“Taking Back Our Country”: Tea Party Membership and Support for Punitive Crime Control Policies (original) (raw)
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In 2009, after the financial meltdown, the mortgage bubble"s burst and the following bailouts of Wall Street banks and major corporations, 80 percent of American adults said they distrusted the U.S. government, and 75 percent said they felt either angry or frustrated, feeling that the government looks out for the interests of a few special interests at the expense of the people (DiMaggio). One could imagine 80 percent of an angered public coming together, marching together and demanding change in public policy, after all, everyone identified the problem as the same, the same circumstances and policies had set the conditions that lead to the problem. But, that isn"t what happened.
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In 2009, shortly after the election of the United States' first black President, a new protest movement emerged. When some supporters of this new Tea Party Movement (TPM) expressed their ire with race-laden messages various commentators suggested that racism may be a major motive for TPM activism. Accordingly, this study draws on national survey data to examine the extent to which racial attitudes and conservative ideology are associated with self-declared membership in the TPM while controlling for contextual factors that have proven influential in other rightist movement research. Key findings reveal that aside from conservative political ideology, racial resentment is indeed among the strongest predictors of TPM membership. Supplemental analyses explore the extent to which conservatives differ from TPM members. The results show that very conservative individuals and TPM members evince similar attitudes. The findings are discussed in terms of contemporary race relations and the implications for future social movement research.
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Research on the Tea Party finds that both libertarian and authoritarian attitudes drive support for this movement, but political scientists lack a satisfactory explanation of this contradiction. To help resolve this puzzle, we argue a key factor driving support for the Tea Party is what Nietzsche called “misarchism:” an ideology which is antigovernment but statist and moralistic. Factor analysis of nine attitudes from the 2012 American National Election Study reveals that statism and moral traditionalism are intercorrelated on a dimension distinct from attitudes toward government. Regression analysis shows that the interaction of anti-government and morally statist ideological factors is one of the strongest and most robust predictors of Tea Party support. Bayesian Model Averaging, multiple imputation, and genetic matching suggest that the correlation between misarchism and support for the Tea Party is not an artifact of model selection, missing values, or bias due to covariate imbalance.