Oct 15, 2026 | 2025 Analysis, Current Events, Elections, expert analysis, Foreign Affairs, International, National, Policy
Dr. Shibley Telhami—the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and an influential scholar on foreign affairs and American public opinion on the Middle East—presented a sweeping historical picture yesterday of how American attitudes toward Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have evolved in recent decades.
“What we’re witnessing is a paradigmatic shift that’s likely to last that sees Israel as a villain and perhaps even a genocidal villain,” Telhami said in a seminar presented to the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. “We have something that I think is more than just a short-term shift in public opinion, and that is much deeper than people may assume.”
Telhami’s central argument, based on his work polling American attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1989, is that Americans’ support for Israel– waning gradually over the past 15 years– experienced a dramatic crash following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack and the Israeli assault on Gaza. Telhami: “The dam finally broke in Gaza once the scale of the Israeli assault became clear.”
A Paradigm Shift
Telhami emphasized that this transformation did not begin with the war in Gaza, but was building over time. Telhami’s polling data of past decades showed that a majority of Americans have consistently said they want the U.S. to take “neither side” in the conflict. Among the minority who did express a preference, support for Israel outweighed support for the Palestinians by wide margins—often five or six to one. Telhami has seen that gap close over time, with fewer Americans choosing “neither side,” and among those who do take sides, a narrowing—and eventually reversing—preference, especially among Democrats.
It was a shift Telhami tracked and anticipated. In 2014, Telhami published an op ed in Foreign Policy entitled “America Has a Plan, and No, It Isn’t One That Israel Would Like,” and in 2015, his widely cited Monkey Cage blog for the Washington Post, “How to (almost) eliminate the partisan divide on the Middle East,” explored the widening partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats regarding Israel-Palestine. The divide was largely driven by evangelical Christians, and fanned by Netanyahu’s criticism, before Congress, of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.
Under Biden, Telhami’s University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll confirmed that half of young Democrats (under 35) disapproved of the new U.S. president’s handling of the May 2021 Gaza conflict. Writing for the Brookings Institution, Telhami argued that the data underscored a generational shift that would prove to be a warning sign of a widening fracture within the Democratic coalition, and anticipated that could impact Biden’s reelection.
Telhami’s polling data showed an initial, dramatic spike in sympathy for Israel in the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attacks—the largest poll-to-poll increase he has measured in decades of surveying. But this reversed within roughly two weeks, even before the full scope of Israel’s military actions was apparent. Young Democrats did not shift in attitudes during this initial spike– and as the war intensified, their sympathies moved decisively toward the Palestinians.
Telhami used Gallup Poll data to illustrate the scale of the overall reversal: Sympathy for Israel among all Americans fell from roughly 50% to 36%, while sympathy for Palestinians rose to 41%. Among Democrats specifically, the shift was described as “stunning”—support for Israel plummeted from over 50% in 2001 to roughly 17% in recent polling, while sympathy for Palestinians rose to 65%. Republican attitudes, by contrast, remained largely stable or even slightly strengthened in favor of Israel—with one critical exception.
A Generational Gap in Both Parties
Telhami’s data show a narrowing generational gap among Democrats and growing gap among Republicans.
Pew polling cited by Telhami showed that among Democrats, the gap between younger and older cohorts on unfavorable views of Israel has nearly disappeared (71% vs. 66%). Between 2022 and 2025, younger and older Democrats turned more negative toward Israel, but negative views among younger Democrats grew by 9 percent, compared with a 23-point increase among older Democrats.
Even more notable is movement among younger Republicans: Unfavorable views of Israel in this group rose from 35% to 57% in a short span—a shift Telhami called evidence that this is “spreading to more segments of society,” not confined to the political left.
Telhami’s research on evangelicals demonstrated that younger evangelicals, unlike their elders, were “walking away” from unconditional support for Israel.
When asked whether Israel’s actions in Gaza were “justified” as self-defense, only 22% of young Republicans responding to Telhami’s poll agreed, compared to 52% of older Republicans.
Why Now? Drivers of the Shift
Telhami outlined several interlocking explanations for why this issue has moved from the margins to the center of American political consciousness:
- Rising priority for those attuned to the issue: Drawing on decades-old research with colleague Jon Krosnick, Telhami explained that policy influence depends less on broad public opinion than on “issue publics”—segments who rank an issue as a top priority. Historically, this issue public was small but overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Now, younger Democrats increasingly rank Israel-Palestine as a high concern, possibly because they view it as emblematic of broader commitments to human rights and democracy.
- Perceptions of genocide and American complicity: Telhami’s polling shows substantial and growing numbers of Americans—including a plurality of the general public and majorities of Democrats—describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide” or “major war crimes akin to genocide.” More than 60% of respondents said U.S. military and diplomatic support actively enabled these actions, tying the issue directly to American foreign policy rather than treating it as a distant humanitarian concern.
- The Iran War as an accelerant: Telhami argued that the U.S. strike on Iran transformed the issue from a foreign policy question into what he called a “pocketbook issue,” linked tangibly to energy prices and inflation. Public discourse increasingly framed the war as one the U.S. entered on behalf of Israel and Netanyahu.
- A “permission structure” for criticism: Telhami theorized that a social and psychological threshold had been crossed: Once enough people began publicly criticizing Israel, others who privately held similar views felt emboldened to speak out, having previously assumed they were in the minority. Telhami’s polling of the public and of scholars of political science has directly asked whether and why Americans have self-censored in sharing their views on Israel-Palestine. Pre-war, more than 60% of scholars reported feeling the need to self-censor when discussing Israel-Palestine professionally, with the overwhelming majority citing fear of appearing critical of Israel. That figure rose above 80% after October 7. Extending this research to the general public, Telhami found that 42% of Americans say they feel the need to be “careful” discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in public—compared to only 29% who say the same about Russia-Ukraine.
Looking Ahead: Fragility, Wild Cards, and Electoral Consequences
Telhami closed with reflections on the durability of this shift and its political stakes:
- Israeli elections: While some observers hope a new Israeli government might ease American concerns, polling data suggests dissatisfaction with Israel runs deeper than opposition to Netanyahu personally.
- Islamophobia as a “wild card”: Telhami highlighted dramatically rising unfavorable views of Muslims among Republicans—now at a 12-year high—which could continue to anchor pro-Israel sentiment within the GOP even as other factors erode it.
- Trump and Republican fragility: Telhami argued that Republican support for Israel is more fragile than commonly assumed, and that anchoring this support in this moment is is President Trump’s personal backing of Israel. A political shift in course from the GOP might not result in major backlash from the evangelical base that supports Trump for reasons unrelated to Israel.
- Electoral consequences: Telhami argued that the Israel-Palestine issue contributed to Democratic losses in 2024, including Kamala Harris’s defeat, citing both polling data and firsthand knowledge of internal campaign dynamics. He suggested the upcoming midterms will reveal how durable this electoral effect proves to be, with races like those in Texas potentially offering more revealing tests than reliably Democratic states like Michigan.
While acknowledging uncertainty about how this shift will translate into concrete policy outcomes that are never purely a function of public opinion, Telhami asserted: “Public opinion will matter more on this issue than it has in the past. I have no doubt about that.”
This post was written by Tevah Platt, who manages communications for the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. It is based on Telhami’s presentation on Oct. 14, 2026 in the CPS Interdisciplinary Workshop on Politics and Policy.
Learn more: Telhami’s newly released 2026 Critical Issues Poll data tracks prejudice toward Jews and Muslims among the American public, and also measures change in how Americans define antisemitism and the extent to which they differentiate attitudes against Jews and Judaism from attitudes against Israel and Zionism.
Apr 28, 2025 | 2025 Analysis, Current Events, expert analysis, Foreign Affairs, International, National, Policy
By ANNE PITCHER
What do the following activities, organizations, and companies have in common:
- The Soybean Innovation Lab in Illinois
- The delivery of food aid in Ukraine
- The provision of antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV in South Africa
- Neonatal care in Ghana
- John Deere tractors, and
- Land grant universities like Michigan State University?
All of them have benefitted from partnerships with, and/or funding from, the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Most of them have been significantly affected by stop-work orders affecting USAID that were issued after President Donald Trump took office.
The gutting of USAID within the first 100 days of the Trump administration has upended the aid sector around the world.
This post provides a brief overview of USAID: What does the agency do? What has happened, and what are the consequences?
So What Is USAID?
USAID was created by Congress in 1961 under President John F. Kennedy to administer humanitarian aid and programs on behalf of the US government. In recent years it has distributed some $40 billion annually in aid to 120 countries, providing support to address illness and hunger, neonatal care, clean water, electricity, and disaster relief. Among its many tasks, it promotes democracy all over Africa, conservation efforts in the Amazon, and awareness campaigns about clean air across Southeast Asia. Its spending, procurement, and project implementation procedures are subject to rigorous oversight and compliance regulations administered by the USAID Office of the Inspector General.
USAID does not give aid directly to governments. Instead, it often provides “tied aid,” meaning that the aid is conditional on recipients spending aid funding on American goods and services. For example, USAID might partner with a for-profit company like John Deere, which makes agricultural equipment, or agricultural seed companies like Corteva Agriscience, to deliver agricultural aid. USAID also provides funding to international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as CARE, World Vision, Doctors Without Borders, or Catholic Relief Services, or domestic NGOs in Benin, Thailand, or Nicaragua that offer assistance in sectors from health care to education in developing countries. Some of these NGOs depend on USAID for a large percentage of their budgets. Finally USAID has partnered with US land grant universities like MSU to engage in research on water, electricity provision, or food security.
And although the much loved Peace Corps is a separate government agency it has worked closely with USAID. The Peace Corps was created in 1961 under the administration of President John F. Kennedy after he proposed it on a campaign stop at the University of Michigan when he was running for President. The Peace Corps has partnered with USAID on projects such as the Small Project Assistance Program to support community-driven projects such as the prevention of malaria or human trafficking, or disaster preparedness. Many Peace Corps volunteers often go on to serve rewarding and productive careers at USAID.
Washington, DC, USA- March 1, 2020: One of the entrance of United States Agency for International Development in Washington, DC, USA, an independent agency of the United States federal government.
What Has Happened?
On returning to office for his second and last term as President, Donald Trump signed an executive order that froze almost all international spending for a 90-day review. Cuts to foreign assistance were spelled out in detail on January 24, 2025, followed by the filing of termination and leave notices to USAID employees. In a lightning speed process, thousands of employees had been terminated by late February. As of last month, an estimated 50,000 US citizens and twice as many foreign service nationals had lost their jobs due to cuts. It has now been reported that many termination letters contained a number of serious errors which has affected severance pay and pension payouts for some USAID employees.
Besides domestic workers, thousands of people were contracted from all over the world to work for USAID. Many had loyally served USAID for decades. Those employees who work for USAID on annual contracts (as many who work abroad do) cannot file for unemployment. Some have been stranded in Egypt, Mozambique, Togo, and Cambodia, without a clear path for planning or paying for a return to the U.S. of themselves, their families, and their belongings.
With regard to USAID funds, approximately 5800 out of 6200 multi-year contracts, to the tune of $54 billion, have been cancelled. Waivers have been provided for life-saving humanitarian aid, but other requests have faced the problem that, with the dismantling of USAID, there are no staff in place to review them. Further directives issued in recent months have put exemptions on hold and another 42 of the remaining 900 contracts have been canceled. A USAID internal report notes that the stop work order was implemented so quickly that food aid was left rotting in ports and warehouses en route to its destination. Vehicles were impounded. Buildings shuttered.
After Elon Musk made a show of remedying an apparent error in DOGE’s massive cuts to foreign aid, the Trump administration quietly doubled down on its decision to stop sending emergency food to millions of children who are starving in Bangladesh, Somalia, and other countries, The Atlantic reported in April.
The Trump administration announced plans in March that USAID would come fully under that State Department and reduce its staff to about 15 positions. An email to USAID employees titled “U.S.A.I.D.’s Final Mission” detailed the plan despite lawmakers’ objections that the efforts to downsize the agency were unconstitutional. USAID employees were also ordered in March to shred and burn personnel documents.
What Are the Consequences?
Most affected by cuts to USAID include patients receiving drugs for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, and children in developing countries who get vaccines. In addition, they include women in Ghana receiving neonatal care, and approximately one million Rohingya from Myanmar whose rations in a refugee camp in Bangladesh will likely be cut in half if more funds are not raised soon. They include almost half of the population of Sudan who face acute hunger. Within weeks of the cuts to USAID, 80% of community kitchens across Sudan closed, leaving millions at risk of dying from starvation or preventable illness. Finally, they include Ukrainians receiving corn from American farmers.
Children around the world are already dying as a result of the cuts, and experts are projecting hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of anticipated deaths in coming months and years from hunger, AIDS, and tuberculosis. Until recently, around 27 million children benefitted from nutrition programs that USAID funded; 4 million received antiretrovirals and 13 million others received treatment from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a health program started under President George Bush, which has now been halted.
Now, around 1,400 infants are being infected by HIV every day, an infection rate that might have been prevented had the new US administration not cut funding to USAID and HIV/AIDS organizations. About 3 million more children and adults will die from HIV-related causes before 2030 because of global aid cuts, according to projections published in HIV Lancet.
With respect to conflict prevention, Andrew Natsios, the former head of USAID under President George Bush, who identifies as a “conservative internationalist” has argued that there is a connection between rising food prices and conflict. He worries that without the food aid provided by USAID, we could witness an alarming rise in conflicts in developing countries that are vulnerable to spikes in food prices due to shortages or climate change. This could have demonstrable effects on our own national security and stability.
Several scholars have observed that these cuts also affect US national security by undercutting our reliance on soft power. Soft power relies on humanitarian relief, food aid, and democracy promotion that strengthens our alliances with other countries. An unintended aspect of soft power is that many of the foreign service nationals who work for USAID abroad often end up as members of parliament, heads of NGOs, or ministers in their own countries. This means the United States already has linkages and allies that serve national governments in other countries which has potential benefits for the US. Such connections will be weakened with the demise of USAID.
Finally, as we saw last month with the earthquake in Myanmar, the US retreat means our replacement by China and Russia, which ultimately undercuts our national interest and our moral standing in the world.
This post is based on a presentation by Anne Pitcher given at the second 2025 teach-in organized by University of Michigan faculty examining “US Democracy in Peril: National and Global Implications.” The event was held March 19, 2025, in the U-M Chemistry Building. Anne Pitcher is Associate Chair of Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and Director of Graduate Studies, and is the Joel Samoff Collegiate Professor of Political Science and Afroamerican and African Studies. CPS faculty have offered ongoing expert analysis on political events of 2025. Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies contributed updates to this report.
Feb 18, 2025 | 2025 Analysis, Current Events, National, Policy
Over the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders – more than 70 of them– that include controversial directives on immigration, the slashing of foreign aid, and the reshaping of the federal government. Organizations defending the rule of law have sounded the alarm that the orders breach constitutional separation of powers and violate due process, and many have already been challenged in court. Is this storm of executive orders unique? And in the end, will this strategy succeed?
Kenneth Lowande, a political scientist affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan, is an expert on executive power, and the author of the recently published book, ““False Front: The Failed Promise Of Presidential Power In A Polarized Age.”
As part of a “teach-in” panel organized by Josh Pasek and faculty to help students understand what’s happening, Lowande argued that the executive orders of the Trump administration are unprecedented because they are illegal power grabs by design, and that their success depends critically on compliance.
A bit of background: Executive orders are presidential instructions that direct executive branch agencies and staff to take specific actions. Presidents often use executive orders to kick off their first 100 days in office to revoke executive orders of previous administrations and to signal they’ll make good on the promises of their campaign.
Lowande has argued that it is normal for politicians to pursue executive actions, even when they know they will fail. Unilateral solutions are often inefficient, short-lived, or empty, but presidents issue the orders to put on a compelling show for key constituencies. It is also normal, says Lowande, for presidents– Republicans and Democrats– to use ambiguous laws to change policy.
What we are seeing in 2025 is different in two ways, Lowande says. The first difference, he argues, is that political wins for the Trump administration are the first and most important objective.
“Today, they’ve hastened the expansion of a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which will cost orders of magnitude more to construct than normal. They released reservoir water in California for no conceivable purpose. They attempted to freeze all federal spending without a good warning of preparation. Any president could have done those things,” said Lowande. “But for the second Trump administration, making political wins seems to be the point. The volume and pace [of executive action] is designed to give you the impression that Trump can do anything.”
The second difference, says Lowande, is that the executive orders appear to be designed to be illegal. “President Trump today is not fundamentally different than he was eight years ago,” said Lowande. “He doesn’t have different ideas about policy. The main difference is that he’s surrounded by people who will sign off on actions even when they suspect that their actions might later be determined to be unlawful.”
In a statement issued last week, the nonpartisan American Bar Association cited attacks on constitutionally protected birthright citizenship; the dismantling of USAID; attempts to criminalize those who support lawful programs to eliminate bias and enhance diversity, and the summary dismantling of departments and entities created by Congress as examples of “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself.”
To take effect, an executive order must be “founded on the authority of the president derived from the Constitution or statute.” And to be exercised, an executive order must in the end be carried out by a bureaucrat.
The Trump administration has opened the game with a strategy of moving first and furiously with orders that are legally risky. The enforcement of those orders may in turn be costly: Opening up dozens of different policy processes has the potential to tax the time and energy of staff. According to Lowande, we can assume that the administration hopes the federal workforce will follow those orders without being forced.
“The success of President Trump’s executive actions depends on people believing,” said Lowande. “It depends on courts, businesses, this university and other organizations acting as if the president actually has the power that he claims to.”
Media narratives that describe the president steamrolling Washington are effectively creating the narrative the President and his advisors need for their strategy to be successful, said Lowande.
An opposing strategy would depend on accurate knowledge about the limitations of executive power. The opposition would need to force the administration to use its energy to make people comply with their directives. And in the face of risk, the people asked to comply would need to draw on their courage.
Kenneth Lowande is an Associate Professor of Political Science, Associate Professor of Public Policy (by courtesy), and a Faculty Associate at the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research.
The teach-in held at Angell Hall during last week’s snowstorm was attended by an estimated 400-500 students seeking to learn about U.S. political institutions. The event also marked the 60th anniversary of the first teach-in convened in the United States, held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War protests of 1965, also at Angell Hall.
This post was written by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies, with contributions from Kenneth Lowande.
Jan 23, 2024 | Economics, National, Policy, Race
Information about the wealth gap between Blacks and whites increases Americans’ awareness of disparity, but does little to increase their support for affirmative action, reparations
Since the “racial reckoning” of 2020, Americans have become increasingly aware of the barriers Black people face to accessing economic opportunities and achieving intergenerational mobility.
But despite widespread knowledge that racial inequality exists, even among liberal, white Americans, the public is radically uninformed about the depths of one of the most profound racial disparities: the racial wealth gap.
According to the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, which collects nationally representative data on American households, the median white family has about 8 times more wealth (that is, total assets minus total debts) than the median Black family. And, despite popular perceptions of education as the vehicle for eliminating racial disparities, education does little to diminish the gap between Blacks and whites. The median white family where the household head did not finish high school has virtually the same wealth as the median Black family where the household head earned a bachelor’s degree. In other words, a Black American has to graduate from college to access the same level of wealth as a white high school dropout.
If you find these numbers startling and even difficult to believe, you are not alone.
Since 2020, my research team, which includes Vincent Hutchings, Kamri Hudgins, and Sydney Carr, has been learning what happens when we correct misperceptions of the racial wealth gap. Does informing people about the size of the racial wealth gap influence opinions about policies to address the gap? How does the public react to information about the racial wealth gap?
Using a novel survey experiment fielded on three nationally diverse samples, we found that exposing both Black and white Americans to information about the size of the racial wealth gap increases their awareness of this disparity– but exposure to this information does little to increase their support for race-targeted social and economic policies like affirmative action and reparations.
For example, among white participants, exposure to our racial wealth gap information treatment increased awareness of the size and severity of the racial wealth gap by, on average, 7 to 18% across the two studies. However, exposure to the same information did not significantly increase support for race-targeted policy changes to reduce the racial wealth gap among white or Black participants.
In contrast, our treatments did increase support for race-neutral equity policies like baby bonds, a program that would fund a trust for every newborn child to establish a baseline level of wealth for all Americans. When informed that Black college graduates have the same level of wealth as white high school dropouts, both liberal and conservative white Americans’ support for baby bonds increased significantly. For conservatives, support increased by 12% moving from a baseline of .41 (indicating weak opposition) to .53 (indicating weak support). For liberals, support increased by 11% moving from .71 (strong support) to .82 (very strong support).
But economists argue that race-neutral programs like baby bonds or canceling student loan debt would not be nearly enough to close the racial wealth gap. For example, Duke University economist William Darity, Jr. proposes that only a comprehensive reparations program requiring “the full resources of the federal government” to redistribute wealth to Black Americans would be sufficient for closing the gap.
Those who believe legislative action on reparations is urgently needed will find the political momentum behind it at the federal level to be insufficient. President Joe Biden made the most progress on this issue of any president in history when he proposed a commission to study whether or not reparations should be paid to Black descendants of the enslaved. But the bill has effectively died in committee and there have been no votes on the House floor regarding the commission or any other reparations policies. While several states and localities have made more progress toward providing reparations to Black residents and, in some instances, (like Evanston, Illinois) have even begun issuing payments, these programs will not resolve the Black wealth crisis nationwide.
As this project develops, we hope to probe public opinion on other racial disparities, including the racial gap in rates of maternal mortality, and increase scholarly and public understanding of what it takes to move the public towards action on racial inequality.
This post was written by Zoe Walker. Tevah Platt contributed to its development.
Zoe Walker is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. Her dissertation research, supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, considers how beliefs about economic opportunity influence perceptions of racial inequality and support for racially redistributive policies among Black Americans.
Sydney Carr, Kamri Hudgins, and Zoe Walker are all Next Generation scholars of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and were consecutive recipients of the Hanes Walton, Jr. Endowment for Graduate Study in Racial and Ethnic Politics at the Center for Political Studies.
Hanes Walton, Jr. of the Center for Political Studies transformed the study of Black politics and helped establish it as a subfield of political science. The 2024 Hanes Walton Jr. Lecture at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research will be presented by Christian Davenport on Feb. 1.
Dec 15, 2023 | Conflict, Policy
As an undergraduate, associate professor Megan Stewart took a class on Middle East politics and became interested in how a political movement, like the Muslim Brotherhood, was providing social services. She pursued that inquiry by going to Egypt herself to do interviews. That was the first field work of what has become her academic expertise—the intersection of political violence and overlapping systems of governance. Her continuing research has taken her to Baalbek in Lebanon to study Hezbollah, as well as to Timor-Leste, Australia, Sweden, Portugal, and the UK.
Stewart, who joined the Ford School faculty in 2022, brings that combination of real-world experience and intellectual acumen to her new role as director of the International Policy Center (IPC). (Former director John Ciorciari is on leave this academic year.)
She has examined Black political leadership in the aftermath of the Civil War and the rise of female innovators in post-WWII America, as well as topics as diverse as land distribution in China, Zimbabwe, Vietnam, Eritrea, and Colombia; the social policies of insurgent groups; and even the implementation of the metric system in revolutionary France. Her research ultimately rests at the nexus of political violence and attempts to radically redistribute social, economic, and political power.
“My motivation has been to find out what is the relationship between redistributive projects and political violence? Under what conditions do political actors attempt challenging and complicated redistributive projects? Under what conditions are redistributive projects successful, and when they fail, why? Is there a particular element that drives it one way or the other?” she explains.
“The Ford School has a real expertise and history of excellence in social policy, which I consider as policy that takes social inequalities seriously. I’d like to think that in the context of civil war and political violence, my research is doing the same.”
Stewart’s understanding of those recent and historic movements, and their successes and failures, can inform new policy on some of the most pressing issues, like how to think about climate change, the role of climate reparations, and the distributive implications thereof. “Climate reparations have the potential to challenge existing distributions of economic power. Because I believe in these programs, I want to know the conditions under which they are likely to be successful. Under what conditions do the policies last? What is the possibility for backlash, especially violent backlash?”
“All of these questions, and almost all forms of political violence, are intimately related to social inequalities. I want to turn to evidence-informed policy when we see exclusionary networks, especially those that use political violence to exclude and subjugate, to learn how they can be changed in meaningful ways.”
She hopes students working with the IPC can answer some of those questions with her trademark combination of ongoing research and experiential learning opportunities.
This content, by Daniel Rivkin, is reposted here with permission from State & Hill, the magazine of the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
Megan Stewart joined the Center for Political Studies in 2023. She recently published an intellectual history of the evolution of civil wars research for the 25th anniversary edition of the Journal of Civil Wars. She called this essay the most personal work she has yet written.
Oct 31, 2023 | ANES, Economics, Elections, expert analysis, International, National, Policy, Social Policy
In the past, excessive economic inequality has ended… badly. As Charlotte Cavaillé points out in her new book that studies the public’s reaction to rising inequality, “only mass warfare, a state collapse, or catastrophic plagues have significantly altered the distribution of income and wealth.” Will this time be different?
Through income redistribution, democratic and political institutions today have a clear mechanism to peacefully address income inequality if voters demand it. Still, as highlighted by Cavaille in Fair Enough?: Support for Redistribution in the Age of Inequality (Cambridge University Press), greater wealth and income inequality are not leading to greater demand for an egalitarian policy response as many would expect.
Cavaillé reports there is little evidence of rising support for redistribution, especially among the worse off. Consider public opinion in the two Western countries with the sharpest increase in income inequality: In Great Britain, public support for redistribution is decreasing, and in the United States, the gap between the attitudes of low-income and high-income voters is narrowing. What, asks Cavaillé, can we conclude about public opinion’s role as a countervailing force to rising inequality?
Based on Cavaillé’s doctoral work, Fair Enough? introduces a framework for studying mass attitudes toward redistributive social policies. Cavaillé shows that these attitudes are shaped by at least two motives: material self-interest and fairness concerns. People support policies that would increase their own expected income. On the other hand, they also support policies that, if implemented, “would move the status quo closer to what is prescribed by shared norms of fairness.” Material interest comes most into play when policies have large material consequences, according to Cavaillé, but in a world of high uncertainty and low personal stakes, considerations of fairness trump considerations about one’s personal pocketbook.
How fair is it for some to make a lot more money than others? How fair is it for some to receive more benefits than they pay in taxes? Cavaillé emphasizes two norms of fairness that come into play when we think about such questions: proportionality, where rewards are proportional to effort and merit, and reciprocity, where groups provide basic security to members that cooperatively contribute. Policy disagreement arises because people hold different empirical beliefs regarding how well the status quo aligns with what these norms of fairness prescribe.
With fairness reasoning in the picture, Cavaillé writes, “baseline expectations are turned on their heads: Countries that are more likely to experience an increase in income inequality are also those least likely to interpret this growth as unfair.”
Should we expect growing support for redistribution to be a driving force behind policy change in the future? A change in aggregate fairness beliefs, Cavaillé argues, will require a perfect storm: a discursive shock that repeatedly exposes people to critiques of the status quo as unfair on the one hand, and a large subset of individuals whose own individual experience predispose them to accept these claims as true on the other. Policy changes in postindustrial democracies are possible, Cavaillé concludes– but they are unlikely to be in response to a pro-redistribution shift in public opinion.
Charlotte Cavaillé is an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and an affiliate of the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research. Her dissertation, on which ‘Fair Enough’ is based, received the 2016 Mancur Olson Best Dissertation Award.
Tevah Platt and Charlotte Cavaillé contributed to the development of this post.
