
- 2377-8253 2377-8261
- Pages
- 16
- Published in
- United States of America
- Rights
- © 2024 Russell Sage Foundation. Cramer, Katherine, Elizabeth Youngling, and Clinton Rooker. 2024. “The Political Implications of Economic Lives: Listening to AVP Respondents’ Perceptions of Efficacy.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 10(4): 104–19. https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2024.10.4.05. We would like to thank the American Voices Project and the Russell Sage Foundation for access to these data, to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation for research support, and to participants in the RSF Building an Open Social Science Symposium, Kathryn Edin, David Grusky, and Larry Bartels for feedback on an earlier version. Direct correspondence to: Katherine Cramer, at kathy.cramer@wisc.edu, 110 North Hall, 1050 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI, 53706, United States.
