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The political psychology of scarcity in American society: a study of culture, discourse, and public opinion

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Content The Political Psychology of Scarcity in American Society:
A Study of Culture, Discourse, and Public Opinion
by
Laura Brisbane
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS)
May 2025
Copyright 2025 Laura Brisbane

ii
Acknowledgements
To my advisor, Professor Ann Crigler – I am so grateful for your insightful mentorship
throughout my doctoral studies. My interest in the political psychology of scarcity took shape in
early conservations with you, and I can’t thank you enough for encouraging my pursuit of this
project at a turning point in my graduate education. Your consistent and thorough feedback has
been invaluable, helping me refine my ideas each step of the way. Furthermore, you helped me
persevere amid a global pandemic when it felt like the world was falling apart. Thank you.
To my committee members, Professor Jane Junn, Professor Jeb Barnes, and Professor G.
Thomas Goodnight – I am indebted to you all for your contributions at key stages of my
dissertation. Thank you, Professor Junn, for reinforcing the value of big ideas and for generously
sharing your wisdom at every turn. Thank you, Professor Barnes, for enriching my perspective on
all things epistemology, methodology, and pedagogy. And thank you, Professor Goodnight, for
situating my research in a broader scope of interdisciplinary scholarship.
Last, I would like to express a deep gratitude to my partner, my parents, my sisters, and my
friends (...and my dog!). You kept me afloat as I endeavored to climb a mountain of my own
making. Thank you for filling my life with love, humor, and creative inspiration.

iii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements......................................................................................................................... ii
Paper Abstracts .............................................................................................................................. ix
Introductory Overview.................................................................................................................... 1
Paper 1: Scarcity in American Political Culture ............................................................................. 9
1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 10
2 Overview of Interpretivist Method in Cultural Analysis of Scarcity ..................................... 13
3 The Scarcity-Conflict Schema and the Scarcity-Cooperation Alternative............................. 16
3.1 Anthropocentrism and Eco-Mutualism Across Culture .................................................. 16
3.2 Individualism and Hierarchy in Locke’s Theory of Property.......................................... 19
3.3 Distributive Ethics and the Alibi of Abundance.............................................................. 20
3.4 Analogies between America and the Original Abundance of Man ................................. 23
3.5 The Descent from Abundance to Scarcity in the Lockean Account................................ 25
3.6 The Lockean Construction of Scarcity ............................................................................ 27
3.7 Malthus and the Introduction of Absolute Scarcity......................................................... 28
3.8 Scarcity Framing in Malthusian Thought........................................................................ 32
3.9 Scarcity and Distributive Ethics in the Shared Logic of Locke and Malthus.................. 34
4 The Scarcity-Conflict Schema in American Political Culture ............................................... 36
4.1 Malthus and Social Darwinism in America..................................................................... 38
4.2 The Analogy of Economic Order and Animal Kingdom in Social Darwinism............... 40
4.3 The Scarcity-Cooperation Schema as the Antithesis of Social Darwinism..................... 42
4.4 Cultural Narratives, Political Cognition, and Contemporary American Politics ............ 44
5 Cultural Psychology and American Political Development................................................... 46
5.1 Individualism and Scarcity in Settler-Colonial America................................................. 47
5.2 Scarcity, Racialized Individualism, and Frontier Land Policy ........................................ 53
6 The Scarcity-Conflict Schema and Anti-Welfarism in America .......................................... 56
6.1 Welfare, Social Control, and Legacies of Capitalist Dispossession................................ 57
6.2 Malthus and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834...................................................... 60
6.3 Race-Gendered Individualism in English and American Welfare .................................. 62

iv
6.4 The Expansion of American Welfare Amid 1960s Unrest.............................................. 66
6.5 The Scarcity-Conflict Schema and the Welfare Queen................................................... 67
6.6 The PRWORA: A Case Study of the Scarcity-Conflict Schema .................................... 71
7 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................. 75
Paper 2: Scarcity, Inequality, and Public Opinion........................................................................ 79
1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 80
2 Scarcity, Racialized Inequality, and Public Policy ................................................................ 82
3 Scarcity as a Hierarchy-Enhancing Force .............................................................................. 85
4 Scarcity as a System Justification Stimulus........................................................................... 87
5 Scarcity as a Culturally Salient Threat................................................................................... 88
6 The Role of Scarcity in the Political Attitudes of White Americans ..................................... 90
7 The Personal and Sociotropic Dimensions of Scarcity in Public Opinion............................. 93
8 Scarcity Psychology Across Partisanship and Cultural Orientation ...................................... 96
9 Data and Methods................................................................................................................. 100
10 Results................................................................................................................................ 104
10.1 Perceptions of Scarcity Across Political Parties.......................................................... 105
10.2 Scarcity and Racial Attitudes ...................................................................................... 108
10.3 Scarcity and Economic Attitudes ................................................................................ 112
10.4 Scarcity and Distributive Attitudes.............................................................................. 114
10.5 The Interactive Influence of Scarcity and Individualism ............................................ 119
11 Discussion .......................................................................................................................... 126
12 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................... 127
Paper 3: Scarcity Framing in American Political Discourse ...................................................... 131
1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 132
2 Theory .................................................................................................................................. 136
2.1 Scarcity, Language, and Framing .................................................................................. 136
2.2 Scarcity, Politics, and Power......................................................................................... 137
2.3 Scarcity Framing, Threat Psychology, and American Political Culture........................ 139
2.4 Scarcity Framing and Socio-Cognitive Implications..................................................... 141
2.5 Theoretical Overview .................................................................................................... 143

v
3 Hypotheses........................................................................................................................... 144
4 Methods................................................................................................................................ 145
5 Results.................................................................................................................................. 148
5.1 The Overall Prevalence of Scarcity Framing ................................................................ 148
5.2 Defining the Objects of Economic Scarcity Framing.................................................... 150
5.3 Defining the Objects of Socio-material Scarcity........................................................... 152
5.4 Ideological Patterns of Scarcity Framing ...................................................................... 155
6 Discussion ............................................................................................................................ 162
7 Limitations ........................................................................................................................... 164
8 Conclusion............................................................................................................................ 166
References................................................................................................................................... 169
Appendix for Paper #2 ................................................................................................................ 180
Appendix A: Descriptive Statistics.......................................................................................... 180
Appendix B: Regression Tables for Scarcity and Political Attitudes...................................... 184
Appendix C: Interactions Between Vertical Individualism and Scarcity ................................ 194
Appendix D: Experimental Treatments on Scarcity Perceptions............................................ 214
Appendix E: Robustness Checks ............................................................................................. 219
Appendix for Paper #3 ................................................................................................................ 235
Appendix F: Search Criteria for Opinion Pieces.................................................................... 235
Appendix G: Coding Scarcity Mentions.................................................................................. 237
Appendix H: Analysis of Overall Scarcity Framing Measured as a Binary Variable ............ 250

vi
List of Tables
Table 1: Frequency of Articles Mentioning Zero, One, or Multiple Scarcity Objects............... 149
Table 2: Frequencies and Chi-Squared Tests for Total Number of Scarcity Mentions.............. 150
Table 3: Objects of Economic Scarcity Framing........................................................................ 150
Table 4: Objects of Socio-material Scarcity Framing................................................................. 153
Table 5: Frequencies and Chi-Squared Tests Across Scarcity Objects | Full Sample ................ 158
Table 6: Frequencies and Chi-Squared Tests Across Scarcity Objects | 2020 Sample .............. 160
Table 7: Frequencies and Chi-Squared Tests Across Scarcity Objects | 2021 Sample .............. 161

Table A1: Descriptive Statistics on Demographic Variables and Personal Background ........... 180
Table A2: Descriptive Statistics on Ideology, Personality, and Cultural Orientation ................ 181
Table A3: Descriptive Statistics on Scarcity and Related Constructs ........................................ 182
Table A4: Descriptive Statistics on Inequality-Reinforcing Dependent Variables .................... 183

Table B1: Perceptions of Racialized Job Competition ............................................................... 184
Table B2: Whites’ Racial Resentment towards African Americans........................................... 186
Table B3: Economic System Justification Attitudes .................................................................. 188
Table B4: Opposition to Welfare via Personal Tax Hikes.......................................................... 190
Table B5: Opposition to Income Redistribution......................................................................... 192
Table C1: Racialized Competition w/ VI * Personal Scarcity Interaction ................................. 194
Table C2: Racialized Competition w/ VI * Sociotropic Scarcity Interaction............................. 196
Table C3: Racial Resentment w/ VI*Personal Scarcity Interaction ........................................... 198
Table C4: Racial Resentment w/ VI * Sociotropic Scarcity Interaction .................................... 200
Table C5: Economic System Justification w/ VI * Personal Scarcity Interaction...................... 202
Table C6: Economic System Justification w/ VI * Sociotropic Scarcity Interaction ................. 204
Table C7: Opposition to Welfare w/ VI * Personal Scarcity Interaction.................................... 206
Table C8: Opposition to Welfare w/ VI * Sociotropic Scarcity Interaction ............................... 208
Table C9: Opposition to Redistribution w/ VI * Personal Scarcity Interaction ......................... 210
Table C10: Opposition to Redistribution w/ VI * Sociotropic Scarcity Interaction................... 212

Table D1: Perceptions of Personal Scarcity Across Party .......................................................... 215
Table D2: Perceptions of Sociotropic Scarcity Across Party ..................................................... 217

Table E1: Perceptions of Racialized Competition w/ Sample Level Controls ........................... 220
Table E2: Racial Resentment w/ Sample-Level Controls........................................................... 223
Table E3: Economic System Justification Attitudes w/ Sample-Level Controls ....................... 226
Table E4: Opposition to Welfare via Personal Tax Hikes w/ Sample-Level Controls............... 229
Table E5: Opposition to Income Redistribution w/ Sample-Level Controls.............................. 232

Table F1: Overview of Search Criteria using Proquest Central Database for 2020 Sample ...... 235
Table F2: Overview of Search Criteria using Proquest Central Database for 2021 Sample ...... 236

Table G1: Macroeconomic Scarcity Examples........................................................................... 238

vii
Table G2: Commercial Scarcity Examples................................................................................. 239
Table G3: Job Scarcity Examples............................................................................................... 240
Table G4: Fiscal Scarcity Examples........................................................................................... 241
Table G5: Pocketbook Scarcity Examples.................................................................................. 242
Table G6: Resource Scarcity Examples...................................................................................... 243
Table G7: Provisional Scarcity Examples .................................................................................. 244
Table G8: Subsistence Scarcity Examples.................................................................................. 245
Table G9: Information Scarcity Examples ................................................................................. 246
Table G10: Leadership Scarcity Examples................................................................................. 247
Table G11: Temporal Scarcity Examples................................................................................... 248
Table G12: Labor Scarcity Examples......................................................................................... 249

Table H1: Frequencies and Chi-Squared Tests for Articles Mentioning Scarcity...................... 250

viii
List of Figures
Figure 1: Distribution of Personal Scarcity Perceptions Across Party ....................................... 107
Figure 2: Distribution of Sociotropic Scarcity Perceptions Across Party................................... 108
Figure 3: Racialized Competition Coefficient Plot (95% Confidence Intervals) ....................... 110
Figure 4: Racial Resentment Coefficient Plot (95% Confidence Intervals)............................... 111
Figure 5: Economic System Justification Coefficient Plot (95% Confidence Intervals)............ 114
Figure 6: Opposition to Welfare Coefficient Plot (95% Confidence Intervals) ......................... 117
Figure 7: Opposition to Redistribution Coefficient Plot (95% Confidence Intervals) ............... 118
Figure 8: Interaction Plots for Racial Attitudes (Full Sample)................................................... 120
Figure 9: Interaction Plots for Racialized Competition (Across Partisanship)........................... 122
Figure 10: Interaction Plots for Racial Resentment (Across Partisanship)................................. 123
Figure 11: Interaction Plots for Economic System Justification (Across Partisanship) ............. 125
Figure 12: Percentage of Total Articles that Mention Objects of Economic Scarcity................ 156
Figure 13: Percentage of Total Articles that Mention Objects of Socio-material Scarcity ........ 157

ix
Paper Abstracts
Scarcity in American Political Culture: Psychological Roots in Economic Liberalism,
Ascriptive Hierarchy, and Settler Colonialism
Abstract: In the United States, the construct of scarcity is often casually understood in essentialist
terms – that is, as a straightforward characteristic of the natural world that is typically a source of
social conflict. In this article, I complicate taken-for-granted constructions of scarcity by analyzing
the influence of culture through an historical lens. Towards this end, I conduct a narrative analysis
of primary source texts, including John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and Thomas
Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population. In my analysis, I approach these texts as cultural
artifacts embodying the worldview of settler-colonial America and its cultural progenitors. Using
this approach, I examine the cultural schemas by which scarcity psychology has shaped American
political development, highlighting the contingent nature of scarcity constructs in traditional
American thinking and contrasting them with alternative conceptions that emphasize cooperative
responses to scarcity. This analysis culminates in a study of welfare policy, where I examine how
cultural schemas linking scarcity with competition and hierarchy have shaped welfare contraction
throughout American history.
Scarcity, Inequality, and Public Opinion:
How Scarcity Shapes Political Attitudes Among White Americans
Abstract: Broadly speaking, scarcity is a psychological phenomenon in which one perceives there
is not enough of some good for a given need or objective. While this definition of scarcity is
relatively straightforward, the political implications of scarcity are far from clear, particularly
insofar as they unfold in the context of the American racial hierarchy. Research in social

x
psychology demonstrates that perceptions of scarcity increase racial discrimination while
escalating orientations of competitiveness and amplifying selfish behavior. To what extent do these
effects translate to political attitudes, and how does a person's cultural orientation and racial
positionality shape this dynamic? As a first step towards answering this question, this study
leverages original survey data on the attitudes of white Americans and demonstrates the nuanced
patterns by which perceived scarcity reduces support for redistribution and welfare while
increasing economic system justification attitudes, racial resentment, and perceptions of racialized
competition. These patterns play out in ways that may defy expectations, with white Democrats
most consistently exhibiting hierarchy-enhancing responses to scarcity in their political attitudes.
Scarcity Framing in American Political Discourse: The Case of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Abstract: The perception of scarcity – in relation to myriad objects such as money, jobs, resources,
etc. – powerfully influences cognitive dynamics of attention, such that a given scarcity object may
capture one’s focus when primed and shape one’s political priorities. Following this insight, and
considering the threat salience of scarcity in American political culture, I develop a theory of
scarcity framing in which actors rhetorically set the scope of the policy agenda by problematizing
specific objects of scarcity with political meanings that are congenial to their ideological leanings.
I examine this theory through a content analysis of opinion pieces covering the COVID-19
pandemic in the liberal-leaning New York Times and the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal.
While the literature focuses on economic scarcity, I inductively conceptualize two main categories
of scarcity framing pertaining to objects of both economic scarcity and socio-material scarcity.
Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the frequency with which each scarcity object is
emphasized is partially correlated with publication ideology. Taken as a whole, the content

xi
analysis demonstrates the overall prevalence of scarcity framing in media commentary and lays
the groundwork for future research regarding the role of scarcity framing in opinion formation.

1
Introductory Overview
American society has a scarcity problem. Not a scarcity of land, and certainly not a scarcity
of riches, but rather a scarcity of basic affordable necessities. This lived reality gives rise to an
overarching psychology of scarcity whose influence on American politics remains underexplored
in contemporary scholarship. The three papers that comprise my dissertation aim to fill this gap in
our understanding.
I chose to focus on the politics of scarcity in my doctoral studies, in part, due to my
undergraduate focus on the study of human rights, which I pursued as an entry point for
envisioning a world where everyone’s needs are met. Prior to college, I wrote my first research
paper as a high school student on the Eugenics movement in the United States. These threads of
my early education – regarding human rights, on the one hand, and social Darwinism, on the other
– instilled a growing appreciation for the contradictions at play between a rights-based framework
of social welfare provision and a cultural milieu in which scarcity is naturalized as an inevitable
source of competition and hierarchy. These contradictions have motivated my research agenda,
inspiring my inquiry into the social construction of scarcity and its impact on inequality within the
context of American culture, discourse, and public opinion.
I began this dissertation project in 2018, drawing initially upon the political aftermath of
the 2008 financial crisis as a starting point for understanding scarcity in American society (Edsall
2012). At the time, I couldn’t have predicted the twists and turns this project would take, as the
role of scarcity in the American psyche took on new and unforeseen heights with the 2020 onset
of the COVID-19 pandemic. As people around the world sheltered in place, I began a content
analysis of American media commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic to examine the discourse of

2
scarcity in real time. This analysis provided the raw material for developing my theory of scarcity
framing, in which political actors leverage narratives of scarcity to advance their ideological
agendas. While this theory of scarcity framing should make intuitive sense to any everyday
observer of today’s fractured media environment, the theoretical and empirical contribution of
rigorously documenting the influence of ideology on the discourse of scarcity is foundational, in
large part because it disrupts the notion that scarcity is a straightforward feature of the human
condition. To the contrary, scarcity is a subjective experience and perception that emerges in
dialogue with mass media. The experience and perception of scarcity may be direct for many
people at any given time; however, the political meaning of scarcity is fundamentally mediated by
societal discourse. In turn, the content analysis that comprises Paper 3 offers a cautionary tale
regarding one’s media diet that warns against an uncritical acceptance of scarcity frames which
may otherwise appear ideologically neutral or matter of fact.
While the focus on COVID-19 media commentary in Paper 3 was a timely analysis that
addressed the politics of the moment, the examination of American political culture in Paper 1
draws upon a broader sweep of American history to unpack the origins of scarcity psychology as
it manifests in contemporary society. Applying an interpretivist lens in the spirit of genealogical
inquiry, Paper 1 argues that the political meaning of scarcity is mediated not only by media
discourse but also by longstanding cultural factors rooted in economic liberalism, ascriptive
hierarchy, and settler colonialism. When I started this dissertation project, I did not anticipate
making a cultural argument about the psychology of scarcity. My intuition was that the problem
of scarcity in American society primarily pertained to the material lack of affordable necessities
as well as to the manipulative uses of scarcity rhetoric among political elites. It had not occurred
to me that public responses to both the material reality and rhetoric of scarcity might be contingent

3
on longstanding cultural narratives that varyingly associate scarcity with conflict, on the one hand,
and cooperation, on the other. In fact, one of the main subfields that inspired my original thinking
about scarcity was evolutionary psychology – a subfield which generates theories about the
evolved elements of the human mind that are often portrayed and interpreted as relatively universal
and hard-wired, especially when summarized in their most simplified form. As a layperson
exploring this framework, the folk intuition that humanity evolved an us-versus-them schema of
scarcity amid our evolutionary development in tightknit tribes was persuasive. I could see this folk
intuition playing out in today’s political context, despite the many factors that differentiate the
circumstances of modernity from those of our early ancestors.
Over time, and thanks to the insights of peers and mentors, my perspective on scarcity
psychology in American society gained more cultural nuance. Previously, I had unconsciously
naturalized the conflict-laden implications of scarcity and assumed that the solution to the problem
was a matter of minimizing scarcity full-stop. My mindset was that conflict-based responses to
scarcity that amplify competition and exacerbate hierarchies were an inevitable byproduct of
humankind’s collective lizard brain. Heeding this folk intuition, I lamented the divisive
ramifications of scarcity as an intractable feature of evolutionary psychology that haunted
contemporary social life. Therefore, our only hope for social harmony in America was to mitigate
material scarcity as soon as possible and do our best to minimize the prevalence of unqualified
scarcity framing in public discourse. These steps are necessary but insufficient. Paper 1 articulates
my reasoning behind this claim. To address the scarcity problem in American society, we need to
shift the dominant cultural narrative that surrounds scarcity. Rather than being a hard-wired source
of conflict in human social relations, scarcity can be met with more cooperative responses. Amid
the division and polarization of contemporary American society, the idealism of this premise

4
cannot be denied. Nonetheless, the challenges of today’s politics do not negate the basic truth that
the dominant culture in American society is but one of many cultures which have grappled with
archetypal questions of distributive ethics amid scarce resources.
To unpack the implications of this basic truth, Paper 1 presents an original analysis of how
scarcity is constructed in classic works of political thought that are emblematic of the dominant
culture in the United States, including the writings of John Locke and Thomas Malthus. I approach
these pieces as cultural artifacts that represent the ideational lineage that links the United States to
its English cultural progenitors. Through this analysis, I conceptualize the scarcity-conflict schema
as a culturally rooted program of scarcity psychology that pervades mainstream American politics.
Drawing on the insights of Indigenous interlocutors and their description of Indigenous traditions
in North America and beyond, I contrast this cultural framework with the scarcity-cooperation
schema, which impresses upon society an alternative narrative in which scarcity is schematically
associated with distributive ethics rooted in reciprocity and egalitarianism. In retrospect, it’s clear
that my original preconceptions about scarcity as a deterministic source of conflict and hierarchy
were due in no small part to my own upbringing in mainstream American culture.
In Paper 1, I analyze how the scarcity-conflict schema shape-shifted from its origins in
England to its new life in the nascent United States, taking on its own character amid the culture
of individualism that intensified throughout American political development. I trace the
individualistic expressions of the scarcity-conflict schema and their race-gendered contours in
American society to political discourses ranging from frontier land policy in the 1800s to antiwelfare policy in the late twentieth century. This analysis sets a theoretical foundation and
establishes historical context for the public opinion study in Paper 2, where I analyze the

5
relationship between scarcity perceptions and inequality-reinforcing political attitudes among
white Americans.
The insights of Paper 2 support the cultural argument of Paper 1 while adding more nuance
and concreteness to how the psychology of scarcity shapes racial, economic, and distributive
attitudes among white Americans in today’s partisan landscape. In Paper 2, I demonstrate the
importance of distinguishing between personal scarcity (i.e. scarcity perceived in one’s personal
life) and sociotropic scarcity (i.e. scarcity perceived at the level of society writ large). Among
white Americans of all partisan stripes, sociotropic scarcity is positively correlated with racial
attitudes that reinforce inequality (including racial resentment and racialized competition).
However, when it comes to economic and distributive attitudes, white Democrats and white
Republicans exhibit mirror opposite patterns. While white Democrats exhibit hierarchy-enhancing
correlates of sociotropic scarcity with respect to economic and distributive attitudes, white
Republicans exhibit hierarchy-attenuating patterns in which sociotropic scarcity is correlated with
more egalitarian positions on the economy, welfare, and redistribution. To explain these findings,
I leverage insights from affective intelligence theory that suggest how emotional mechanisms
related to fear may underpin the partisan heterogeneity observed in my study.
The need for future research on emotional mechanisms notwithstanding, Paper 2
culminates in an analysis of the interaction between scarcity perceptions and individualistic
predispositions. Where significant (and particularly among Democrats and Independents), I find
that this interaction corresponds with patterns of public opinion that are consistent with the
scarcity-conflict schema analyzed in Paper 1. When it comes to both racial and economic attitudes,
a person’s degree of individualism positively moderates the influence of scarcity perceptions on
racial resentment, racialized competition, and economic system justification. In other words, the

6
extent to which scarcity reinforces competition and hierarchy via racial and economic attitudes
hinges upon a person’s alignment with the dominant culture of individualism. Though confined to
Paper 2, these findings provide preliminary empirical support for the theoretical arguments
developed in Paper 1. In turn, these contributions of my overall dissertation underscore the broader
takeaway that the political psychology of scarcity in American society and its role in perpetuating
inequality is, in part, a byproduct of cultural factors.
The upside of this takeaway is that culture is dynamic and malleable. The intergenerational
transmission of cultural schemas does not preclude the winds of cultural change. Humans create
and recreate culture every day, and we can do so with or without conscious intention. This is the
promise of neuroplasticity, i.e. the feature of the human brain that allows for changes in neural
pathways with sufficient repetition. If the scarcity-conflict schema is instantiated on a neurological
level among those who have internalized the dominant culture of individualism in America, then
the way out of the vicious scarcity-conflict cycle requires conscious cultural transformation
whereby narratives in line with the scarcity-cooperation schema become more ubiquitous in the
mainstream conversation. I cannot offer a precise plan for this kind of cultural transformation, but
I will stand by the possibility of its promise.
My research agenda carries new weight in the aftermath of the 2024 election. The political
focus on inflation and immigration played a significant role in Trump’s electoral victory and
reflects the psychological dynamics of scarcity that I unpack in my dissertation papers. Donald
Trump and JD Vance relied on narratives that emphasized sociotropic experiences of scarcity amid
rising prices while explicitly casting blame on immigrants for widespread scarcities of affordable
housing. JD Vance’s rhetoric at the 2024 Vice Presidential Debate was uncanny in its
exemplification of scarcity framing and the scarcity-conflict schema:

7
“...in communities all across this country, you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve
got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable
because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce
homes…Twenty-five million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is
one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country” (quoted in Becket 2024).
This passage follows the political psychology of scarcity playbook in no uncertain terms. The
emphasis on housing scarcity and the scapegoating of immigrants is consistent with the findings
of Paper 2, in which racially divisive attitudes are stronger at higher perceptions of scarcity among
white Americans across the partisan spectrum. The messengers of Trump and the MAGA
movement are not known for subtlety, so it’s worth noting that scarcity framing can take far more
discreet forms than the passage presented above. Nonetheless, this quote reflects the political
moment and the role of scarcity psychology therein at the time of this dissertation’s completion.
In addition to contextualizing these patterns of rhetoric, my theory of scarcity provides a
coherent framework for dispelling the false binary implicit in prominent explanations of Trump’s
popularity as either a story of social identity or one of economic angst. As demonstrated in my
dissertation, scarcity ties into both explanations as it is a psychological signature of economic
hardship that stokes identity-based divisions. In political science scholarship and public discourse
more broadly, the explanatory power of scarcity psychology in this regard is widely overlooked.
My research offers an important corrective that promises to yield further clarity on contemporary
politics, especially considering the emerging signs of a rightward shift among voters in blue states
like California.
Going forward, I am interested in researching the ‘abundance agenda’ that is gaining
traction among public policy advocates. As articulated by public intellectuals1
, research
1 Ezra Klein is one such intellectual whose work in this regard is exemplified in his forthcoming book, Abundance,
co-authored with Derek Thompson: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/EzraKlein/9781668023488

8
organizations2
, and academic scholars3
, the abundance agenda is focused on expanding access to
essential goods/services through supply-side interventions that sustainably boost the production of
key resources, such as affordable housing, green energy, and child/elder care. In my view, the
abundance agenda could offer a rallying point that appeals to disparate voting groups in the
aftermath of the 2024 election. In response to Republican gains in support among voters of color
under Trump’s unorthodox brand of economic populism, there is increasing speculation of a
partisan realignment. If such a realignment is underway, the question then arises as to what policy
agendas will gain favor among shifting political coalitions. While scarcity psychology may very
well have played a role in the 2024 election, the potential for an abundance agenda to unify
constituencies in a moment of political upheaval offers a glimmer of hope for those who care first
and foremost about ensuring the provision of basic human needs. The research that comprises my
dissertation offers a bird’s eye view on the politics of scarcity throughout American history and
into the present. Looking ahead, I intend to focus my research agenda on the politics of scarcity
and abundance as they manifest in policymaking processes at the national-, state-, and local-level.
2 The Possibility Lab at the University of California-Berkeley is an example of an organization focused on the
abundance agenda. More information on the Possibility Lab, including its Abundance Accelerator initiative, is
available here: https://possibilitylab.berkeley.edu/our-work/initiatives/the-abundance-accelerator/
3 See Burke and Barnes (2024) as an example of scholarship focused on the challenges of an abundance agenda in
the U.S. legal system.

9
Scarcity in American Political Culture
Psychological Roots in Economic Liberalism, Ascriptive Hierarchy, and
Settler Colonialism
Laura Brisbane, PhD Candidate
University of Southern California
Political Science and International Relations (POIR)
Dissertation Paper #1
Abstract: In the United States, the construct of scarcity is often casually understood in essentialist
terms – that is, as a straightforward characteristic of the natural world that is typically a source of
social conflict. In this article, I complicate taken-for-granted constructions of scarcity by analyzing
the influence of culture through an historical lens. Towards this end, I conduct a narrative analysis
of primary source texts, including John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and Thomas
Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population. In my analysis, I approach these texts as cultural
artifacts embodying the worldview of settler-colonial America and its cultural progenitors. Using
this approach, I examine the cultural schemas by which scarcity psychology has shaped American
political development, highlighting the contingent nature of scarcity constructs in traditional
American thinking and contrasting them with alternative conceptions that emphasize cooperative
responses to scarcity. This analysis culminates in a study of welfare policy, where I examine how
cultural schemas linking scarcity with competition and hierarchy have shaped welfare contraction
throughout American history.

10
1 Introduction
In the United States, the construct of scarcity is often casually understood in essentialist
terms – that is, as a straightforward characteristic of the natural world that is typically a source of
social conflict. As portrayed in classical economics, scarcity is widely considered an inescapable
feature of the human condition. Accordingly, humans have limitless wants, and therefore the whole
enterprise of economics aims at understanding the circulation of limited goods and services amid
unlimited human desires. In political science, conditions of scarcity are a pretext upon which the
realm of politics is conceptually delineated. Indeed, the definition of politics as ‘a competition
over who gets what, when, and how’ maintains a foothold in political science scholarship
(Lasswell 1936). Implicit to this definition is an assumption of scarcity, without which the
allocation of the ‘what’ to the ‘who’ need not be a source of competitive conflict.
In this article, my aim is to complicate these taken-for-granted constructions of scarcity by
interpreting cultural renderings of scarcity through an historical lens. Towards this end, I conduct
a narrative analysis of primary source texts, including John Locke’s Second Treatise on
Government and Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. In my analysis, I
approach these texts as cultural artifacts embodying the worldview of settler-colonial America and
its English progenitors. As such, I analyze the construction of scarcity in these texts to understand
the cultural schemas by which scarcity psychology has shaped American political development.
By the construction of scarcity, I refer to the discursive process by which sociopolitical meaning
is ascribed to alleged shortages pertaining to some object of collective import (whether it be land,
money, biophysical resources, etc). By locating the construction of scarcity in the primary texts of
two quintessential thinkers within the tradition of economic liberalism, I establish a foundation for

11
understanding the cultural resonance of scarcity in contemporary American politics (Entman
2004).
In my reading of these texts, I contrast their political logic surrounding scarcity with the
perspectives of Indigenous cultures in North America. My analysis here is intended to serve as a
foil for elucidating the contingent nature of scarcity constructs in traditional American thinking. I
make no claim to offer a comprehensive account of how scarcity is understood across the nuanced
diversity of Indigenous communities. Instead, I highlight select examples of how scarcity is given
meaning in Indigenous traditions and practices as articulated by key interlocutors, including
environmental biologist and citizen of the Potawatomi tribe, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013). I also
draw upon the work of Candace Fujikane (2021) and Shannon Speed (2019), both of whom offer
insight into the persistent influence of settler colonialism as not an isolated event of the past but
rather an ongoing structure of social and economic organization in America.
Through this cultural analysis, I arrive at two intentionally broad schemas by which
scarcity and its implications may be constructed. My analysis of Locke and Malthus unveils a
shared logic whereby conditions of scarcity are understood to inevitably precipitate social conflict
by intensifying competition and hierarchy. By contrast, the work of Indigenous interlocutors
portrays an alternative schema in which conditions of scarcity are understood to necessitate social
cooperation via relations of reciprocity and egalitarianism. For purposes of parsimony, I refer to
these alternative renderings as the scarcity-conflict schema and the scarcity-cooperation schema.
Throughout my analysis, I theorize the roots of these contrasting schemas and ultimately
trace the scarcity-conflict and scarcity-cooperation schemas to distinct ontological perspectives of
anthropocentrism and eco-mutualism. The former encapsulates an understanding of human
existence in the world wherein human prosperity is contingent upon human dominance over

12
nature. Eco-mutualism, by contrast, embodies an understanding of the human-nature relationship
wherein the prosperity of human and non-human species are interdependent. I theorize that
constructions of scarcity and their salience in political culture are traceable to these quintessential
frameworks of human-nature ontology.
To put my textual analysis of Locke and Malthus into broader perspective, I draw upon
scholarship in American political development, public policy, and cultural psychology. I
triangulate my textual analysis with evidence from these fields to argue that the cultural resonance
of scarcity in American politics stems paradoxically from a history of messaging wherein America
is portrayed as a land of abundance whose fruits may be enjoyed by a racially-bounded community
of rugged individualists willing to play by the purportedly civilized rules of private property
accumulation. American political development (APD) scholarship demonstrates how this history
of racialized messaging facilitated the implementation of land policy by which the federal
government settled and incorporated states along the frontier (Frymer 2014). Furthermore, scholars
of cultural psychology highlight how the ethos of individualism distinctively characterizes the
United States (Kitayama et al. 2010). In my discussion of these literatures, I bridge the gap between
APD and cultural psychology by emphasizing how the individualistic ethos of America was
actively shaped in racially-bounded terms in the discourse of frontier policy. In my reading of
Locke and Malthus, I locate this racialized individualism in relation to the scarcity-conflict schema
and analyze how it shapes the construction of both abundance and scarcity as politicized
conditionalities upon which governance agendas are predicated. My analysis ultimately builds
towards a study of welfare policy discourse in the United States, in which I analyze how cultural
schemas of scarcity have interacted with federalist law-making structures in shaping episodes of
welfare contraction throughout American history.

13
Taken as a whole, this article offers an analysis of scarcity psychology in the American
political context that proceeds in the spirit of genealogical inquiry. My primary source analysis of
John Locke and Thomas Malthus, contextualized alongside the insights of Indigenous
interlocutors, provides a means for deconstructing the meaning of scarcity and pinpointing its
politicization by virtue of cultural and historical influences. My analysis of the scarcity-conflict
schema in welfare policy discourse across time provides a “history of the present” that traces
contemporary expressions of scarcity psychology to their cultural origins (Foucault 1977: 31). In
the course of this analysis, I triangulate insights from neuropsychology to underscore the
contingent nature of scarcity schemas and the potential for constructing new narratives. The
malleability of the human mind that is afforded by neuroplasticity opens the door to reframing how
scarcity is given meaning at the individual- and societal-level. In turn, this article offers an
interdisciplinary theoretical framework for understanding the role of scarcity in American political
life – one that deconstructs its conflict-laden meaning while illuminating the potential for a cultural
shift towards a more cooperative paradigm.
2 Overview of Interpretivist Method in Cultural Analysis of Scarcity
The social world is complex. Human beings rely upon narrative structures to make sense
of social reality and cognitively manage its complexity. Narrative gives the social world an
intelligible plot and enables the construction of collective meanings. As such, narrative is an
ontological condition of social life and constitutive of both social identity and action (Somers and
Gibson 1994). And importantly, while the repertoire of narratives within which a person may
locate oneself is always culturally and historically specific, the content and meaning of narratives
must be interpreted and explicated rather than assumed a priori (ibid). This focus on explicating

14
the content and meaning of the narratives that shape public life is at the heart of interpretivist
methods within political science (Kurowska and de Guevara 2020).
At its most basic level, scarcity represents a social challenge; however, it is by virtue of
cultural schemas that scarcity comes to imply certain routinized responses via prescribed courses
of sociopolitical action. Schemas relate to interpretive processes of the mind and are constituted
by “clusters or nodes of connected ideas or feelings stored in memory” (Entman 2004: 7). Similar
to how habitual practices are integral to institutions, habitual schemas are considered “part and
parcel of one’s cultural heritage” (Gamson 1988: 167). In this paper, I leverage the primary source
material of John Locke and Thomas Malthus as a window into the schemas by which scarcity was
understood among the cultural predecessors of settler-colonial America, for reasons elaborated
below.
At the time of their writing, Locke and Malthus represented an historic Anglo-Saxon
perspective in which America was indeed exceptional by virtue of its perceived abundance. From
this perspective, America constituted a novel utopian landscape (Verhoeven 2016) where the
principles of individualistic competition could be played out without serious moral concern for the
possibility of social deprivation among the ‘have-nots.’ Embedded in both Locke and Malthus is
the prediction that these conditions of abundance cannot last as property is accumulated and the
population grows. Scarcity, whether relative or absolute, is bound to descend upon the ‘New
World,’ thereby bringing America into parity with the contexts of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury England where Locke and Malthus developed their ideas. The eventual circumstances of
scarcity feature as part of the narrative premises upon which Locke and Malthus ultimately argue
their political positions, with the former advocating for limited government based upon private

15
property protection and the latter building upon this Lockean agenda to advocate an elaborated
vision of anti-welfarism.
In my textual analysis, I identify rhetorical continuity across Locke and Malthus on the
basis of their shared conceptualization of distributive ethics. Both essentially contend that
individualistic competition is the just principle by which resources should be distributed.
Additionally, both defend the legitimacy of inequality as a function of merit-based hierarchy
centered on individual industriousness. Bracketing their shared conceptualization of distributive
ethics and inequality is an Enlightenment paradigm in which human societies are distinguishable
in terms of civilization and savagery. This civilized-savage distinction offers yet another axis of
hierarchy out of which emerges the ‘imagined community’ of the American polity (Anderson
1983). This imagined community privileges European descendants as more prototypically
‘American’ relative to non-Europeans (Smith 1993), thus providing the skeletal origins for the
white supremacist thinking that has long animated American politics with varying degrees of
explicitness (Speed 2019). I elaborate these elements of Lockean and Malthusian thought to
suggest that the scarcity-conflict schema in American political culture engenders a psychological
response to perceived scarcity that amplifies ideological propensities for competition and hierarchy
in specifically racialized and gendered terms. While the individual is the operative unit for which
competition and hierarchy are envisioned to play out in the American political imaginary,
individualism itself is fashioned as the constitutive principle that defines a broader ingroup typified
by masculinity and whiteness.
I’ve taken a purposive sampling approach in choosing to analyze the writings of Locke and
Malthus. As such, I do not claim that Locke and Malthus are necessarily ‘representative’ of some
monolithic population of perspectives that uniformly characterizes the English-colonial lineage of

16
American cultural progenitors. Rather than being representative per se, the writings of Locke and
Malthus are instead exemplary insofar as their ideas are considered foundational to economic
liberalism. Locke is widely considered an authoritative icon of private property rights (Arcenas
2022), while Malthus “stands as shorthand” for a system of thought that long dominated
transatlantic economic theory (Valenze 2023: 4). For these reasons, I analyze and interpret the
works of Locke and Malthus as a means for unearthing but one of many possible renderings of the
cultural lineage within which scarcity is schematized in American political life.
The overarching objective of this paper is to theorize the origins of the scarcity-conflict
schema in American political culture and unpack its salience in American policy discourse. Rather
than seeing political problems as objectively given, interpretivist approaches to policy analysis
focus on dynamics of problematization, including the assumptions that underpin how a problem is
represented in a given context and the alternative modes of thinking about the problem that are
obscured from view (Kurowska and de Guevara 2020). For many Americans, the scarcity-conflict
schema may appear natural, familiar, and common-sensical (Gamson 1988). The goal of the
interpretivist approach taken in this paper is to denaturalize the scarcity-conflict schema and
demystify the cultural specificity with which scarcity is given political meaning in the United
States.
3 The Scarcity-Conflict Schema and the Scarcity-Cooperation Alternative
3.1 Anthropocentrism and Eco-Mutualism Across Culture
The ideas of Locke and Malthus orbit in a common cosmology in which the world was
created by the monotheistic, masculinized God figure of Christianity. Man is made in God’s image,
and God made the world for men. In this cosmological premise lies the root of a broader
anthropocentrism that informs the logic of private property as shared by Locke and Malthus. So

17
too, here lies the beginning point for both thinkers’ philosophical consideration of how man4 may
justly navigate the moral tensions inherent in providing for one’s subsistence.
I begin my discussion of Locke and Malthus with an elemental yet important observation
offered by Kimmerer (2013) in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. Put simply, humans cannot
photosynthesize. We cannot feed ourselves directly off the sun. Therefore, humans must consume
the lives of other beings, whether plant or animal, in order to sustain ourselves. From an ecomutualistic perspective, this predicament introduces an inherent moral conundrum. The question
arises: What are the just parameters by which the taking of life may be morally contained and
ethically pursued?
To this point, Kimmerer highlights the Honorable Harvest as a guiding framework among
Indigenous cultures for answering this question. While the specifics vary across time and place,
the precepts are nearly universal. Accordingly, the Honorable Harvest encompasses a “canon of
principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life”; in other words, rules that “govern
our taking [and] shape our relationships with the natural world” (Kimmerer 2013: 180). As such,
the Honorable Harvest requires humanity “to take only what is given, to use it well, to be grateful
for the gift, and to reciprocate the gift” (Kimmerer 2013: 21).
Embedded in the logic of the Honorable Harvest is the perspective that the fruits of the
Earth are born from a reciprocal act of cooperation between humanity and the Creator, whose spirit
infuses all living beings. All planetary life forms, including the land as well as the plants and
animals it sustains, are a gift rather than a possession to be appropriated and commodified. With
the acceptance of this gift, human beings are morally obliged to care for the earth and nurture
4 When interpreting the works of Locke and Malthus, I’ve chosen to mirror their usage of masculine pronouns.
Though it may have historically been conventional to use masculine pronouns even when intending to speak about
the whole of humanity, I make no assumptions that Locke and Malthus had anyone other than masculine individuals
in mind when proposing their theories. Therefore, I stay true to their language choice when discussing their works.

18
planetary well-being in return. The relationship between human beings and the land is
fundamentally one of reciprocity. The world was not created for humans to the exclusion of other
living beings (both plant and animal). Instead, the world was created as “a garden for the wellbeing of all” (Kimmerer 2013: 7). In this world, natural law is “the law of reciprocity, of
regeneration, of mutual flourishing” (Kimmerer 2013: 173).
The eco-mutualistic perspective embedded in the Honorable Harvest is likewise built into
the traditional language of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation to which Kimmerer belongs. Indigenous
to the Great Lakes region, the Potawatomi people were subjected to federal policies of forced
removal which resulted in their relocation to Oklahoma and subsequent dispersal across the transMississippi West. Though forced from their homelands by the genocidal policies of the federal
government, with many suffering from illness and dying in the process, the Potawatomi people
and their cultural lifeways carry on not least via the “grammar of animacy” that structures their
native language (Kimmerer 2013: 55).
In contrast to European languages where nouns and verbs are often gendered, the
Potawatomi language distinguishes nouns and verbs in terms of their animacy or inanimacy. In
other words, the language embeds a distinction between “the living world and the lifeless one,”
such that the land, plants, and animals are conveyed as holding the same status of animacy as that
of human beings (Kimmerer 2013: 53). This grammar of animacy precludes the kind of
objectification that arises when a living being is referred to as an ‘it’ (Kimmerer 2013: 55). As
such, this grammar implicitly facilitates a human-nature ontology based upon reciprocity and
egalitarianism rather than one based upon dominance for human gain. The ontologies of ecomutualism and anthropocentrism are built into language itself.

19
In the Anglo-Saxon traditions of thought from which Locke and Malthus emerge, the
human-nature ontology of anthropocentrism negates the need for principles and practices in line
with the Honorable Harvest as observed among Indigenous cultures. Because the world was
created by God for man, the parameters of just subsistence are not constrained by obligations of
reciprocity to the natural world. Nature is there for man’s taking, and thus the question of just
subsistence applies primarily to relations among men. The anthropocentrism discussed here can
be understood more concretely through an analysis of the values of hierarchy and individualism
embedded in Locke’s labor-property thesis, all of which Malthus takes as given. In this paper, I
theorize that these values and their underlying ontological roots are fundamental in shaping
cultural responses to scarcity.
3.2 Individualism and Hierarchy in Locke’s Theory of Property
The labor-property thesis refers to Locke’s well-known argument for the right to private
property on the basis of individual labor. Accordingly, God did two things. First, “God gave the
world in common to all mankind,” such that “all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds,
belong to mankind in common” (Locke 1690: 21, 19). Second, God “commanded him to subdue
the earth…and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour” (Locke 1690: 21).
In “obedience to this command of God,” man appropriates nature as his individual property (21).
Locke offers the example of picking an apple from a tree. In exerting one’s energies
towards this end, man “add[s] something to them more than nature, the common mother of all, had
done” (Locke 1690: 19). That is, with the “labour of his body, and the work of his hands,” man
mixes his labor with “the trees in the wood” and “thereby makes [the apple] his property” (Locke
1690: 21). Indeed, this principle by which individual labor confers a right to private property is
asserted by Locke to be the “original law of nature” (Locke 1690: 30).

20
With these basic premises spelled out, we can begin to see the values of individualism and
hierarchy at play in an anthropocentric worldview that valorizes masculinity. The language of God
commands man evokes a hierarchical relation between the Creator and mankind. This hierarchical
structure is extended to man’s relationship to nature, where nature as the common mother of all is
rendered feminine and subdued for the purposes of masculine appropriation. Indeed, to this latter
point, Locke situates the “subduing [of]... the earth” and “having dominion” as one and the same
(Locke 1690: 22). This logic culminates in an obligatory license to extract and exploit for the
purposes of individual enrichment: “...God, by commanding to subdue, gave authority so far to
appropriate: and the condition of human life, which requires labour and materials to work on,
necessarily introduces private possessions” (Locke 1690: 22).
Through the gendered values of individualism and hierarchy, Locke answers the question
of how individual property can be carved out of the natural commons given by God to all of
mankind (Locke 1690: 22). This answer is not the end but rather the starting point for a broader
discussion of the distributive ethics by which property may be individually appropriated among
men. This discussion, in a sense, offers an anthropocentric analogue to the Honorable Harvest of
Indigenous cultures, insofar as it considers the parameters which ought to ‘govern the taking’
among men and, in turn, circumscribe the extent to which the individual may justly accumulate
property. I theorize that these contrasting conceptualizations of distributive ethics set in motion
divergent cultural understandings of scarcity and its social ramifications, as elaborated below.
3.3 Distributive Ethics and the Alibi of Abundance
To negotiate the distributive ethics of his labor-property thesis, Locke posits two
limitations that constrain the accumulation of private property. First, he asserts the requirement
that one’s property accumulation be contained such that the means by which others may

21
sufficiently meet their needs are preserved. Second, he asserts the constraint that one accumulates
no more than he can make use of, such that nothing spoils in his possession. The former is
commonly referred to as the sufficiency limitation and the latter as the spoilage limitation (Ince
2011).
Indeed, Locke explicitly states that it is “foolish” and “dishonest” for a man to “hoard up
more than he can make use of” (Locke 1690: 28). Thus, the spoilage limitation retains its force, at
least initially, as a constraint on property accumulation. The sufficiency limitation, however, is
quickly given little credence. According to Locke, the conditions that characterize the beginning
of time when private property was established were of such abundance that one need not worry
about whether one’s accumulation of property encroaches upon the ability of others to meet their
needs. The abundance at the beginning of man ensured a non-zero-sum situation in which land and
the means of subsistence were sufficient for all. Therefore, the sufficiency limitation is rendered
irrelevant.
In negotiating these limitations, the Lockean origin story touches upon a theme of
importance across a range of cultures: that is, the theme of human greed. How much is one person
entitled to? What are the moral principles that ought to ‘govern the taking’? The cultural ubiquity
of this archetypal question is evident in the concerns of the Honorable Harvest. Indeed,
Anishinaabe mythology originating among Indigenous nations of the Great Lakes region goes even
further in its narratives admonishing the human temptation to hoard. As recounted by Kimmerer,
Anishinaabe elder Basil Johnston tells the story of Nanabozho, a cultural protagonist whose
learning of hard lessons as the Original Man on Turtle Island is recounted across generations. In
this story, Nanabozho is taught a new fishing technique by the Heron5 bird, who warns him not to
5 To be consistent with the grammatical approach of Kimmerer’s (2013) account, I’ve chosen to capitalize the
names of these non-human figures.

22
take too many fish. Nanabozho ignores this warning and proceeds day after day to catch far more
fish than required for his subsistence. Eventually, as the winter nears, the lake grows empty while
his supply becomes evermore bloated. Then, one day, a Fox catches wind of the bounty and feasts
upon the supply when Nanabozho is off on yet another fishing excursion. As a consequence of his
own greed, Nanabozho is left with nothing. The moral of the story is archetypally evergreen:
“never take more than you need” (Kimmerer 2013: 179).
To a degree, Locke taps into this moral lesson, in the terms of his Christian worldview.
Accordingly, one shouldn’t take more than they need because doing so risks spoiling the fruits of
nature, and the creations of God are not meant to be spoiled. However, for Locke, the story does
not end here. Instead, mankind innovated a workaround regarding the spoilage limitation. This
workaround came in the form of money. Gold and silver cannot spoil. Therefore, coinage offers
the perfect medium of exchange by which property may be accumulated, commodified, and
transacted without implicitly violating the spoilage limitation. With money in circulation, which
by men’s consent may be exchanged for the truly useful yet perishable things in life, the individual
is morally entitled to accumulate evermore property, for the fruit of the land on which the
individual does not personally subsist can be exchanged for gold and silver, i.e. materials which
may be rightfully ‘hoarded’ without risk of spoilage.
With the advent of money, all bets are off, so to speak, for it had always been the case,
under the original conditions of abundance, that the exceeding of the bounds of one’s just property
accumulation lie not “in the largeness of his possession, but the perishing of anything uselessly in
it” (Locke 1690: 28). Thus, according to the Lockean account, distributive ethics are not anchored
to concerns of sufficiency nor spoilage by virtue of man’s original abundance and man’s invention
of money. A vacuum regarding distributive ethics emerges, such that even an anthropocentric

23
analogue to the Honorable Harvest loses traction. The following sections will build toward an
understanding of how this vacuum ultimately gets filled in the Lockean account.
3.4 Analogies between America and the Original Abundance of Man
Here, we begin to see Locke establishing an analogy between the original abundance of
man and the conditions of America. Accordingly, the ‘Indians’ of America enjoy conditions of
abundance; however, by virtue of their ‘savage’ lifestyle, they appear to squander it. They leave
much of the land uncultivated, rendering themselves “rich in land, and poor in all the comforts of
life” (Locke 1690: 26). The “fruitful soil” of the ‘Indians’ in America is “apt to produce in
abundance,” and yet, the quality of life enjoyed by their kings is “worse than a day-labourer in
England” (Locke 1690: 26).
According to Locke, the land itself, though abundant in its potential, is of meager value
compared to that of England’s Devonshire. For “want of improving it by labor,” the lands of
America, as “left to nature, without any improvement,” are of little worth (Locke 1690: 26, 24). In
this premise, we see the construction and influence of two hierarchies: that of man over nature,
and that of the European over the Indian. These hierarchies are part of the logic of man’s alleged
progression from savage to civilized which undergirds both the Lockean and Malthusian
perspective. This logic is crucial for justifying colonization by Europeans in the New World,
including that of the Anglo-Saxon settlers who would become the founding generation of the
nascent United States (Speed 2019; Frymer 2014; Smith 1993).
The lifestyle of the Indigenous peoples, living broadly by the principles of the Honorable
Harvest, is incomprehensible from the Lockean perspective. The advent of money necessarily
spurs the accumulation of property, and yet, the ‘Indian’ seemingly leaves much of the land

24
untouched, taking no more than one’s individual subsistence requires. For Locke, this lifestyle is
fundamentally backward.
Indeed, Locke distinguishes the ‘civilized’ from the ‘savage’ in terms of their use of
money. Put simply, the civilized use money and the savage do not. The use of money, and its
concomitant negation of the sufficiency limitation, marks a step of progress along the stages of
human development. Locke frequently invokes this paradigm, situating the Indian at the earliest
stages of development and the European at the forefront of civilizational advances. In observing
the lack of a monetary economy among the Indigenous, an assumption is made that this absence
is a matter of underdevelopment rather than a matter of cultural principle, informed by the grammar
of animacy, the ethics of the Honorable Harvest, and the ontology of eco-mutualism.
Under the bias of Locke’s cultural blinders, the land-use practices of the Indigenous are
nonsensical and thus render the land available for the taking by anyone willing to heed God’s
command and subdue the land via agricultural techniques familiar to the European eye. Indeed,
the advent of money provides the very basis on which America might come to be a target of the
European settler willing to enclose the commons for private cultivation in God’s name (Locke
160: 29).
To Locke, America parallels the state of the world prior to the advent of money, where
conditions are abundant but no motivation yet exists to settle the surplus of acreage. As Locke
states: “in the beginning all the world was America, and more so than it is now, for no such thing
as money was anywhere known” (Locke 1690: 29). In this ‘before time,’ there existed no incentive
for man to subdue and cultivate the “inland parts of America, where he had no hopes of commerce
with the world, to draw money to him by the sale of the product” (Locke 1690: 29). With the
advent of money, and with the directive of God’s will that the land be cultivated, man is both

25
permitted and compelled to accumulate property without limit. This logic is at the heart of the
Lockean account.
3.5 The Descent from Abundance to Scarcity in the Lockean Account
Ironically, this logic seen through to its conclusion spells the descent of America from its
state of relative abundance into a state of relative scarcity, at least with regard to the supply of
land. Locke hypothesizes that the advent of money and its use among men will necessarily drive
the enlarging of possessions on behalf of the individual, at least the kind of individual progressing
along the savage-to-civilized trajectory. With this hypothesis, Locke claims that the original
conditions of abundance, in the beginning of man and likewise in America, will not last forever.
Instead, the universal story of man is such that “the increase of people and stock, with the use of
money… [will make] land scarce” (Locke 1690: 28).
This descent is not a negative development, per se, but rather the inevitable outcome of
heeding God’s will. Uncultivated land, among those who have not “joined with the rest of
mankind, in the consent of the use of their common money,” is understood to “lie waste” (Locke
1690: 28). Here again, we see the difference between an anthropocentric worldview and an ecomutualistic one. For the latter, land is intrinsically valuable. Its fruits are a gift born of reciprocity.
When acts of reciprocity between land and people have provided for the needs of the individual
and community, no more is to be harvested. In fact, that which is taken beyond the scope of
subsistence is itself considered ‘waste.’
By contrast, Locke’s logic surrounding property and money defines waste in terms of
profits. In turn, abundance is also defined in terms of potential dominion and profit. Uncultivated
land is ‘waste’ because it constitutes a missed opportunity to turn a profit. By this anthropocentric
account, the land itself, in its ‘uncultivated’ form, has no value. In fact, it only gains value once it

26
is rendered scarce by the advent of money and the resulting property accumulation that limits its
supply relative to demand. Here, Locke notes the connection between relative scarcity and profit.
In doing so, Locke foreshadows an insight put forward by scholars of contemporary capitalism –
that is, under capitalist systems, scarcity and profit are closely linked, such that profit margins rise
as a product is rendered increasingly scarce relative to demand. This link between scarcity and
profit is understood by scholars to be at the heart of settler-colonial systems of capital (Fujikane
2021).
With the hypothesized descent into scarcity, we might expect Locke to revisit the
sufficiency limitation, insofar as it theoretically holds new water in the more advanced stages of
civilization where money and rising population are anticipated to generate scarcity. This
expectation stems from a contradiction that emerges in his account, wherein the solution to the
spoilage limitation – that is, the advent of money – catalyzes property accumulation, engenders
land scarcity, and thereby necessarily violates the sufficiency limitation as it pertains to land-based
subsistence. Locke does not explicitly acknowledge this contradiction.
Instead, Locke advances an optimism familiar to liberal-economic thinking. Accordingly,
the accumulation and cultivation of private property and the resulting growth of monetary
exchange relations will necessarily increase the “common stock” of mankind (Locke 1960: 23). In
other words, even where “all the land is possessed” (Locke 1960: 96), a private property marketbased system ensures the land will be used evermore productively, such that even the propertyless
will always be able to meet their needs by selling their labor in exchange for the wages with which
they may purchase their subsistence. This logic evinces a market faith in line with a long
ideological history in American politics. It does the work of precluding the reformulation of

27
constraints on the right to property, and it forestalls reconsideration of that archetypal question of
distributive ethics regarding how much individual accumulation is morally acceptable.
3.6 The Lockean Construction of Scarcity
We can better understand this logic if we clarify the political agenda of Locke’s overall
account. Locke advances a vision of civil government with the primary purpose of protecting
private properties by settling their boundaries via positive compact. Locke’s vision is essentially
libertarian in this regard, making no claims to coordinate life and access to subsistence among the
polity beyond this basic protection. Locke positions the decision by men to enter into positive
compacts of this kind as part of a natural evolution that tracks chronologically with the same forces
precipitating the inevitable descent into scarcity. Accordingly, in those “parts of the world” where
land has become scarce due to the introduction of money and the resulting increase in property
accumulation, men are liable to have, “by compact and agreement, settled the property which
labour and industry began” (Locke 1690: 28). Thus, Locke positions the trajectory from abundance
to scarcity as synchronous to the path along which men establish civil government; however,
Locke obscures the implications of emergent scarcity for distributive ethics by invoking a faith in
the market.
This simultaneous emphasis on and obfuscation of scarcity in Locke’s account is
advantageous for his rhetorical objectives. Scarcity is delicately politicized as occasioning civil
government yet requiring no overt consideration with regard to the question of distributive ethics
and its attendant sufficiency principle. To consider scarcity in this latter light would theoretically
entail elaborating the role of government beyond its function as a passive arbiter of property
protection. Such elaboration would threaten the parsimony of his account and its classical-liberal
vision of limited government.

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To fill the void regarding distributive ethics and to minimally redress the question of
distributive ethics beyond a doctrine of free-market faith, additional features of human nature must
be put into place. Locke rhetorically accomplishes this task by asserting a natural hierarchy among
men on the basis of individual merit. Accordingly, men are distinguished from one another by
“different degrees of industry” which are, in turn, “apt to give men possessions in different
proportions” (Locke 1690: 29). Embedded here is the belief that “industry,” i.e. the capacity for
commodifying the land and turning a profit, is a metric of merit. A person lacking the sufficient
means for meeting their needs can thus be understood as lacking merit, as defined by the hierarchy
of individual industriousness. Merit, like waste and abundance, is defined in terms of profit.
With this hierarchy of merit among men in place alongside the assertion of a free-market
faith, Locke makes no explicit effort to reconsider the sufficiency limitation. As a result, no
analogue to the Honorable Harvest is preserved, and therefore the principle of limitless property
accumulation is maintained. Scarcity, then, relative to the demand for land or otherwise, is dealt
with as a matter of unencumbered individualistic competition.
3.7 Malthus and the Introduction of Absolute Scarcity
This ‘solution’ of competition to the predicament of scarcity remains implicit in the
Lockean account. It is left to a subsequent thinker of economic liberalism, i.e. Thomas Malthus,
to make this ‘solution’ explicit. In doing so, Malthus takes the relative scarcity predicament one
step further and adds in a factor of absolute scarcity – that is, scarcity as it pertains to the planetary
supply of biophysical resources necessary for survival, i.e. food and water. Absolute scarcity, as
discussed here, is distinct from relative scarcity. To illustrate this distinction, take the example of
land. For Locke, land becomes scarce relative to the population’s demand for land access and
property ownership. Nonetheless, for Locke, the land is not necessarily scarce in an absolute sense

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because it can still hypothetically yield a supply of biophysical resources sufficient to meet the
survival needs of the population writ large, even if the propertyless can only access its fruits via
wage labor.
For Malthus, absolute scarcity is always looming on the horizon, no matter the society
under consideration. His logic stems from two core premises. First, food is necessary for the
subsistence of man. Second, the ‘passion between the sexes’ is necessary and will remain. In other
words, men must eat and men will procreate. Unfortunately for man, these postulates of reality are
not entirely compatible because the food supply generated by agricultural subsistence allegedly
cannot grow at the rate by which the population multiples. In other words, the growth rate of
population will inevitably outpace that of a polity’s subsistence capacity. Therefore, the best
humanity can hope for is to reduce the differential between the rate of population growth and the
rate of agricultural production. According to Malthus, this differential can never be eliminated in
full, and thus absolute scarcity will always impose a hard limit on the advance of social well-being.
Though introducing a new factor of absolute scarcity, Malthus takes the essence of Locke’s
premises as given. The “law of self-preservation” and the individualism it connotes are asserted as
fact (Malthus 1798: 60). The same basic worldview is likewise upheld, wherein the protagonist of
the proverbial industrious man lives in subservience to a masculinized, monotheistic God. The
regime of private property and the role of government in protecting it is taken as given. Indeed,
such a system of social organization is affirmed to distinguish the civilized from the savage. In a
general sense, Malthus adheres to the same paradigm as Locke wherein man’s progress along the
path from savage to civilized represents the actualization of God’s will. However, Malthus’s
incorporation of absolute scarcity as an intractable feature of the human condition adds new
dimensions to this basic paradigm.

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Overall, Locke remains silent on the possibility of absolute scarcity for man’s life on earth.
Locke’s silence on the existence and theoretical relevance of even ecological fluctuations in the
natural environment, much less the possibility of absolute scarcity therein, reflects an ontology in
which man’s mastery over Nature is boundless. Here, we see a subtle distinction between Locke
and Malthus in their respective anthropocentric orientations. A sharper iteration of man’s
antagonistic relationship with nature comes into view in Malthusian thought. Accordingly, man
must seek to subdue Nature for purposes of subsistence, but man in his social context enjoys no
guarantee that the subsistence capacity of the planet will cover the needs of the population writ
large. In fact, man is trapped in a cycle of ever-imminent scarcity that necessitates suffering in the
form of deprivation and starvation among some portion of the population. Among the civilized,
this suffering, referred to by Malthus as “misery,” is wisely contained to the lower classes via antiwelfare public policy (Malthus 1798: 92).
Malthus builds on Locke’s merit-based justification of inequality by adding the premise
that inequality between laborers and proprietors (i.e. the propertyless and the propertied) is
necessary for the productive distribution of scarcity-induced misery. In fact, inequality structured
in these class terms is said to differentiate the civilized society, whose subsistence rooted in
agriculture is allegedly superior to that of the savage hunter. According to Malthus, reckoning with
absolute scarcity forces mankind to use their intellectual faculties of foresight, and the
strengthening of these faculties fosters the powers of Reason which propel man out of the savage
state into civilized society. Absolute scarcity may spring misery in the form of starvation and
deprivation, but it must be accepted and celebrated as the fulcrum in God’s design for man’s
progress from savage to civilized. The industriousness with which the individual carves out his

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own subsistence is said to feed the formation of man’s virtuous reason, which purportedly
constitutes the ultimate engine underwriting the path from savagery to civilization.
Sharing Locke’s basic paradigm of the savage-civilized hierarchy, Malthus likewise
positions the ‘Indians’ of the New World in the early stages of this scarcity-fueled trajectory while
situating European nations as much further advanced. Indeed, for Malthus, the New World of
America is one of abundance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Malthus uses the demographics of the
Anglo-Saxon settlers in America to derive his estimate for the rate of population growth under
conditions of abundance. While praising the settlers’ enshrinement of “perfect liberty” as an
important contributor to their flourishing, Malthus cites the settlers’ conditions of abundance as a
primary factor underlying the socioeconomic and biophysical prosperity that allegedly typified the
nascent United States (Malthus 1798: 33).
Nonetheless, Malthus, like Locke, forecasts that such abundance is fleeting. Eventually,
the “Law of Necessity” will rear its head (Malthus 1798: 42). The original abundance will
inevitably yield an increase in population that outpaces the polity’s ability to increase their
subsistence capacity, and the brutal reality of inevitable Misery will stake its claim on the limits
of society’s “perfectibility” (Malthus 1798: 5). According to Malthus, the needs of all can never
be provided for, as the inevitability of absolute scarcity predetermines some degree of deprivation
at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Therefore, any political initiatives aiming for progress in the
provision of social welfare are a fool’s errand.
This prediction is purported to apply to all ‘civilized’ societies. Though the details as they
may manifest in the United States are left by Malthus for the future to tell, the portrait that Malthus
paints of England and its reckoning with the Law of Necessity is illustrative of how scarcity has
been politicized within the ideational progenitors of American culture. In turn, the political

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meaning with which scarcity is portrayed by Malthus can be understood as typifying an ideological
response to scarcity that is culturally salient for the American public.
3.8 Scarcity Framing in Malthusian Thought
Throughout its history, the United States has fashioned itself as a place of abundant
opportunity, if not abundant resources. Faith in the American dream is predicated on this selfconcept. Therefore, any sign of impending scarcity constitutes a threat to not only biophysical
survival, but also to national identity.
Malthusian prescriptions for the governance of inevitable scarcity exemplify a kind of
approach available in the Anglo-Saxon arsenal and therefore the political imaginary of traditional
America. What are these prescriptions? To start, society must resist the temptation to provide for
the poor in any coordinated manner via public policy. The instincts of “benevolence” which spur
such temptation must be superseded by an individualistic regime of “self-love” with each man for
himself (Malthus 1798: 60). For Malthus, this prescription is not just a matter of principle, but a
matter of curbing scarcity itself.
As such, we see in the writings of Malthus a quintessential example of overt scarcity
framing at play. Scarcity framing refers to a rhetorical act in which a political actor frames the
reality of scarcity so as to establish a political perspective and advance a political agenda. In his
Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus makes his case against the Poor Laws of England.
His arguments were highly influential and inspired the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834
(discussed in greater detail in Section 6.2). In his critique, he condemns the welfare program under
the Poor Laws as exacerbating the problem of scarcity and perversely pulling an increasing
proportion of the population into poverty. He argues this position by intermingling a classical
market logic with concern for the population-subsistence differential.

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By this account, aid to the poor merely enables the lack of industriousness which
purportedly explains one’s positioning among the have-nots in the first place. In providing for the
needs of the poor, the polity stifles the poignancy of fear which allegedly steers the poor away
from the “ale-house” and towards productive labor (Malthus 1798: 27). The cultivation of fear
serves as an instrument of governance, without which the productive economy of the polity writ
large is gravely undermined (Tellmann 2017). According to Malthus, the penalty on national
productivity that stems from supporting the poor and ameliorating their fears further widens the
disparity between population and subsistence, a disparity made all the worse in seasons of low
agricultural yield due to fluctuations in the natural environment. Moreover, by putting money in
the hands of the poor, the state reduces the value of the dollar relative to the price of food – in
other words, welfare exacerbates inflation. Therefore, by a zero-sum logic, welfare policy elevates
the poor at the expense of honest laborers, thereby dragging the latter down to the rungs of the
former.
Perhaps worst of all, aid to the poor undermines the potency of fear as a disciplinary device
for discouraging procreation among the poor. Accordingly, without the fear of failing to provide
for the subsistence of one’s family, men will procreate without limit by virtue of the “passion
between the sexes” (Malthus 1798: 4). The removal of fear that allegedly comes with aiding the
poor leaves this propensity to procreate unchecked and therefore subverts the crucial constraint on
population growth that is facilitated by the anticipation and/or the experience of biophysical
deprivation.
The combined disincentives to (1) remain abstinent and (2) labor productively are
understood to exacerbate absolute scarcity by virtue of expanding the population-subsistence
differential. As a result, all of society suffers at the hands of scarcity under a welfare regime, with

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the greatest wrong accruing to those formerly on the edge of poverty and now subject to its
miseries.
3.9 Scarcity and Distributive Ethics in the Shared Logic of Locke and Malthus
For Malthus, parity between population and subsistence is never long-lasting. Put simply,
the good times cannot last. Therefore, a society wherein the servicing of everyone’s needs is
always guaranteed is impossible. The “common stock” can be increased in the Lockean sense, but
eventually the fruits of a growing subsistence capacity will yield a growth in population that
outpaces the gains in productivity. With the consequent descent from abundance to scarcity, the
pursuit of “benevolence” in the form of welfare will eventually reveal its own impotence and return
society to a regime of “self-love” that ought to have been honored in the first place (Malthus 1798:
60).
Embedded in this logic is a negation of Locke’s original sufficiency limitation. According
to Malthus, it is inevitable that human societies will prove unable to provide for the sufficiency of
all individuals at all times. Therefore, Malthus does not even bother stipulating principles in the
spirit of the sufficiency limitation, however diluted it may become by the end of Locke’s treatise.
Though the sufficiency limitation is out the window, the ultimate distributive ethic of the
Lockean account is preserved. Property, and thus the means of subsistence, is to be allocated by a
metric of individual industriousness that is adjudicated by the outcomes of competition. In a world
where land and the direct means of subsistence are relatively abundant, this distributive ethic
carries minimal weight, for men enjoy an open season to ‘put hand to plow’ and cultivate the land
to the extent that their industry allows. No competition is necessary.
However, in a world where land and the direct means of subsistence are relatively scarce,
this distributive ethic carries more water. One man’s industry is pitted against another, and the

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resulting competition differentiates the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots.’ Nonetheless, because scarcity
is only relative in kind, the needs of the population writ large are not compromised per se. Instead,
the propertyless man may service his needs so long as he is willing to play the game of proving
his deservingness over that of another by augmenting the profits of proprietors via the exchange
of his labor. Therefore, relative scarcity does not spell suffering per se, but it does stimulate a
polity that is hierarchically structured by individualistic competition.
Under conditions of absolute scarcity, the sufficiency limitation is rendered unrealistic fullstop. There is not enough for all to survive, and therefore somebody must suffer. Egalitarianism
would require that the suffering be shouldered by all, while hierarchy based on individualistic
competition would ensure that the ‘most deserving’ are spared. Because individual industriousness
is understood to fuel man along the path from savage to civilized, as per God’s design, the latter
hierarchical structure of society is preferred. Without sparing the deserving via the competitionbased allocation of misery, society risks stunting the progression of mankind writ large.
Under conditions of scarcity, whether relative or absolute, individualistic distributive ethics
precipitate inequality that is delineated by the outcomes of competition. Conditions of relative
scarcity versus absolute scarcity determine the stakes of the competition, with the former
implicating quality of life and the latter implicating biophysical survival outright.
The scale of stakes aside, both Locke and Malthus are united in establishing an association
between scarcity and conflict in their political logic. Already inherent in individualism, conflict
encompasses the competition and hierarchy that animate society all the more potently under
conditions of scarcity. Broadly speaking, the ideological traditions that align with LockeanMalthusian thought posit a scarcity-conflict schema that, in turn, structures the way political reality
is envisioned in prominent subcurrents of American society.

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Put simply, what is a polity to do when scarcity rears its head? The joint LockeanMalthusian answer doubles down on the virtue of preserving hierarchy as adjudicated by
individualistic competition. This response encapsulates the scarcity-conflict schema and
constitutes the shadow of the American dream, i.e. that darker side of American morality which
spells deprivation and precarity among the marginalized when abundance sours.
4 The Scarcity-Conflict Schema in American Political Culture
Though the primary texts analyzed here are but two works among a vast corpus of
European political thought considered to be influential in the American context, the texts can be
more broadly appreciated as artifacts of a common political-cultural perspective. My aim in the
following analysis is to explore and identify how the perspective reflected in the writings of Locke
and Malthus can be seen unfolding in American public policy. In doing so, I aim to establish
continuity between the accounts of Locke and Malthus and dynamics of American politics. My
core argument is that the ideas they express and the narrative premises on which their accounts
rely belong to a broader cultural lineage that, among other influences, continues to shape policy
design, political rhetoric, and public opinion into the present day.
Through the foregoing textual analysis, I demonstrated how the scarcity-conflict schema is
embedded in the shared worldview of Locke and Malthus. I analyzed how the scarcity-conflict
schema goes hand-in-hand with their conceptualization of distributive ethics. This
conceptualization identifies competition as the just principle of distribution and embraces
economic hierarchy based on individual industriousness as the legitimate social structure. My
analysis highlights how this envisioned social structure is intimately tied to another axis of
hierarchy – that is, the civilized-savage hierarchy which elevates European values as superior to
that of Indigenous lifeways. I emphasized that the ontological roots of this cultural lineage lie in

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an anthropocentric cosmology wherein nature is feminized and subjugated for purposes of man’s
dominance in the name of a masculinized God.
My goal in the following analyses is to illustrate how elements of this overall worldview
have periodically animated American political history into the contemporary era. I do not claim
that this worldview, as I’ve explained it, encapsulates all aspects of this history, nor do I attempt
to provide an exhaustive account towards this end. Instead, I analyze select periods of American
policy discourse that are particularly emblematic in their mirroring of Lockean-Malthusian
premises. In a sense, these periods of policy discourse echo Locke and Malthus in their narrative
constructions and political logics. My intention is not to argue that the Lockean-Malthusian lineage
uniformly underwrites all policy discourses to the same degree, but rather that it has done so
prominently enough to justify my claim that the worldview expressed in their accounts and the
scarcity-conflict schema embedded therein should be understood as a latent subcurrent in
American political culture, subject to periodic activation when perceptions of scarcity are
heightened. As such, the scarcity-conflict schema influences American politics alongside other
forces, including more cooperative cultural subcurrents. For instance, the formation of mutual aid
groups throughout American history exemplifies a political logic that meaningfully contradicts
that of the Lockean-Malthusian worldview (see Brooks 2024). Similar to how Smith (1993)
conceptualizes American political culture as “the often conflictual and contradictory product of
multiple political traditions” (549), these schemas of conflict and cooperation can be seen as
concurrent forces shaping responses to scarcity in American politics.
In the ensuing sections, I discuss the influence and the expression of the scarcity-conflict
schema in political discourses across American history, and I draw upon interlocutors of
Indigenous cultures to further illuminate the scarcity-cooperation alternative. Along the way, I

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interweave discussion of pertinent scholarship from political psychology and highlight relevant
political phenomena in the contemporary United States for purposes of concretely illustrating the
mechanisms by which scarcity schemas permeate the politics of the present.
4.1 Malthus and Social Darwinism in America
The chain of political dialogue initiated by Malthusian thought cannot be underestimated.
Malthus was among the first publicly recognized intellectuals in English society to identify the
pressure of population on subsistence as an essential organizing principle of human existence. As
such, he set in motion an emergent social perspective that ultimately gave rise to Darwin’s theory
of natural selection and its subsequent application to society among political elites in latenineteenth, early-twentieth century America. These political elites would eventually be referred to
as social Darwinists.
Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection posited that species evolve through a
mechanism of biological fitness by which the characteristics of organisms who successfully
reproduce are passed on to subsequent generations and thereby form the defining traits of the
species writ large (Darwin 2009). Accordingly, nature ‘selects’ for traits that improve the
organism’s odds of reproducing and thus, presumably, their ability to survive and attract a mate.
Indeed, Darwin is explicit in citing Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population as an original
inspiration for his evolutionary theory, on the grounds that Malthusian thought formalized
Darwin’s own observations regarding the “struggle for existence which everywhere goes on”
(quoted in Hofstadter 1992: 39).
Darwinian evolutionary theory instituted a paradigmatic shift insofar as it directly
contradicted theological understandings of the natural world as designed by the hands of God
(Hofstadter 1992). The theory of natural selection thus ushered in a more secularized intellectual

39
atmosphere (Hofstadter 1992); however, when it comes to the scarcity-conflict schema, it dressed
up old premises in new clothes. With the rise of Darwinian evolutionary theory came the elevation
of Malthusian social prognoses to the status of a planetary order. The ‘struggle for existence’
became an organizing principle for all life on Earth, and the implications for society became a
topic of intellectual debate. As recounted by Richard Hofstadter (1992), social Darwinists gained
popularity in the post-Civil War context where conservatives sought to quell societal instability
and justify the political status quo. The “individualistic-competitive uses of Darwinism” offered a
means for doing so (Hofstadter 1992: 6). In true Malthusian fashion, such uses of Darwinian theory
were applied not simply to explain the evolution of homo sapiens but, perhaps more tellingly, to
chart mankind’s progress on the path to civilization (Hofstadter 1992: 57).
In addition to precipitating a ‘survival of the fittest’ conception of individualistic
competition, Darwinian evolutionary theory provided fodder for the country’s long-running
tradition of ascriptive hierarchy (Smith 1993). The scientific sheen of evolutionary theory
conferred a new status of legitimacy upon racial and gender inequality on the premise that the
races and sexes are naturally arrayed into hierarchy, just as species in the animal kingdom are
purportedly hierarchized with humans at the top (Smith 1993). The social Darwinism deployed to
justify domestic inequalities of race and gender was likewise deployed to construct racialized
perceptions of foreign threat for purposes of exclusionary immigration law.
This application of social Darwinism was evident in the policy discourse leading up to the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which marked the first major curtailment of open immigration in
America (Smith 1993). According to its advocates, such as California Senator John Miller, Chinese
laborers had to be denied entry into the United States insofar “Chinese race characteristics…made
them unbeatable competitors against the free white man” (Smith 1993: 559). The framework of

40
social Darwinism provided an orienting narrative for situating the Chinese as “far below the
Anglo-Saxon…[yet] still a threat to the latter’s livelihood in a market economy” (Smith 1993:
559). By conveying and tapping into a competitive jungle worldview, social Darwinism provided
the necessary plot material for constructing an enemy threat while nonetheless disparaging the
enemy as inferior to the white American ingroup. By situating racial competition in the context of
market relations, the discourse of social Darwinism in anti-Chinese immigration policy
constructed the economic sphere as the playing field in which both individualistic and interracial
hierarchy takes form.
The Chinese Exclusion Act marked an early shift en route to the 1921 national-origins
quota law, which instituted an explicitly racist system of regulating immigration in the service of
an idealized American whiteness. The quota system denied immigration to virtually all Asians and
authorized European immigration only in ratios that favored immigrants of northern Europe. In
celebration of the new restrictions, Congressman Albert Johnson from Washington state declared
that “the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended,” as if a truly
‘accepting’ approach had previously been at play (quoted in Smith 1993: 560). With a white
supremacist racialization of the American citizenry on full display, the quota system remained
official policy until its repeal under the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. In the early
twentieth century, the overt racism of exclusionary immigration policy can be understood as the
logical outgrowth of a cultural context in which social Darwinistic interpolations of the civilizedsavage hierarchy were prominently expressed.
4.2 The Analogy of Economic Order and Animal Kingdom in Social Darwinism
In the discourse of social Darwinism, rhetorical analogies between the economic order and
the animal world proliferated. In early 20th century America, conservative proponents of laissez-

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faire governance drew upon such analogies to argue against labor reform demanding increased
wages. Accordingly, interfering with the free-market, however brutally competitive it may be, is
akin to interfering with the laws of nature. Natural selection, by their reading, dictates that the
strong survive and the weak perish. Therefore, the market-based economy ought to serve its
function of ‘social selection’ by rewarding the proverbial industrious man and preserving his status
at the top of the social hierarchy (Hofstadter 1992: 57). This social Darwinistic perspective added
a new dimension to the free-market faith of economic liberalism.
This logic was expressed at the time among Ivy League elites with influence over
conservative politics. The words of Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner reflect how social
Darwinistic rhetoric echoed the valorization of liberty and the justification of inequality evident in
both Malthus and Locke:
“Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: liberty, inequality,
survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries
society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and
favors all its worst members” (quoted in Hofstadter 1992: 51).
Through the discourse of social Darwinism, we see the Lockean-Malthusian orientation of
competition and hierarchy take an historically specific form in American rhetoric. In this particular
quote, we can detect the spirit of the scarcity-conflict schema implicitly at work in positioning
equality and liberty as antithetical to one another, thereby establishing not only zero-sum social
relations but also a zero-sum value system.
The analogy between economic order and animal struggle persists into today’s popular
culture. For instance, take reality television. The reality TV show, Shark Tank, has been on the air
since 2009 and has produced a whopping 339 episodes worth of entertainment for American
viewers (Holman 2024). To explain the show, I’ll quote the description featured on the show’s
Wikipedia page. Though never an academic source, Wikipedia is nonetheless a pop-cultural one

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and thus perhaps all the more telling of how the show connects with viewers in the American
public. Accordingly, the show is described as follows:
“Budding entrepreneurs get the chance to bring their dreams to fruition in this reality show
from executive Mark Burnett. They present their ideas to the sharks in the tank – five titans
of industry who made their own dreams a reality and turned their ideas into lucrative
empires. The contestants try to convince any of the sharks to invest money in their idea.
When more than one of the sharks decide they want a piece of the action, a bidding war
can erupt, driving the price of investment” (accessed on August 18, 2022).
The orientations of competition and hierarchy that characterize the scarcity-conflict schema are
brought to life in this quoted passage – and, in turn, in the show itself – through the analogy of
economic order and animal struggle. The ‘sharks’ represent the dominant players in the proverbial
‘survival of the fittest,’ and the contestants represent those who must compete for capital in pursuit
of status and power within the ‘animal kingdom.’ Even among the dominant players, i.e. the sharks,
conflict rules the day, insofar as they must resort to ‘war’ when their interests collide.
Indeed, the language of war and empire evident in the passage suggests that a militarized
version of the scarcity-conflict schema is operative in the way capitalism is popularly imagined.
This militarized connotation is telling in the United States context where the development of
capitalism is closely intertwined with violent histories of settler colonialism and chattel slavery
(Speed 2019). To better appreciate the continued discursive force of cultural analogies linking
economy and animal kingdom, it’s worth pausing to further tease apart the scarcity-conflict
schema as it operates in the social Darwinist perspective analyzed thus far. A discussion of the
scarcity-cooperation alternative offers insight toward this end.
4.3 The Scarcity-Cooperation Schema as the Antithesis of Social Darwinism
As typified by social Darwinism, the “individualistic-competitive uses” of Darwinian
evolutionary theory has received push back for simplifying the complexity of natural selection to

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a struggle between competing organisms fighting over scarce resources (Hofstadter 1992: 6). This
simplification, according to its critics, obscures the multiple dynamics at play in evolution,
including those which favor relationships of cooperation within and across species in response to
scarcity. In Braiding Sweetgrass, environmental biologist Kimmerer discusses scarcity-driven
cooperation in the natural environment. Specifically, she identifies the example of lichen, which
is a composite organism made up of a symbiotic relationship between alga and fungus. Kimmerer
explains the insights of scientific findings regarding the role of scarcity in catalyzing this symbiotic
relationship. As demonstrated in lab research, algae and fungi remain separate under conditions
ideal for survival. It’s only under conditions of scarcity that the alga and fungus come together to
combine strengths in reciprocity for purposes of survival. In eco-mutualistic cultures, including
those of Indigenous nations in North America, it is common to regard plants as teachers (Kimmerer
2013). In this vein, Kimmerer extrapolates from the example of lichen and posits a very different
worldview than that of social Darwinism. She says: “In a world of scarcity, interconnection and
mutual aid become critical for survival” (Kimmerer 2013: 272).
In this discussion, Kimmerer emphasizes scarcity-driven cooperation over and above
scarcity-driven conflict. She ultimately portrays interspecies cooperation as an essential
ontological orientation for navigating anthropogenic climate change and reorganizing society
around ecological restoration (Kimmerer 2013: 276). However, considered in an even broader
sense, her discussion is instructive for further understanding the scarcity-cooperation schema as it
manifests in an eco-mutualistic worldview. By this view, the planetary order is structured by
principles of reciprocity and all the more so under conditions of scarcity. Indeed, we can see
evidence of this ontology in Indigenous cultural mythology, as recounted in Kimmerer (2013).

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Kimmerer highlights the traditional farming style of Native peoples wherein corn, beans,
and squash are planted in close proximity to one another to interact their mutually complementary
qualities such that all three plant organisms flourish in reciprocity. This gardening style is referred
to and mythologized as the Three Sisters – that is, three feminized deity-like figures whose origin
story comes in many different forms. Kimmerer describes one common version of the story that
narrates how the Three sisters came to provide for human subsistence:
“Some stories tell of a long winter when the people were dropping from hunger. Three
beautiful women came to their dwellings on a snowy night. One was a tall woman dressed
in all yellow, with long flowing hair. The second wore green, and the third was robed in
orange. The three came inside to shelter by the fire. Food was scarce but the visiting
strangers were fed generously, sharing in the little that the people had left. In gratitude for
their generosity, the three sisters revealed their true identities – corn, beans, and squash –
and gave themselves to the people in a bundle of seeds so that they might never go hungry
again” (Kimmerer 2013: 131).
We can see here a moral lesson that is relatively unimaginable from a social Darwinist perspective
premised on the scarcity-conflict schema. As conveyed in this story, the socially correct response
to scarcity is to share resources as an act of cooperation. In doing so, humanity will ultimately
foster more generative relationships with nature such that the circumstances of scarcity may be
ameliorated in the long-term. This cultural narrative conveys a fundamentally different humannature ontology than that of social Darwinism wherein mankind struggles against nature in the
fight for survival (Hofstadter 1992). Through this storied history of the Three Sisters, we can
appreciate the stark difference between the scarcity-cooperation schema of eco-mutualistic
cultures and the scarcity-conflict schema of anthropocentric cultures.
4.4 Cultural Narratives, Political Cognition, and Contemporary American Politics
Whether shared across generations as oral tradition or embedded in the plot structures of
mass entertainment, cultural narratives are politically meaningful. Quick as some may be to

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dismiss cultural narratives as mere ‘cheap talk,’ cultural narratives provide an essential basis for
orienting oneself when interpreting the complexity of social life (Polanyi 1989). The cultural
narratives in which individuals are immersed influence what kinds of cultural schemas are
accessible in the minds of the public – that is, the “clusters or nodes of connected ideas and feelings
stored in memory” that derive from the broader culture (Entman 2004: 7). The more accessible a
cultural schema, the more likely it will become salient in processes of political cognition. Once
salient, the cultural schema may guide the process of opinion formation in a manner metaphorically
similar to how the grooves of a riverbed guide the flow of water. The cultural logic guides the flow
of thought from one point to the next, leading the individual to a political interpretation that is
consistent with the cultural schema (Entman 2004). Evidence from the study of neuropsychology
supports this understanding of culture and cognition (Kitayama and Uskul 2011), and theoretical
concepts like Bourdieu’s habitus encapsulate the often unconscious manner by which individual
alignment with cultural norms is enacted in everyday thought and action (Bourdieu 2000: 146).
These insights convey how culturally-endowed modes of knowledge, intuitively and
unconsciously acquired over the course of one’s life, render an individual ‘at home’ in their society
(ibid). These modes of knowledge are recurringly revivified through cultural narratives, such that
longstanding cultural schemas may seamlessly guide the logic of policymaking across time and
place in a manner that resonates with the public as commonsensical.
Further, cultural narratives animate the mass media systems through which the public
becomes acquainted with political actors and power seekers. Donald Trump won the 2016
presidential election just one year after his last episode as the host of The Apprentice, a reality
show not so different from Shark Tank wherein contestants compete as business professionals for
the ultimate prize of winning a one-year $250,000 contract to promote one of Donald Trump’s

46
business properties. Each week, a contestant is ceremoniously eliminated at the sound of Trump’s
catchphrase: “You’re fired!” While the show’s plot premise is devoid of an overt analogy between
economic order and animal kingdom, it nonetheless mirrors a perception of economic life that’s
structured by a dominant player at the top of the hierarchy and individual competitors fending for
themselves in their struggle for survival and mobility. As such, it echoes social Darwinistic
thinking and its Malthusian origins.
Members of the public expressed shock when Donald Trump was elected. To explain this
outcome, scholars have documented the role of racism and sexism among supporters of Donald
Trump in 2016 and beyond (see Schaffner et al. 2018). Furthermore, scholars have cited Trump’s
popular media presence as a factor in his political appeal. The reality show’s millions of viewers
came to feel that they really ‘knew’ Trump and therefore formed a parasocial bond with him
(Gabriel et al. 2018). When viewers become voters, and when celebrities become politicians, the
cultural narratives of mass entertainment spill over into the formation of political attitudes and
candidate preferences (ibid). Trump’s political rise from mass entertainment in combination with
the record of racism and sexism voiced by him and his voter base suggests the possibility that the
social Darwinistic mythologization of Trump attracted the political approval of those seeking to
accept, if not entrench, hierarchy and inequality on the basis of not only individualistic competition
but also race and gender. Through this mythologization of Trump as a dominant figure
commandeering the economic order, we see the scarcity-conflict schema take narrative form with
Trump as its protagonist.
5 Cultural Psychology and American Political Development
The foregoing analysis of social Darwinism in the United States sets a foundation for
appreciating how echoes of Locke and Malthus have cascaded into the American cultural

47
landscape and political imaginary. In this section, I build further upon this discussion in an effort
to set the stage for my analysis of the scarcity-conflict schema in American welfare policy.
Towards this end, I discuss the cultural psychology of American individualism in connection to
historical discourses that contributed to processes of racial formation in American political
development. I characterize the interplay of individualism and white supremacy in the United
States as a form of racialized individualism, the dynamics of which are essential for understanding
the influence of the scarcity-conflict schema in American welfare politics.
5.1 Individualism and Scarcity in Settler-Colonial America
The ethos of individualism, studied in a general sense, has drawn widespread attention
from analysts of cultural psychology. Drawing upon Kitayama et al.’s (2010) voluntary frontier
settlement hypothesis, I theorize that the scarcity-conflict schema and the cultural origins of
individualism in America are inextricably linked by virtue of the developmental dynamics of
settler-colonial state-building. By highlighting the authors’ insights regarding the cultural
evolution of individualism in America, I intend to establish a foundation for considering the
psychological processes by which the scarcity-conflict schema has been passed down across
generations so as to shape contemporary responses to scarcity.
At its essence, culture can be understood as an amalgam of socially shared meanings (e.g.
ideas and beliefs) and associated behavioral practices (e.g. tasks and conventions) that are crossregionally and cross-generationally transmitted (Kitayama and Uskul 2011). These components of
collective meaning-making and scripted behavioral patterns find distinct expression across
different societies; however, extant studies suggest that one core organizing dimension along
which cultures can be distinguished is that of individualism (also referred to as independence)
versus collectivism (also referred to as interdependence). The former typifies a cultural orientation

48
towards self-promotion, self-expression, and self-sustenance, whereas the latter characterizes a
cultural orientation towards social harmony and coordination, relational attachment, and social
obligation (ibid). While both modes of orientation are viable and necessary across all societies,
Western societies have historically emphasized the ethos of individualism, whereas Eastern
societies have historically emphasized the ethos of collectivism (Kitayama and Uskul 2011;
Kitayama et al. 1997; Markus and Kitayama 2010; Triandis 1995). Following this premise,
scholars have demonstrated how people from Western and Eastern societies exhibit distinctly
independent versus interdependent psychological tendencies, as evidenced by attribution biases as
well as emotional patterns, and observable even at the level of neural activity (see Kitayama and
Uskul 2011).
Moreover, while East-West differences in independence versus interdependence are widely
recognized, there are nonetheless noteworthy differences of degree within each cultural propensity.
For instance, and of significant import to the present focus, extant research demonstrates that North
Americans are even more individualistic than Western Europeans, including the English and
Northern Germans (Kitayama et al. 2009). One explanation as to why American culture is so
distinctively individualistic pertains to the psychological dynamics surrounding American settlercolonialism along the Western frontier. The voluntary frontier settlement hypothesis lays out this
explanation in detail (Kitayama et al. 2010).
To elaborate this explanation, it’s worth establishing the relevance of neuroplasticity at the
outset. Neuroplasticity describes the way the brain works, frequently summarized under the adage
whereby neurons that fire together, wire together. More specifically, neuroplasticity refers to the
“mechanism by which behavioral patterns (as defined by cultural tasks) plastically shape the
actor’s brain,” enabling “culturally induced activation patterns of the brain that support the person

49
when he or she intends to perform his or her cultural task” (Kitayama and Uskul 2011: 424). Put
simply, neuroplasticity is what makes possible macro-level rewiring across subsystems of the brain
(ibid). Just as neuroplasticity enables the brain’s flexibility in forming new neural pathways, it also
undergirds the brain’s malleability such that cultural tendencies may become second nature with
sufficient repetition.
Neuroplasticity is integral to processes of cultural change. The production-adoption model
of cultural change, as emphasized in the voluntary frontier settlement hypothesis, illustrates the
role of neuroplasticity in the development of American individualism. According to this theoretical
framework, as detailed by Kitayama et al. (2010), the origins of the individualist ethos derive from
the harsh conditions faced by white American settlers on the Western frontier. Settlers left behind
their connections to social institutions, rendering them socially isolated and unable to rely on social
support for survival. Moreover, the environmental features of the Western frontier were
ecologically challenging, including cold winters and dry climates. Kitayama et al. (2010)
emphasize that it is “challenging to maintain reciprocity when a harsh ecology is combined with
scarce resources, low population density, and high population mobility” (567), as observed in the
propensities of settlers to engage in preemptive attacks on potential enemies (Nisbett and Cohen
1996). Considering these harsh conditions, the ethos of individualism is theorized to have
originally transpired as a survival strategy, reflecting the theory’s broader premise that new
cultural practices are typically ‘produced’ in the first place when they offer adaptive value to their
practitioners. We can understand the origins of American individualism through this lens, insofar
as an individualistic orientation of self-promotion, self-initiative, and self-determination may have
facilitated survival under conditions of social atomization along the ecologically-harsh frontier.

50
Through the repetition of behavior that aligns with individualism as a survival strategy, the
settlers of the frontier are theorized to have progressively internalized associated psychological
propensities via the dynamics of neuropsychology previously discussed. Over time, and while the
practices of individualism increasingly translated into deeply grooved neural networks among
frontier societies, residents of the Eastern regions were told fantastic stories of wealth and
prosperity unfolding in newly settled frontier territories. Throughout the process of settler-colonial
expansion along the frontier, the U.S. federal government explicitly promoted the West as a land
of abundance and portrayed its residents as rolling in riches. Settling along the frontier, itself a
racial project (as elaborated below in Section 5.2), was actively encouraged as a means for settlercolonial state-building. This rhetorical strategy for promoting settlement is theorized to have
elevated the social prestige of frontier society and its concomitant cultural practices of
individualism in the eyes of Eastern residents. In turn, Eastern residents are theorized to have
begun imitating frontier individualism. According to theories of cultural psychology, the adoption
of another’s cultural practices is typically rooted in status-based motives. A person is likely to
imitate the cultural practices of specifically high-status groups as a way to elevate one’s own social
prestige. By virtue of neuroplasticity, the repetition of even adopted cultural practices still has the
effect of neurally ‘rewiring’ the brain over time so that the person becomes more psychologically
oriented around the individualist ethos.
Taken as a whole, the production-adoption model of cultural change provides an
explanation as to how the individualist ethos came to typify frontier society and, in turn, American
culture more broadly. Connecting this development to the present-day, we can appreciate how the
ethos of individualism has been transmitted across generations via processes of socialization,
wherein cultural practices and cultural values are linked and transmitted via stories told to each

51
subsequent generation. We can find evidence of the cross-regional and intergenerational
transmission of individualism in research demonstrating that implicit psychological tendencies are
widespread across the contemporary United States, regardless of region (Kitayama et al. 2010).
Moreover, the link between psychology and the transmission of individualism is further
supported by findings outside the American context. For instance, Kitayama et al. (2006) analyze
the cultural tendencies of residents in Hokkaido, which is the second largest island of Japan that,
until the late 1800s, was a wilderness. Following the collapse of Japanese feudalism, the new
government began settling Hokkaido with ex-samurai warriors (ibid). Shortly thereafter, an influx
of farmers and peasants immigrated to the island in pursuit of new land and opportunity, effectively
making Hokkaido a new ‘frontier’ society (ibid). The parallels to western expansion in the United
States are corroborated by findings demonstrating that the Hokkaido Japanese exhibit more
individualistic tendencies compared to residents of mainland Japan (ibid). Even further, the
Hokkaido Japanese were comparable to Americans on some aspects of implicit individualism,
including “a tendency towards dispositional attribution in person perception and a tendency to be
motivated by personal (vs. public) choice” (Kitayama et al. 2010: 567). The implication here is
that the psychological production of individualistic tendencies under frontier conditions, as
predicted by the voluntary frontier settlement hypothesis, are not inherently unique to the United
States but nonetheless have strongly shaped its culture, given its developmental history.
Interestingly, a theoretically meaningful paradox appears in the voluntary frontier
settlement hypothesis. While the production of the individualist ethos among frontier societies is
attributed to conditions of scarcity, the adoption of the individualist ethos among Eastern residents
is motivated by government-promoted narratives of abundance. Though facing novel conditions
that were unfamiliar to their cultural progenitors, the frontier settlers nonetheless had roots in the

52
Eastern regions, where cultural traditions of the Lockean-Malthusian lineage likely persisted.
Whether among frontier settlers in the West or communities in the settled East, the emergent ethos
of individualism was likely integrated with the cultural schemas already at play in the LockeanMalthusian lineage. In turn, the cultural integration of the newly consolidated individualist ethos
is likely to have resulted in an exaggerated expression of the scarcity-conflict schema that
continues into the present-day.
Without drawing overly broad inferences on this point, we can nonetheless imagine how
the scarcity-conflict schema functions in a psychologically similar manner to the ethos of
individualism. In order to keep up with high-status social practices, a person in American society
is likely to repeatedly reinforce the neurological link between scarcity and conflict. The education
system illustrates this point. Every year, college applicants compete for a finite number of spots
amid an increasingly selective admissions pool. The ‘supply’ of admissions spots at prestigious
universities is always scarce relative to applicant ‘demand.’ The competitive admissions system
yields hierarchy by rewarding the victors of competition (i.e. admitted students) with a badge of
cultural prestige (i.e. a college degree) that, in turn, facilitates their upward mobility within the
class hierarchy. Though just one brief example, the education system illustrates how scarcity and
conflict vis-a-vis competition and hierarchy are regularly linked in behavioral practices required
for participation in dominant societal institutions. Participation in scarcity-based structures of
competition and hierarchy can be understood as a kind of “cultural task” that an individual may
“perform repeatedly and earnestly to become a respectable member of the culture” (Kitayama et
al. 2011: 423-424). With repeated engagement in cultural tasks along these lines, beginning in
one’s early years and extending through higher education, the scarcity-conflict schema may

53
gradually take form as a robust neural pathway that predisposes culturally-aligned behavior, albeit
conditional on situational factors (ibid).
It is useful to imagine the conflict-versus-cooperation axis – along which cultures may
differ in their construction of scarcity – as lying on a continuum. In other words, whether and how
a culture aligns with the scarcity-conflict or -cooperation schema is a matter of degree. Societies,
like the United States, reflect a high degree of alignment with the scarcity-conflict end of the
spectrum, in part due to the ongoing ubiquity of stories and practices linking scarcity to conflict
and the relative dearth of stories and practices linking scarcity to cooperation. The amalgam of
conflict-versus-cooperation scarcity linkages that circulate in societal discourse comprise the
situational cues6
to which Americans are regularly exposed on a day-to-day basis. These cues, in
turn, foster the behavioral enactment of scarcity schemas, which are themselves passed down from
generation to generation through mechanisms of socialization.
5.2 Scarcity, Racialized Individualism, and Frontier Land Policy
The cultural psychology of individualism provides helpful context for understanding the
cross-regional and intergenerational transmission of the scarcity-conflict schema. While
instructive in this regard, the cultural psychology literature falls short in theorizing the specifically
racialized nature of individualism in American political culture. The discourse surrounding frontier
land policy illustrates how the cultural psychology of individualism took racialized form
throughout American political development in a manner that closely aligns with the worldviews
of Locke and Malthus. This dimension of American political development is essential for
6 See Oyserman and Lee (2007) for more on the role of situational cues in cultural psychology, as theorized in the
situated cognition model of culture.

54
theorizing the distinctively American expression of the scarcity-conflict schema that persists into
the present day.
The federal government of the nascent United States was considerably constrained by its
own weak institutional capacity (Frymer 2014). Therefore, rather than relying solely on fiscallyintensive modes of imperial expansion, the United States expanded its territory through a policy
regime that incentivized exclusively European immigrants to come to America in exchange for
free land (ibid). Seen in this light, the voluntary frontier settlement hypothesis is more than just a
story of individualism – it’s a story of U.S. racial formation.
Racial formation refers to a discursive and structural process by which racial categories are
created, represented, and transformed through historically situated projects that reorganize and
redistribute resources along racial lines (Omi and Winant 1986: 5). In the context of U.S. statebuilding, individualism and racial formation were inextricably linked. Lawmakers explicitly
sought Europeans to ‘civilize’ the land and ‘crowd out’ the ‘savages’ in a piecemeal, targeted
manner such that the land was incrementally ‘Americanized’ in accordance with a raciallybounded conception of American citizenship. In other words, embedded in the nation’s approach
to state-building was the notion that to ‘civilize’ meant to ‘Americanize,’ and vice versa. Once a
targeted territory had been satisfactorily populated with white settlers, the territory was considered
qualified for incorporation as a state (Frymer 2014).
This discursive era of state-building via frontier land policy can be made more concrete by
highlighting direct quotes from the historical archive. Like both Locke and Malthus, Thomas
Jefferson imagined a future in which the lands of the New World, abundant in their origins, would
eventually be populated by an American polity ambitiously expanding beyond the original thirteen
colonies. The vision of America as a place of abundance, albeit not for long, was implicitly shared.

55
Jefferson expressed the sentiment that it was “impossible not to look forward to distant times,
when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits, and cover the whole northern,
if not southern continent” (quoted in Frymer 2014: 121). With Jefferson self-identifying as an
enthusiast of Lockean philosophy (Arcenas 2022), it is telling that Jefferson advocated a land
policy in which 160 acres would be given to white males between the ages of eighteen and thirtyfive who agreed to reside in the Louisiana Territory (Frymer 2014: 124). This position reflects an
Americanized interpolation of the civilized-savage hierarchy and the labor-property thesis at play
in Lockean-Malthusian thought.
President George Washington proves another historical icon in American culture who
advocated land policy in this spirit. Following the War of 1812, the passage of the 1812 Military
Tract provided veterans with bounties across the 3.5 million acres in the Illinois Tract that bordered
Indian Territory as a means, in Washington’s words, for “plant[ing] a brave, a hardy and
respectable race of people as our advanced post, who would always be ready and willing…to
combat the savages and check their incursions” (quoted in Frymer 2014: 124). This valorization
of rugged individualists as the protagonists of American expansion continued into the aftermath
of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which concentrated Indigenous peoples into a newly declared
Indian Territory that was later perceived as a security threat by state officials in Missouri and
Arkansas. Officials called for the implementation of a buffer zone in which white settlers would
themselves act as a defense. Echoing Washington’s portrayal of the imagined settlers, Arkansas
Senator William Fulton described the buffer zone’s objective as the “dense settlement of hardy
adventurers along the exposed frontier” (quoted in Frymer 2014: 124).
This discursive construction of the imagined settler community proceeded throughout
federal policymaking in the nineteenth century. Whether it be the discourse surrounding the 1842

56
Armed Occupation Act or that of the 1850 Donation Land Claim Act, the echoes of Locke and
Malthus abound (see Frymer 2014). This era of policymaking and the discourse that propelled it
forward can be deconstructed to reveal an underlying political logic in sync with the scarcityconflict schema. The abundance of the New World was seen by settler-colonial America as a
bounty awaiting seizure. As a matter of public policy, the U.S. government created incentives for
its appropriation at the hands of white settlers operating under the pretenses of individualistic
competition yet buoyed by institutionalized racism. Taking Lockean-Malthusian premises through
to their conclusion, the abundance of the New World was not made to last. Filtered through the
cultural worldview shared by Locke and Malthus, the threat of scarcity is always present when the
emphasis is on property accumulation, and all the more so when there’s no meaningful sufficiency
limitation at play within the distributive ethics that characterize societal norms (see Section 3.2).
In turn, the developmental dynamics of U.S. state-building suffused the scarcity-conflict schema
of America’s cultural progenitors with a racialized individualism in which specifically white
abundance is always threatened by impending scarcity. In this paper, I theorize that these threads
of American political development have continuously shaped policymaking discourses, including
the discourse surrounding welfare policy, to which I’ll now turn.
6 The Scarcity-Conflict Schema and Anti-Welfarism in America
The discourse surrounding welfare offers a particularly instructive window into the latent
influence of the scarcity-conflict schema in American politics. In this section, I discuss the
evolution of welfare politics and build towards connecting welfare policy in America to the
Malthusian principles that shaped welfare reform in early nineteenth century England. My
historical overview centers around the Great Depression and the Civil Rights movement as pivotal
chapters that expanded welfare and ultimately set the stage for the anti-welfare backlash of the late

57
twentieth century. The discourse of anti-welfarism that emerged in the 1980s, as dominated by the
rhetoric of the ‘welfare queen,’ shares various narrative premises with those of Locke and Malthus.
In Section [add number], I unpack the echoes of Lockean-Malthusian thought, with the intention
of illustrating how the scarcity-conflict schema has served as a potent cultural resource for
opponents of welfare. I conclude with a discussion of federal welfare reform in the 1990s as
context for understanding the current policy landscape, where the scarcity-conflict schema can be
seen as emboldening neoliberal prerogatives to transform welfare as a site of market
aggrandizement.
6.1 Welfare, Social Control, and Legacies of Capitalist Dispossession
At face value, welfare programs may be perceived as a cooperative response to unmet
human needs. By this logic, the degree of welfare provision should correspond with the degree of
poverty in society. In their extensive analysis, however, Piven and Cloward (1971) upend this
cooperative image of welfare and assert a different explanation for the expansion of poverty relief.
Rather than strictly serving as a means for alleviating material suffering, welfare has been
leveraged primarily as a tool for social control in response to acute societal disorder. This
understanding of welfare comprises the author’s central thesis and serves as a starting point for the
present discussion.
As emphasized by Piven and Cloward (1971), the structure of poverty relief for much of
American history has mirrored that of England in terms of its highly localized administration. The
first iteration of welfare policy in England began with the passage of the Poor Laws beginning in
1572. The original program established a local taxation system to provide for the poor and placed
oversight responsibility with local communities. However, as would become more strictly
enforced in later reforms to the Poor Laws, poverty relief was tied to specific conditions on the

58
part of the recipient. Poor individuals seeking relief were required to work in exchange for
assistance, making relief conditional on labor. Piven and Cloward (1971) argue that the passage of
the original Poor Laws came in response to the societal instability spawned by the emergence of
capitalism in England.
Among a multitude of associated developments, the transition away from feudalism
reconfigured the organization of English society in a manner that created new ‘winners,’ so-tospeak, while also rendering wide swaths of society newly dispossessed. Capitalism inaugurated a
novel era of property accumulation in which land was continually converted and commodified in
the service of shifting commercial opportunities. The emerging capitalist system came with the
now-familiar features of constant fluctuation and chronic unemployment, prompting systemic
cycles of social disorder (Piven and Cloward 1971). The booming cotton industry, for instance,
precipitated the conversion of land from tillage to pasture beginning in the sixteenth century,
leading to the widespread dispossession of English farmers. As commercial opportunities
proliferated across a range of land-based industries, landowners sought to increase the size of their
properties. This process of accumulation eventually led to the enclosure of the commons, which
the landless proletariat had formerly relied upon for purposes of subsistence. The enclosures of
land that had previously been available for public use exacerbated the degree of desperation among
the propertyless, and the scale of dispossession resulted in a level of vagrancy and begging that
undermined societal stability. The Poor Laws were eventually passed as a means for quelling the
resultant disorder, according to Piven and Cloward.
Before elaborating on subsequent reforms to the Poor Laws that were inspired by
Malthusian thought, it’s worth briefly connecting the foregoing discussion to the narrative
premises of Locke and the history of Indigenous dispossession in the United States. Writing in the

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midst of England’s capitalist transformation, Locke is theorized to have set forth his Second
Treatise on Government in part to justify the private property arrangements that marked a
significant departure from feudal organization where land ownership was contingent on social
proximity to the monarchy (Henry 1999). In comparison to the concentration of power that
characterized feudal society, private property under capitalism was perceived among its supporters
as a step in the direction of greater freedom and equality. However, given the mass dispossession
that came with ever-increasing land accumulation, the institution of private property required an
intellectual defense. Among political theorists, Locke’s work and his labor-property thesis are
interpreted as serving this prerogative in English society (Macpherson 1951).
Moreover, the English legacy of dispossession in the service of consolidating capitalism
reflects a point of overlap in the developmental histories of England and the United States (Murray
2022). For instance, in the U.S. context, the Dawes Act of 1887 reflects a parallel instance in which
the commons were forcefully converted into private property. Amid the ongoing project of forced
relocation on behalf of the federal government, Indigenous people were coerced out of their
traditional practice of holding land in common. The Dawes Act authorized the federal government
to partition tribal lands into private land plots (Frymer 2014). Every tribal member was given title
to an allotment of land under the structure of private ownership, with any unallocated land plots
being opened for white settlers (Kimmerer 2013; Frymer 2014). The immediate result was the loss
of not only two-thirds of tribal lands (Frymer 2014) but also that of an eco-mutualistic lifeway
rooted in stewarding the land as commons (Kimmerer 2013). In exchange for “surrender[ing] their
allegiance to land held in common and agree[ing] to private property,” tribal members were offered
American citizenship (Kimmerer 2013: 19). Whether it be sixteenth century England or eighteenth

60
century America, this shared legacy of forced land privatization was couched in the values of
industriousness that are likewise emphasized in the narrative premises of Locke and Malthus.
Though the passage of the original Poor Laws served the function of quelling social
disorder, the program came up against recurring demands for reform, specifically in the interest of
local industry. When industry faced labor shortages, reform pressures mounted with the aim of
contracting relief provision for the purposes of incentivizing wage labor. The 1723 reform of the
Poor Laws was pursued for the expressed purpose of fostering the quality of industriousness
among the poor by permitting local parishes to establish workhouses and authorizing their
discretion in denying aid to those who would not enter. The tying of aid to undesirable working
conditions, as newly permitted under the 1723 reform, reflects an early instantiation of the
principle of less eligibility that would come to guide the formulation of welfare policy in England
and the United States.
6.2 Malthus and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834
The principle of less eligibility is even more explicitly articulated in the English Poor Law
Amendment Act of 1834, a reform whose supporters drew inspiration from the anti-welfare
critique advanced by Thomas Malthus (Tellmann 2017; Digby 1986). As previously described at
length, Malthus opposed welfare on the grounds that it purportedly exacerbates scarcity by
encouraging reproduction and disincentivizing productive labor among the poor, thereby widening
the population-subsistence differential to the detriment of all. When the poor are not compelled to
work by virtue of welfare, according to Malthus, a cascade of societal distortions transpire,
including absolute scarcity and spiraling inflation. While the Malthusian prognosis would repeal
the right to relief point blank, reforms based on the principle of less eligibility nonetheless move
the system closer to this vision.

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The principle of less eligibility requires that the living conditions of an aid recipient must
never be as appealing as those of the lowest paid laborer in society (Soss et al. 2011). The principle
is written into the 1834 Poor Laws reform:
“The first and most essential of all conditions, a principle which we find universally
admitted, even by those whose practice is at variance with it, is, that his [the relief of the
recipient’s] situation on the whole shall not be made really or apparently so eligible [i.e.
desirable] as the situation of the independent laborer of the lowest class” (quoted in Piven
and Cloward 1971: 35).
With the intention of enforcing wage work and curtailing procreation among the poor, the principle
of less eligibility ultimately undermines the capacity of welfare to ‘decommodify’ labor (Soss et
al. 2011). While expansions of welfare can hypothetically protect workers and minimize the wagedepressing effects of unbridled competition, the restriction of relief on the principle of less
eligibility precipitates a race to the bottom in labor conditions and renders the poor powerless in
the face of precarious market conditions (ibid).
In addition to formalizing the principle of less eligibility, the 1834 reform officially
prohibited any provision of aid outside the workhouse across all parishes in a gendered manner
that recalls the Lockean-Malthusian worldview and presages the trajectory of welfare policy in the
United States. While some segments of society retained access to relief without conditions, such
as the aged and the infirm, able-bodied men and unwed mothers were required to labor in the
workhouse in exchange for relief. The logic behind this reform follows the Malthusian handbook
(Tellmann 2017). Accordingly, the labor of able-bodied men must be compelled so as to
continually increase the polity’s agricultural output and fend off the ever-imminent threat of
absolute scarcity. Moreover, the rearing of ‘illegitimate children’ by unwed mothers must be
discouraged not merely as a moral prerogative but further as a means of mitigating scarcity. The
more children that are born into families without a working father, the greater the burden on the

62
polity’s subsistence capacity, according to Malthus and the welfare reformers he inspired. In the
face of ever-imminent scarcity, the state must incentivize traditional marriage as a socially
regulatory institution, whereby women care for children in the home and men labor outside the
home to provide for the family and augment the polity’s overall productive capacity. The 1834
reform incentivizes adherence to traditional gender roles and family structures in accordance with
the patriarchal premises of the Lockean-Malthusian lineage, for the express purpose of mitigating
scarcity.
Motivated by a latent concern for scarcity, these principles and conditions of relief reflect
a gendered reinforcement of hierarchy and competition. The design of welfare under the 1834
reform undermined what could otherwise be considered a key function of welfare policy – that is,
the decommodification of labor among the poor. This hypothetical function of welfare would
otherwise temper the competition of the market system and its wage-depressing effects. By
subverting the decommodifying potential of welfare, the 1834 reform expanded competition as an
organizing principle of society. Moreover, in subjecting the poor to the whims of the labor market,
the reform bolstered the discretionary power of the proprietary class to set the terms of
employment, thereby fortifying class hierarchy. In a similar vein, the reform reinforced gender
hierarchy by punishing unwed mothers and conditioning government support on a woman’s
marital status. Insofar as the discourse surrounding these expansions of competition and hierarchy
borrowed from Malthusian reasoning, the 1834 welfare reform offers a window in the scarcityconflict schema at work in the English context.
6.3 Race-Gendered Individualism in English and American Welfare
This history and logic of welfare policy in England shares important commonalities with
that of the United States as well as noteworthy points of difference (Piven and Cloward 1971).

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While both England and America began with local provision and eventually expanded nationwide
welfare programs, the development of a national relief system in the United States was
distinctively slower, in large part due to geographic and cultural factors. Whereas the threat of
social disorder amid ecological and economic downturn sharply motivated the expansion of relief
in countries like England, this threat was tempered in the nascent United States by virtue of the
frontier (ibid). In the face of downturn, the dispossessed and marginalized segments of settlercolonial America could turn to the purportedly ‘open’ land of the frontier for the pursuit of upward
mobility and material improvements. The perceived abundance of the frontier therefore mitigated
the disruptive effects of downturns that may have otherwise mobilized demands for relief
expansion on behalf of the state. In turn, the political geography of the frontier, with its possibilities
of abundance, further cultivated the ethos of individualism in America. As expressed in the
American doctrine of self-help, in which self-sufficiency is expected and valorized, the cultural
milieu of the United States proved especially aversive to any kind of large-scale governmental
relief system (ibid).
Nonetheless, similar to England, when and where the localized provision of welfare
emerged in the United States, it followed the principle of less eligibility previously discussed
(ibid). The structuring of welfare around this principle was especially evident in the South, where
the degree of relief provision was carefully calibrated so as to facilitate the continued exploitation
of Black agricultural workers following the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery. In other
regions of the country, the principle of less eligibility likewise persisted, and efforts to provide aid
at the national level failed despite cyclically high unemployment. Even the economic depressions
of 1893-1894, 1914, and 1921 proved ineffectual in precipitating a federal welfare program (ibid).
It wasn’t until the Great Depression inaugurated an era of such severe deprivation and destabilizing

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social unrest that efforts to institute a federal welfare program began to gain traction, culminating
in an array of legislative victories under President Franklin D. Roosevelt (ibid).
While marking a dramatic victory for anti-poverty advocates, the welfare program
instituted under Roosevelt nonetheless included a two-tiered system of provision that ultimately
reinforced gender and racial hierarchies (Piven and Cloward 1971; Soss et al. 2011). Under the
Society Security Act of 1935, a social insurance program was implemented at the national level.
The program provided a safety net for retirees formerly employed in industries that were, at the
time, dominated by white male workers. The social insurance program excluded domestic,
nonprofit, and agricultural job categories from coverage, and consequently excluded the female
and nonwhite workers who comprised much of the labor force in these sectors. In turn, the Aid to
Dependent Children (ADC) program, later renamed the Aid to Dependent Families with Children
(ADFC) program, was implemented to expand public aid provision at the state and local level.
Under the ADC, the federal government provided match grants to fund the state and local
administration of poverty relief via welfare payments. As Social Security extended governmental
support to primarily white males, the ADC became the primary source of aid to female-headed
families and nonwhite Americans.
As argued by Piven and Cloward (1971) and echoed by Soss et al. (2011), the two-tiered
reflected the gender and racial basis of the prevailing civic hierarchy, and ultimately represented a
material effort to sustain the exploitation of cheap Black labor in the South and unpaid women’s
labor in the family. Unlike Social Security, for which federal law standardized requirements
regarding entitlement qualifications and program expectations for all recipients, the ADC afforded
states and municipalities substantial control over eligibility criteria, benefits levels, and program
rules. As a result, states and municipalities were able to exploit a greater margin of discretion in

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the program’s implementation, with the effect of further reinforcing hierarchies of race and gender
in an intersectional manner.
This dynamic was especially evident in the American South, where, in comparison to white
women, Black women were frequently subject to a stricter application of work requirements. The
race-gendered enforcement of rules serves the interests of the landed white elite in maintaining the
southern sharecropping system that relied on poor Black families to work in the fields (Liberman
1998). In addition to the biased enforcement of work requirements, states in the South exhibited
further manipulation of rules regarding a recipient’s qualifications for relief. States and localities
used various mechanisms – such as ‘suitable home’ rules, ‘man-in-the-house’ rules, and morals
tests – as pretexts for moving Black women offer the welfare rolls and ensuring they were not
sharing their benefits with Black men who were sought after by industry as cheap field laborers.
In the same vein, Southern states also created ‘employable mothers’ rules in a manner that secured
the seasonable labor of Black women while leaving white women exempt (Piven and Cloward
1971).
Taken as a whole, the emergent regime of welfare policy during the New Deal era expanded
relief while nonetheless cementing race-gender hierarchy in a manner that overlaps with the
narrative premises of Lockean-Malthusian thought. The two-tiered structure of welfare reflects a
policy formulation wherein the primacy of the white male individualist is upheld. His masculinity
and his whiteness de facto pre-qualify him for top-tier governmental relief, and his participation
in select industries of the competitive market system solidifies his deservingness. With access to
Social Security circumscribed on these grounds, and considered in conjunction with the racially
discriminatory implementation of the ADC across states and localities, the overall regime of

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welfare in the New Deal era can be seen as reflecting a cultural tradition of race-gendered
individualism that persists into the contemporary era.
6.4 The Expansion of American Welfare Amid 1960s Unrest
Leading up to the 1960s, the principle of less eligibility continued to powerfully structure
the administration of ADC benefits, with states calibrating benefit levels to never exceed the lowest
wages and doing so even more stringently where Black Americans were more prevalent in the
state-level population (Soss et al. 2011). Against the backdrop of this policy status quo, the United
States underwent significant demographic shifts as modernization and advances in labordisplacing technology disrupted the Southern agricultural industry. A severe uptick in
unemployment among Black Americans occurred in the South, resulting in many Black Americans
migrating to cities in the North where unemployment among Black residents was already high. As
deprivation among poor Black Americans became increasingly concentrated in Northern cities,
welfare officials in these localities nonetheless kept welfare restricted until the mid-1960s. One
strategy for doing so entailed accusing applicants of ‘welfare abuse,’ accusing applicants of being
non-residents who sought to exploit the welfare system of a different locale. Taken together, these
developments exacerbated poverty and disorder in urban settings, relegating Black Americans to
‘ghettoes’ with little-to-no employment opportunities and an acute lack of government support
(Piven and Cloward 1971).
The context of the unemployment crisis alongside the rise of the civil rights movement
created a situation of social unrest that ultimately led to the expansion of welfare, again as a tool
for social control (ibid). While industrial and agricultural modernization left poor Black Americans
chronically unemployed and acutely impoverished, the degree of need was not the ultimate driver
of welfare expansion. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s, long after the migration of Black Americans

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to northern cities began, that welfare expanded. President Johnson’s Great Society program and
its attendant wave of policymaking led to the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act and its creation of
Community Action Agencies (CAA) in urban localities, where poor clients were encouraged to
apply for welfare and received direct support in their efforts when confronting welfare agencies.
In addition to the success of litigation that challenged the constitutionality of eligibility rules, these
developments dramatically expanded the number of people on welfare rolls across the country,
and especially in the South, by boosting the overall pool of applicants and eliminating
opportunities for denial or restriction on behalf of welfare agencies (ibid).
Though the civil rights movement and the Great Society agenda expanded welfare in
America, global economic developments and reactionary political forces would ultimately spell
the unraveling of this policy advance, contributing to the high levels of inequality that persist into
the current day. In this paper, I theorize that the scarcity-conflict schema and its race-gendered
expression in American society is an under-specified factor in this overall trajectory. To make this
argument, I’ll discuss the historical context surrounding the contraction and transformation of
welfare following its 1960s expansion, and I’ll situate the scarcity-conflict schema as an
explanatory factor in the story of American welfare that can improve the theoretical cohesion of
scholarly accounts with regard to psychological and cultural influences.
6.5 The Scarcity-Conflict Schema and the Welfare Queen
To understand the story of American welfare in this light, it’s instructive to outline the
trajectory of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century in the relative terms of
scarcity and abundance. The United States rose to global dominance in the aftermath of World
War II. Positioned as such, U.S. businesses enjoyed sizable profit margins relative to the rest of
the industrialized world and therefore faced minimal global competition (Noble 1997; Soss et al.

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2011). However, by the end of the 1960s, the United States’ status as a global powerhouse began
to decline as global markets became more competitive. The 1970s oversaw a significant
recessionary period, and the downward turn of the economy amplified the longer-term trajectory
of deteriorating abundance, during which the real wages of ordinary Americans declined and the
profits of corporations stagnated. On a theoretical level, we can understand the end of the 1970s
into the 1980s as a time in which a collective fear of scarcity in America was palpable.
On top of and related to the recession, Americans faced novel inconveniences due to
shortages stemming from the oil crisis, as epitomized by long lines at the gas pump, which were
at variance with America’s abundance-rooted identity and antithetically associated with Soviet
communism. President Carter (1977-1981) famously encouraged Americans to adjust their
lifestyles around greater frugality. Though embraced by some, this sentiment contradicts the
American story of abundance, which itself has cultural roots in the shared worldview of Locke and
Malthus (as elaborated in Sections 3.4 and 3.7). Considering this dynamic of national identity, the
country’s brush with scarcity moving from the 1970s into the 1980s was threatening in both an
existential and a symbolic sense. Scarcity in the form of economic downturn symbolically
compromises the legitimacy of the American dream by puncturing its mystique as an unwavering
promise. While the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl certainly disrupted the American narrative
of abundance, this original self-concept was powerfully reinstated in the aftermath of World War
II. Having been raised in this post-WWII era, the baby-boomer generation which came to power
by the 1980s grew up in a cultural milieu that once again equated America with abundance, albeit
with the danger of sudden scarcity looming in recent historical memory among their Depressionera parents who imparted an emphasis on saving and reusing. This unique positioning of the baby
boomer generation within the historical sweep of scarcity and abundance set the scene for the rise

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of anti-welfarism in the 1980s-1990s via a policy discourse with narrative premises that poignantly
overlap with those of Locke and Malthus in their articulation of the scarcity-conflict schema.
In addition to originating the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan that would later propel
the Trump campaign, President Reagan also coined the term ‘welfare queen’ as part of his antiwelfare agenda. Scholars have since studied the role and function of this trope in American politics.
Hancock (2004) conceptualizes the ‘welfare queen’ as a constructed public identity that informed
popular perceptions of welfare recipients and demonized them according to a cohesive package of
stereotypes and moral judgments. The term ‘welfare queen’ came to invoke the image of Black,
single mothers in American society as the allegedly prototypical welfare recipient. Accordingly,
Black, single mothers were stereotyped as being (1) lazy and (2) hyperfertile, and their poverty
and welfare reliance was morally judged as a matter of personal failure. The message encapsulated
in the trope was that welfare beneficiaries, who were falsely presumed to be primarily Black
women, were unwilling to work and had babies just to maintain welfare eligibility – hence the
stereotypes of laziness and hyperfertility.
In the United States, it’s not just scarcity that is antithetical to the American self-concept
of abundance – so too is poverty itself. If America is a nation of abundant opportunity and abundant
resources, then scarcity should never arise and the poor only have themselves to blame. These
implications constitute the shadow side of ‘rugged individualism’ (Hancock 2004) and inform the
doctrine of self-help that long precluded the coordination of federal welfare programs. On the one
hand, the stereotypes and moral judgments folded into the welfare queen trope functioned to
individualize blame for poverty by attributing such circumstances to a personal unwillingness to
work and a propensity for sexual promiscuity (Hancock 2004). On the other hand, the welfare
queen trope and its organizing themes of laziness and hyperfertility gave the threat of scarcity a

70
human face by framing Black single women as responsible for exacerbating scarcity in the first
place. Instead of focusing on systemic-level explanations for economic developments, the
discourse of the welfare queen demonized Black, single mothers in Malthusian terms – as
effectively exacerbating the population-subsistence differential, whereby too many are born into
the ‘unproductive’ poor. Likewise in the spirit of Malthus, the welfare queen trope framed welfare
itself as responsible for enabling scarcity-exacerbating laziness and hyperfertility among the poor.
By exonerating systemic-level factors that drive scarcity and poverty, the symbolism of the welfare
queen provided a morally righteous alibi for dismantling welfare as a policy agenda pursuant to
‘making America great again.’
Amid emergent perceptions of scarcity, and alongside growing compassion fatigue in the
face of intransient poverty (Hancock 2004), late twentieth century anti-welfarism and its
concomitant trope of the welfare queen attracted support among free-market advocates and
neoconservatives alike. Importantly, as emphasized by Hancock (2004), the stereotypes of laziness
and hyperfertility as directed at Black women have their roots in the institution of American
slavery. These stereotypes are traceable to slavery-justifying beliefs that “legitimated white
paternalist control over Black populations within systems defined by labor coercion and sexual
exploitation” (Soss et al. 2011: 82). Considering the textual analysis of Section 3, one can further
situate these stereotypes in the Lockean-Malthusian worldview. While not directly targeted at
Black, single mothers verbatim, themes related to laziness and hyperfertility are leveraged by
Malthus to construct the identities of the ‘savage’ and the poor. Accordingly, the ‘savage’ are
portrayed as lacking the faculties of foresight to labor productively (i.e. overcome laziness) and
abstain from procreation (i.e. contain hyperfertility). Moreover, the poor are said to require the
impetus of fear in order to curb their propensities for laziness and procreation. Welfare, in turn, is

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portrayed as destructive on the grounds that it enables these very propensities and thereby widens
the population-subsistence differential that underlies the ever-imminent threat of absolute scarcity.
Considering these parallels, we can begin to appreciate how stereotypes implicating
laziness and hyperfertility facilitated anti-welfarism across two distinct political contexts,
separated by over a century, that nonetheless share roots in a common cultural worldview (i.e.
1980s America and early-nineteenth century England). Moreover, we can see how these
stereotypes are similarly leveraged against marginalized identities within each society for purposes
of reinforcing competition and hierarchy (i.e. Black women amid American Reaganism, and the
poor and ‘savage’ during British imperialism). The rhetoric of the welfare queen is another
example of how Americans rely on the narrative premises of Locke and Malthus as the basis of
their encountering the world. Scarcity doesn’t lead to cooperative thinking, but instead leads to the
proliferation of negative othering stereotypes that put the self above the racialized and gendered
other who is not deserving of property when times are scarce. As a function of cultural factors,
cooperation is neither the motivation behind welfare expansion in America nor is it the response
to rising conditions of collective scarcity.
6.6 The PRWORA: A Case Study of the Scarcity-Conflict Schema
The rhetoric of the welfare queen spread throughout the 1980s and culminated in the 1990s
with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
(PRWORA) under the Clinton administration. Leading up to the election of President Clinton in
1992, welfare reform became a centerpiece of both parties’ policy platforms. Known for his widely
embraced promise to “end welfare as we know it,” then-candidate Clinton posed a serious electoral
challenge to President George H.W. Bush. As Clinton and others continued to beat the drum of
anti-welfarism, and with the 1992 election on the horizon, Bush encouraged states to apply for

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AFDC waivers that permitted states to manipulate policy design and impose more behavioral
control over welfare recipients, stereotyped as lazy and sexually irresponsible under the welfare
queen trope (Soss et al. 2011).
The promotion of waivers throughout the early 1990s precipitated state-level discourse that
further reflects how the scarcity-conflict schema plays out in U.S. history and policy. The
Republican Governor of California, Pete Wilson (1991-1999), illustrates this point. In his political
rhetoric, Wilson framed welfare as exacerbating the state’s budget deficit, stoking concerns over
fiscal scarcity and blaming welfare as the cause (Soss et al. 2011). Building on this rhetoric, Wilson
proposed a series of reforms in California, including the imposition of family caps as well as a
system for reducing benefits among long-term recipients and new California residents, including
immigrants (ibid). The emphasis on fiscal forms of scarcity alongside constructions of welfare
beneficiaries as illegitimate freeloaders served to further malign welfare in the pre-PRWORA era.
Once passed, the PRWORA set in motion a dramatic transformation of welfare policy in
America. The long-term consequences are worth highlighting at the outset. First, the PRWORA
replaced the AFDC program with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Whereas
the federal government would provide matching grants to states under the AFDC, the TANF
program called for federal funding to states via block grants, meaning the federal government
provides a prespecified amount of funds instead of matching state spending dollar-for-dollar.
Importantly, the amount of funding the federal government provides under the TANF has not
changed since 1996, such that the real value of federal funding has fallen by forty percent since
1996 (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2022). Not surprisingly then, benefits levels in all
but six states have likewise declined in inflation-adjusted value. Moreover, under the TANF, most
states have set income eligibility thresholds below the federal poverty line, with racially disparate

73
impacts. Fifty-two percent of Black children live in sixteen states with benefit levels at twenty
percent of the poverty line, as compared to forty-one percent of Latinx children and thirty-seven
percent of white children (ibid).
While the PRWORA has precipitated a contraction in welfare funding across the country,
a narrow focus on benefits levels obscures important dynamics of policy design that pertain to
behavioral rules. Under the new TANF program established by the PRWORA, states were given
wide discretion over the design of rules that govern who is eligible for welfare and how welfare
recipients must behave. States had to abide by a set of specific federal guidelines; however, they
were given authority to impose supplementary rules. For instance, under PRWORA federal
guidelines, a person could only receive welfare benefits for up to sixty months; however, states
could choose to impose a stricter time limit. In addition, while federal rules imposed a minimum
level of work requirements on welfare recipients, states were given discretion in creating
categories of exemption (e.g. for mothers of newborn children). On top of these areas of discretion,
states were also authorized to impose a family cap on recipients and deny benefits for recipients
who have children while on welfare. In this same vein, states could limit TANF eligibility based
on behavioral conduct (e.g. a child’s poor school performance) and had discretion in designing
sanction procedures for penalizing recipients who violate program rules (Soss et al. 2011).
Reflecting the influence of political discourse, the stereotyping of Black Americans under
the ‘welfare queen’ trope has been traced to policy outcomes regarding state-level TANF
implementation. Grounding their analysis in cognitive theories of implicit racism that suggest the
susceptibility of policymakers to cultural frames conveyed in the welfare queen trope, Soss et al.
(2011) demonstrate the influence of race over state variation in TANF design. Accordingly, states
were more likely to impose a stricter regime of TANF rules and requirements across the

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discretionary areas previously described when the state population included a higher proportion of
Black Americans. Moreover, and further in line with theories of implicit racism, states with larger
and residentially concentrated Black populations were more likely to pursue second-order
devolution whereby authority over TANF implementation was delegated to local levels of
government, thus answering to racialized perceptions regarding the need for policy design that is
tailored to the purported ‘pathologies’ of majority-Black localities (ibid). These findings reinforce
the importance of the scarcity-conflict schema to policy making in the United States and its
differential impact on Americans across racial identities.
The PRWORA passed in 1996 with bipartisan support, illustrating the salience of the
scarcity-conflict schema among mainstream American constituencies. While the dynamics of
policy design surrounding the implementation of TANF across states and localities can be
understood as inaugurating a new policy era of ‘neoliberal paternalism,’ in which the power of the
state is channeled as a disciplinary force that serves industry interests by ‘transforming’ the poor
into low-wage labor (Soss et al. 2011), the basic purpose of welfare reform in this era nonetheless
reflects the cultural legacy of Locke and Malthus. Recalling the textual analysis from Section 3
and connecting it to the English Poor Laws of 1834, the disciplinary turn that came with the
PRWORA reflects a Malthusian logic whereby the poor must be behaviorally disciplined through
emotional manipulation, all in the name of mitigating the ever-imminent threat of scarcity. For
Malthus, the preferred policy approach entailed zero provision of poverty relief. Accordingly, the
absence of welfare support would ensure the poor remain in a state of fear regarding their own
deprivation and that of their offspring, such that they would be motivated to work and forgo having
more children, thereby augmenting economic productivity without ‘draining’ further resources.
While the PRWORA and its accompanying TANF program did not repeal welfare outright, the

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resultant regime of disciplinary welfare follows a similar logic in which the threat of punishment
and its underlying mechanism of fear is used as a tool for enforcing economic productivity and
reproductive restraint among the poor. The welfare queen trope facilitated the schematic linking
of single, Black mothers to this basic Malthusian logic, contributing to the racialized
implementation of disciplinary welfare policy across America.
Notably, the first- and second-order devolution of welfare under the TANF actually
represents a return to status-quo form, with the localized administration of poverty relief having
been the norm for much of American history. Moreover, through dynamics of policy drift (Galvin
and Hacker 2020), the real-value of federal welfare funding has declined over time since the
passage of the PRWORA, effectively moving the country closer to an earlier era in which no
federally funded welfare program existed. Acknowledging the major changes brought about by the
PRWORA and the TANF, as analyzed at length by Soss et al. (2011), the overall trajectory can
nonetheless be understood as a reinforcement of the long-term status quo, broadly speaking.
Characterized by competition and hierarchy, this status quo in American society found a footsoldier in the trope of the welfare queen, which brought to life the scarcity-conflict schema in
service of an anti-welfare policy agenda.
7 Conclusion
The study of culture and its influence on public policy is notoriously elusive. Culture entails
modes of knowledge that, in the words of Bourdieu, are inhabited “like a garment” that is taken
for granted (Bourdieu 2000: 146). For the enculturated, it’s hard to detect culture as anything at
all, just as the proverbial fish is unlikely to discern the sea in which it swims. Being ‘at home’ in
American society entails a certain level of immersion in a collective psyche that is splintered when
it comes to abundance and scarcity. On the one hand, stories of abundance are in America’s cultural

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DNA. On the other hand, scarcity is considered the law of nature, condemning the human
experience to an inescapable cycle of social conflict based on survival of the fittest. America is
supposed to be abundant, and yet the threat of scarcity, exacerbated by conflict-laden cultural
meanings, is never far beneath the surface. Where does this splintered construction of abundance
and scarcity come from, and how has it shaped American policy history? In this paper, I’ve offered
an interpretive analysis geared towards clarifying this elusive question.
First and foremost, this splintered construction of abundance and scarcity comes from
America’s cultural roots as a settler-colonial nation of English heritage. The anthropocentrism that
wires this cultural lineage entails a basic origin story in which the world begins with abundance
and ends with scarcity. Reiterating the words of Locke, “in the beginning all the world was
America” (Locke 1690: 29). In the absence of any distributive ethics along the lines of the
Honorable Harvest, the original abundance of mankind and, by extension, America was prefigured
to yield conditions of scarcity arbitrated by individualistic competition. My textual analysis of
Locke and Malthus illustrates how this notion is baked into the worldview of America’s cultural
progenitors. Moreover, the settler-colonial project of American state-building set in motion the
intermingling of individualism and racial formation. In turn, a basic cultural throughline in
American history can be summarized by the scarcity-conflict schema, in which threats to white
abundance are met with political responses that seek to reinforce competition and hierarchy by
way of a racialized individualism that frequently takes on gendered contours.
This throughline can be traced to the evolution of welfare policy in American political
history. The adage that history repeats is substantiated anew when comparing the political rhetoric
of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population to the discourse of the welfare queen.
The recurrence of othering stereotypes based on laziness and hyperfertility was leveraged in both

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contexts to demonize the poor and to give the otherwise disembodied construct of scarcity a human
face. The overlap between the policy discourse of nineteenth century England and that of 1980s
America is uncanny, serving as a reminder that the historical distance separating the contemporary
U.S. from the traditions of its cultural progenitors is not so great after all. For all the antiquated
notions of this cultural lineage that are largely dismissed in today’s thinking, the basic logic of
scarcity and its race-gendered interpolation in American society seems to have persisted in the
collective conscience. The end result of contemporary welfare retrenchment can be culturally
contextualized accordingly, given the political precepts on display in the works of Locke and
Malthus.
The upside of this paper’s conclusions is rooted in the fact that culture is not only
notoriously elusive – it is encouragingly malleable. Insofar as cultural propensities are subject to
reframing and neuroplasticity, the conflict-laden construction of scarcity in American culture is
not set in stone. The potential for alternative narrative constructions of scarcity that emphasize
cooperation and reciprocity to take greater sway in the collective conscience is ever-present. As
the challenges of scarcity become more pronounced due to climate change, an awareness regarding
the need for a cooperative response to scarcity may become increasingly mainstream. In turn, the
status of scarcity in human ontology may likewise culturally evolve. We can see signs of this in
contemporary politics with the emergence of political initiatives taking form under the banner of
the ‘abundance agenda’ (Klein and Thompson, forthcoming). Though the reality of ecological
constraints will always require careful consideration in policymaking, the default tendency to
frame the human experience and its associated political challenges in terms of scarcity may loosen
its grip. Acknowledging the elusiveness of culture and the nonlinearity by which it evolves, the

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potential for a growing abundance mindset in combination with a more cooperative schema of
scarcity in the collective political conscience is always within reach.

79
Scarcity, Inequality, and Public Opinion
How Scarcity Shapes Political Attitudes Among White Americans
Laura Brisbane, PhD Candidate
University of Southern California
Political Science and International Relations (POIR)
Dissertation Paper #2
Abstract: Broadly speaking, scarcity is a psychological phenomenon in which one perceives there
is not enough of some good for a given need or objective. While this definition of scarcity is
relatively straightforward, the political implications of scarcity are far from clear, particularly
insofar as they unfold in the context of the American racial hierarchy. Research in social
psychology demonstrates that perceptions of scarcity increase racial discrimination while
escalating orientations of competitiveness and amplifying selfish behavior. To what extent do these
effects translate to political attitudes, and how does a person's cultural orientation and racial
positionality shape this dynamic? As a first step towards answering this question, this study
leverages original survey data on the attitudes of white Americans and demonstrates the nuanced
patterns by which perceived scarcity reduces support for redistribution and welfare while
increasing economic system justification attitudes, racial resentment, and perceptions of racialized
competition. These patterns play out in ways that may defy expectations, with white Democrats
most consistently exhibiting hierarchy-enhancing responses to scarcity in their political attitudes.

80
1 Introduction
From the standpoint of America’s cultural progenitors, the United States was the land of
abundance. Propagated via imagery that mythologized the frontier, this abundance-rooted national
identity is likewise evident in the story of the American dream, according to which America is a
land of abundant opportunity, if not abundant resources. This story of America is passed down
from generation to generation and ritualized in State of the Union Addresses by one president after
another. And yet, the story of American abundance has been recurrently thrown into crisis across
various historical episodes, from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in the early twentieth
century to the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic in more recent times. The politics
of scarcity again took center stage in the 2024 presidential election, where the scarcity-laden focus
on inflation and immigration helped elect Donald Trump. The experiences and perceptions of
scarcity that animate these historical episodes not only contradict the founding narratives of
American political culture – they also stand to fundamentally impact the already pronounced levels
of inequality that characterize American society.
Broadly speaking, scarcity is a psychological phenomenon in which one perceives there is
not enough of some good for a given need or objective. While this definition of scarcity is relatively
straightforward, the political implications of scarcity are far from clear, particularly insofar as they
unfold in the context of the American racial hierarchy. Research in social psychology demonstrates
that perceived scarcity increases racial discrimination while amplifying orientations of
competitiveness as well as selfish behavior (Krosch and Amodio 2019; Roux et al. 2015). The
question remains – to what extent do these effects translate to political attitudes, and how does a
person’s racial positionality shape this dynamic? As a first step towards answering this question,
this paper leverages original survey data on the attitudes of white Americans and demonstrates the

81
nuanced patterns by which perceived scarcity reduces support for redistribution and welfare while
increasing economic system justification attitudes, racial resentment, and perceptions of racialized
competition. These nuanced patterns play out in ways that may defy expectations, with Democrats
most consistently exhibiting hierarchy-enhancing responses to scarcity in their political attitudes.
In focusing on scarcity, this paper builds on extant scholarship that explores the political
influence of related constructs, such as economic insecurity and evaluations of the national
economy (Melcher 2023). By contextualizing these constructs alongside the dynamics of scarcity,
this research contributes a psychologically-rooted framework for understanding the persistent
challenges of inequality in the United States. Moreover, by analyzing the public opinion correlates
of perceived scarcity, this study sheds light on the role of mass-politics in public policy outcomes
throughout the late twentieth century into the present.
The United States rose to global dominance in the aftermath of World War II. Positioned
as such, U.S. businesses enjoyed sizable profit margins relative to the rest of the industrialized
world and therefore faced minimal global competition (Soss et al. 2010). However, the post-WWII
context of national abundance in which American economic power was unparalleled began to
deteriorate as the 1960s came to a close and global markets became more competitive. The 1970s
subsequently oversaw a significant recessionary period in which the real wages of ordinary
Americans declined and the profits of American corporations stagnated (ibid). On a theoretical
level, we can understand the end of the 1970s into the 1980s as a time in which a collective fear
of scarcity in America became increasingly palpable.
On top of and related to the recession, Americans faced novel inconveniences due to
shortages stemming from the 1970s energy crisis, as epitomized by long lines at the gas pump,
which Americans symbolically and antithetically associated with Soviet communism. President

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Carter (1977-1981) famously encouraged Americans to adjust their lifestyles around greater
frugality, and though embraced by some, this presidential messaging contradicts the American
story of abundance. Further embroiled in the Iran hostage crisis, President Carter lost his race for
a second presidential term to Ronald Reagan, whose nostalgic portrayal of American abundance
on the heels of national scarcity, combined with his inflammatory welfare queen rhetoric, set the
stage for federal reforms that have culminated in sharply reduced welfare spending with racially
inequitable ramifications (Soss et al. 2010). The master-narratives of scarcity and abundance that
bracket these policy developments raise questions about the psychological dynamics of scarcity
and how they underpin the public opinion processes by which American inequality has increased
in recent decades. This paper unpacks the relationship between perceptions of scarcity and public
opinion, focusing specifically on the racial, economic, and distributive attitudes of white
Americans across the political spectrum.
2 Scarcity, Racialized Inequality, and Public Policy
Inequality in the United States is far from race-neutral. To the contrary, the racial share of
income inequality in the U.S. has risen such that contemporary inequality between racial groups
accounts for a greater proportion of total inequality today than it did in 1980 (Hero and Levy 2016).
Just as the empirical reality of inequality in the United States is racialized, so too are the effects of
scarcity.
As previously alluded to, scarcity is shown to increase racially discriminatory behavior
(Krosch and Amodio 2019). To investigate the mechanisms at play in this phenomenon, Krosch
and Amodio (2019) conduct resource allocation games and examine how white participants
visually process the faces of Black recipients under conditions of scarcity versus conditions of
neutrality. Under scarcity, white participants exhibit visual encoding deficits, meaning that they

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perceive the faces of Black recipients as less human than those of white recipients. These encoding
deficits have been characterized as a form of ‘perceptual dehumanization’ (Cassidy et al. 2017)
and are associated in the study with lower allocations on the basis of race (Krosch and Amodio
2019). The perceptual mechanism underlying scarcity and racially discriminatory behavior sheds
light on prior studies demonstrating related scarcity effects of reduced outgroup empathy,
increased racial prejudice, and heightened perceptions of racial otherness (Krosch et al. 2017;
Krosch and Amodio 2014; Chang et al. 2016; Rodeheffer et al. 2012).
Considered in light of policy developments throughout the late twentieth century into the
present, these racial discrimination effects suggest a potential role for scarcity psychology in the
political attitudes and policy outcomes that sustain inequalities at the intersection of race and class.
The role of racial prejudice in undermining support for the kinds of policy that reduce inequality
(such as welfare) is well-documented and has played out in myriad policy episodes (Gilens 1999;
Soss et al. 2010). The 1980s and 1990s ushered in a newly resurgent era of anti-welfarism in
American politics, with Ronald Reagan emerging as the movement’s presidential champion (ibid).
In addition to originating the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan that would later propel the
Trump campaign, Reagan also coined the term ‘welfare queen,’ a trope that stereotyped welfare
recipients as disproportionately Black and female while pathologizing them as lazy and sexually
irresponsible (Hancock 2004). The rhetoric of the welfare queen spread throughout the 1980s, and
the mantle of anti-welfarism was eventually assumed by President Clinton at the helm of the
Democratic Party, reflecting the bipartisan reach of this agenda in recent history. Leading up to
the 1992 election, welfare reform became a centerpiece of both parties’ policy platforms,
culminating in the 1994 passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Reconciliation Act (PRWORA).

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Once passed, the PRWORA set in motion a dramatic retrenchment7 of welfare provision
in America, with long-term consequences. The PRWORA replaced the Aid to Families with
Dependent Children (AFDC) program with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).
Whereas the federal government previously provided matching grants to states under the AFDC,
the TANF program called for federal funding to states via block grants, meaning the federal
government began providing a prespecified amount of funds instead of matching state spending
dollar-for-dollar. Importantly, the amount of funding the federal government provides under the
TANF has not changed since 1996, such that the real value of federal funding has fallen by 40
percent (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2022). Not surprisingly then, benefit levels in all
but six states have likewise declined in inflation-adjusted value. Moreover, under the TANF, most
states have set income eligibility thresholds below the federal poverty line, with racially disparate
impacts. Fifty-two percent of Black children live in sixteen states with benefit levels at twenty
percent of the poverty line, as compared to forty-one percent of Latinx children and thirty-seven
percent of white children (ibid).
In this paper, I analyze survey data on racial, economic, and distributive attitudes to explore
the role of scarcity psychology in the public opinion underpinnings of this ongoing policy
trajectory, which can be further appreciated in light of state-level reforms and discourses leading
up to the passage of the PRWORA. As Clinton and others beat the drum of anti-welfarism during
the 1992 election, then-President George H.W. Bush encouraged states to apply for AFDC waivers
that permitted states to manipulate policy design and impose more behavioral control over welfare
recipients (Soss et al. 2010). The promotion of waivers throughout the early 1990s precipitated
7 Note that the PRWORA also transformed the welfare system in terms of policy design, introducing
reforms rooted in disciplinary neoliberal paternalism. For more on this facet of the PRWORA, see Soss et
al. (2010).

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state-level discourse that schematically linked scarcity and anti-welfarism. The rhetoric of
California Governor Pete Wilson (1991-1999) illustrates this point. In his political messaging,
Wilson framed welfare as exacerbating the state’s budget deficit, stoking concerns over fiscal
scarcity and blaming welfare as the cause (Soss et al. 2010). Building on this rhetoric, Wilson
proposed a series of reforms in California, including the imposition of family caps and the
introduction of a system for reducing benefits among long-term recipients as well as new
California residents (ibid). This emphasis on fiscal forms of scarcity alongside constructions of
welfare beneficiaries as illegitimate freeloaders served to further malign welfare in the prePRWORA era.
3 Scarcity as a Hierarchy-Enhancing Force
A central objective of this paper is to theoretically bridge scholarship in psychology and
public policy, based on a motivating premise that scarcity, race, and inequality are interconnected
in the mass-politics of contemporary American society. In addition to racial discrimination effects,
scarcity has been demonstrated to cognitively activate a competitive orientation, which, in turn, is
associated with self-serving behaviors (Roux et al. 2015). These effects of scarcity likely translate
to political attitudes differently based on one’s positionality within structures of hierarchy and
systems of social organization in American society. As a form of threat, scarcity may engender
heterogeneous psychological responses based on one’s degree of privilege within this status quo.
Social dominance theory offers a conceptual framework for delineating the political dynamics of
scarcity in this regard.
Social dominance theory (SDT) proceeds from the basic premise that group-based
hierarchy is a near-ubiquitous feature of non-hunter-gatherer, surplus-producing human societies.
According to SDT, human social systems are shaped by the “counterbalancing influences” of

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hierarchy-enhancing (HE) forces, on the one hand, and hierarchy-attenuating (HA) forces, on the
other (Sidanius and Pratto 2001: 38). While HE forces produce and maintain greater levels of
group inequality, HA forces moderate relations of dominance and subordination. The relative
balance of HE and HA forces in a given society are understood to dynamically shape its degree of
group inequality. Following this premise, public policies may have the effect of either enhancing
or attenuating social hierarchy. For instance, progressive taxation and affirmative action could be
considered HA forces in public policy, while tax breaks to large corporations and increased
military spending could be considered HE forces (Zimmerman and Reyna 2013). Extending this
premise, elements of mass psychology that influence public opinion may consequently be
considered either hierarchy-enhancing or hierarchy-attenuating. In this paper, I theorize that
scarcity is, by and large, a hierarchy-enhancing force, particularly when perceived by white
Americans, who are relatively advantaged under American racial hierarchy and may therefore
respond to perceived scarcity in a manner that consolidates their privilege.
The psychological connection between scarcity and competition demonstrated in extant
scholarship points to the potential role of perceived scarcity as an antecedent factor in individuallevel propensities to enhance hierarchy via political attitudes. Within SDT research, scholars
conceptualize the psychological construct of social dominance orientation (SDO), which is defined
as a generalized sociopolitical disposition measuring the degree to which an individual desires or
supports group-based hierarchy and the domination of ‘inferior’ groups by ‘superior’ groups
(Sidanius and Pratto 2001: 48). According to Duckitt (2001), the intensity of social dominance
orientation is traceable to how strongly one harbors a competitive-jungle worldview, i.e. a
perception of the social world as a “ruthless and amoral Darwinian struggle for survival” (51).8
8 See Duckitt and Sibley (2010) for more on the role of a competitive jungle worldview in social dominance
orientation.

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Insofar as perceptions of scarcity may amplify individual propensities to view the world through
a zero-sum, competitive-jungle lens, perceived scarcity may activate dominance motives in line
with SDO and in turn escalate hierarchy-enhancing political attitudes, ranging from racial
resentment to anti-welfare policy positions. This scarcity-induced psychological sequence is likely
all the more palpable among white Americans, for whom relations of racial hierarchy may be selfserving. In turn, perceptions of scarcity may distinctively reinforce the link between competition,
self-interest, and HE public opinion among those with racial privilege in particular.
4 Scarcity as a System Justification Stimulus
Just as group-based hierarchy is theoretically self-serving for white Americans in the
United States, so too are status quo systems of social organization. This convergence in self-,
group-, and system-based motives among white Americans reflects the intersection of social
dominance theory and system justification theory (SJT). According to SJT, people are
psychologically motivated to justify the social systems on which their daily lives depend, and
especially so when perceiving conditions of epistemic, existential, or relational threat (Jost 2021).
These dimensions of threat correspond with a range of sensitive psychological needs, including
the drive for certainty, safety, and social belonging. According to Jost (2021), these needs comprise
the “motivational substructure of political ideology” in the sense that they motivate the beliefs,
opinions, and values that make up ideology, rendering individuals especially receptive to
ideologies that justify the status quo system (73). When it comes to epistemic needs, the status quo
offers the virtue of certainty. When it comes to relational needs, rationalizing the status quo may
reduce social alienation. And further, when it comes to existential needs, system-justifying beliefs
may bolster cultural traditions that insulate individuals from reckoning with their own mortality
(Solomon et al. 2015).

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In this study, I conceptualize scarcity as a multifaceted threat that may play upon all three
categories of need and, in turn, intensify ideological tendencies of system justification. At its most
basic level, perceptions of scarcity may activate a sense of biophysical danger. A person may feel
existentially threatened insofar as scarcity activates fears regarding one’s ability to meet their
subsistence-based needs. On a relational level, scarcity may symbolically threaten Americans by
virtue of their national self-concept that is rooted in abundance. This interpretation of scarcity as
a threat to American identity is consistent with extant understandings that define symbolic threats
as those which endanger the integrity or validity of an ingroup’s system of meaning (Stephan and
Stephan 2017).
The epistemic dimension of scarcity threats in America is closely intertwined with the
existential and relational dimensions previously discussed. In the face of scarcity-based existential
threat, one may grapple with epistemic distress insofar as perceptions of scarcity puncture prior
notions of safety and the sense of certainty enfolded therein, leaving a person to grasp for solid
ground via system-justifying ideology amid their drive for cognitive closure. When it comes to
relational dynamics of scarcity, one may feel uncertainty regarding a core basis of their national
identity. In one subliminal form or another, Americans may wonder: if America faces scarcity,
then who are we as a nation? In the face of scarcity, the narrative threads of American abundance
scatter along with one’s sense of certainty regarding the nature of one’s social foundation. In turn,
system justification may offer epistemic relief.
5 Scarcity as a Culturally Salient Threat
The salience of scarcity threats can also be understood in relation to features of American
political culture. As emphasized by scholars of cultural psychology, American culture – that is, its
assemblage of socially shared meanings and associated behavioral practices – is uniquely

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individualistic (Triandis 1995; Triandis and Gelfand 1998; Kitayama and Uskul 2011). In contrast
to more collectivist cultures that are oriented around social harmony and coordination, Western
societies embrace cultural ideas and conventions guided by self-promotion, self-expression, and
self-sustenance (ibid). On this point of differentiation, the United States stands out even among
Western societies, with North Americans proving decidedly more individualistic than Europeans
(Kitayama et al. 2009). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, implicit psychological tendencies of
individualism are widespread across the contemporary U.S. (ibid).
To appreciate the cultural salience of scarcity as a form of threat, the implications of
American individualism are critical. Extant scholarship analyzes the written accounts of influential
thinkers within the philosophical tradition of classical liberalism and considers the construction of
scarcity therein (Xenos 1987; Tellmann 2017). Embedded across accounts within this tradition,
which itself shaped the cultural tendencies of early settler-colonial America, is a political
perspective in which individualistic competition is considered the just mechanism by which
resources and wealth ought to be distributed.
We can see this distributive ethic at play in the American value of meritocracy as well as
the cultural narratives surrounding the American frontier and the American dream, in which the
individual is at the center of a story that culminates in upward mobility (Bellah et al. 1985). While
these narratives have historically been promoted against a backdrop portrayal of America as a
place of abundance (Kitayama et al. 2010), these narratives and their underlying emphasis on
individualistic competition take on threat-inducing contours when conditions of scarcity arise. The
stakes attached to an ‘every man for himself’ mentality become that much more dire under
circumstances of scarcity. Such circumstances turn individualistic competition into a zero-sum
social conflict, thereby amplifying the threat salience of scarcity as a function of its cultural

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implications. Considering the racial discrimination effects of scarcity as well as the history of antiwelfare discourse, it’s perhaps unsurprising that this distributive ethic of individualistic
competition has been heavily race-gendered throughout American history (see Turner 2008).
For all the reasons emphasized above, members of the American public may experience a
felt sense of threat when perceptions of scarcity are activated, which, in turn, may engender system
justification responses, as suggested by extant experimental studies where threat priming
strengthens system-justifying attitudes (Jost et al. 2005). Insofar as the United States is highly
unequal, justifying the economic system entails justifying a policy status quo that sustains class
hierarchy. In this light, scarcity may operate as both a system justification stimulus and a hierarchyenhancing force, particularly when perceived among white Americans for whom ideologically
legitimizing the status quo may serve both self- and group-interests while ameliorating the
psychological impacts of scarcity-induced distress.
6 The Role of Scarcity in the Political Attitudes of White Americans
The role of scarcity in reinforcing inequality via public opinion mechanisms can be
assessed through various angles, including a range of political attitudes related to race, the
economic system, and public policy. While similar in terms of their bearing on inequality, these
political attitudes nonetheless proxy nuanced dimensions of the overarching phenomenon at hand.
For instance, scarcity may impact racial attitudes in a theoretically multifaceted sense. On the one
hand, the racial discrimination effects of scarcity demonstrated in extant scholarship are consistent
with longstanding theory encapsulated within the realistic group conflict framework. According
to this framework, outgroup prejudice is activated by perceived threats to material resources amid
intergroup relations of zero-sum competition (LeVine and Campbell 1971; Sidanius and Pratto

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2001). Insofar as perceived scarcity may exacerbate threat perceptions in this manner, the racial
discrimination effects are broadly consistent with realistic group conflict theory.
On the other hand, given the status difference between white and Black Americans within
the American racial hierarchy (Masuoka and Junn 2013), the anti-Black discriminatory effects
demonstrated in studies of primarily white participants may be attributed to not just outgroup
prejudice but also ingroup dominance, with members of higher-status racial groups discriminating
in a manner that doesn’t merely generate intergroup division but goes further in reinforcing status
quo hierarchy (Krosch et al. 2017, 2019). As such, the effects of scarcity may extend beyond
heightened perceptions of racialized competition into sentiments and beliefs that ideologically
rationalize racial and economic inequality. The constructs of racial resentment and economic
system justification proxy these sentiments and beliefs.
According to recent scholarship, racial resentment among white Americans encompasses
an emotion-laden perspective that undeserving African Americans and other minorities are taking
advantage of resources in a manner that is seen as disadvantaging whites and altering the status
quo (Davis and Wilson 2022). Accordingly, racial resentment stems from interrelated motivations
to justify the status quo and preserve ingroup dominance via appraisals of deservingness. The
potential of scarcity to amplify racial resentment is supported by extant findings in which
perceptions of scarcity are shown to increase the degree to which deservingness appraisals
underwrite preferences regarding the distribution of resources (Skitka and Tetlock 1992). This
dynamic harkens back to the welfare queen trope, which rhetorically communicated the alleged
undeservingness of welfare recipients (Hancock 2004).
The deservingness dimension of racial resentment also plays on the distributive ethics of
individualistic competition that shape traditions of American political culture. The ‘resentment’ at

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play here is expressed through pretenses that racially progressive policies (such as affirmative
action) violate the mores of individualism and meritocracy, suggesting that the ideological
dynamics of racial resentment are further interconnected to those of economic system justification
(ESJ). These ESJ attitudes include perspectives that if people work hard, they almost always get
what they want as well as beliefs that economic positions are legitimate reflections of people’s
achievements. As a form of threat that may amplify group- and system-based motives, scarcity is
likely to escalate tendencies of both racial resentment and economic system justification.
These racial and economic attitudes – including heightened perceptions of racialized
competition, racial resentment, and economic system justification – may shift alongside public
opinion on redistribution and welfare policy. To this point, extant scholarship demonstrates a
negative relationship between scarcity perceptions and support for redistribution, specifically
when analyzing respondents from the UK (Nettle and Saxe 2020). Given the United States’ English
colonial roots and shared culture of individualism, these effects may translate to the attitudes of
white Americans. Moreover, the policy discourse surrounding late-twentieth century welfare
contraction suggests this negative relationship may further extend to public opinion on whether
the government should increase taxes to fund programs for the poor and the unemployed. Insofar
as mass preferences and policy outcomes related to redistribution and public goods provision are
widely impacted by dynamics of racial diversity and social identity (Shayo 2009; Habyarimana et
al. 2007), the racial and economic attitudes previously discussed are theoretically intertwined with
redistributive and welfare opinion. In turn, the psychological dynamics of scarcity may implicate
this varied yet interrelated array of political attitudes, all of which proxy public opinion
mechanisms by which inequality is reinforced in the United States. Taken as a whole, the foregoing
expectations make up the core of my overarching theory and can be summarized as the inequality-

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reinforcing effects of scarcity. Applied to the present study, these effects are hypothesized as
follows:
H1: Scarcity will be positively correlated with racialized competition.
H2: Scarcity will be positively correlated with racial resentment.
H3: Scarcity will be positively correlated with economic system justification.
H4: Scarcity will be positively correlated with opposition to welfare.
H5: Scarcity will be positively correlated with opposition to redistribution.
7 The Personal and Sociotropic Dimensions of Scarcity in Public Opinion
The construct of scarcity can take many forms, including jobs, resources, housing, finances,
government funding, and beyond. Moreover, scarcity can be appraised as a matter of direct
experience and/or as a feature of one’s broader social environment. In this study, I theorize a
distinction between experiences of personal scarcity and perceptions of sociotropic scarcity.
Whereas personal scarcity corresponds with conditions in one’s own life, sociotropic scarcity
relates to conditions at the level of the society or nation in which one lives.9 While the personal
and sociotropic dimensions of scarcity are undoubtedly intertwined in many instances, the
distinction is theoretically important insofar as these dimensions may diverge in their relationship
to political attitudes, as elaborated below. Furthermore, the personal and sociotropic
manifestations of scarcity intersect with distinct constructs in political science scholarship, such
as affective economic insecurity and appraisals of the national economy.
The role of affective economic insecurity in shaping political attitudes has gained renewed
attention, particularly in the context of a broader literature demonstrating the weak and inconsistent
9 See Kinder and Kiewiet (2008) for more on the role of sociotropic politics in U.S. elections.

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effects of economic self-interest on public opinion (see Melcher 2023). Rather than analyzing
objective measures of an individual’s income or employment status as a proxy for economic selfinterest, extant scholarship contends that subjective economic insecurity better reflects individuallevel circumstances in which a person is most likely to endorse policies and attitudes that mitigate
personal hardship (ibid). To this point, Melcher (2023) finds that economic insecurity predicts an
array of political attitudes of relevance to the present inquiry, including perceptions regarding the
extent of opportunity to ‘get ahead’ in America, feelings towards the poor, and perceptions of
racialized job competition. Theoretically speaking, economic insecurity and personal scarcity are
conceptually interrelated yet distinct. On the one hand, a personal appraisal of scarcity is likely a
precursor to the affective state of economic insecurity. On the other hand, a personal appraisal of
scarcity need not exclusively precipitate economic insecurity, as the construct of scarcity itself is
more open-ended and may extend beyond strictly economic subject matter, such as housing, food,
and healthcare. In this sense, personal scarcity and economic insecurity have substantive overlap
but are not definitionally equivalent.
In this same vein, perceptions of sociotropic scarcity and evaluations of the national
economy are related yet non-coterminous in their definitional boundaries. Sociotropic scarcity can
encompass object-appraisals that are cognitively categorized outside or at the margins of the
national economy. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, one source of sociotropic
scarcity included shortages of baby formula. While certainly embedded in the national supply
chain, and thus traceable to the national economy writ large, the availability of baby formula is not
the prototypical referent for assessing economic prosperity, especially compared to more
categorically emblematic metrics, such as GDP growth. As such, matters of sociotropic scarcity

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may call to mind a wider range of object-appraisals than would be cognitively top-of-mind when
judging the well-being of the national economy.
While these distinctions are theoretically clarifying, the broader conceptual and
experiential tree within which these constructs branch off from one another reflects the value-add
of scarcity as a psychological framework for contextualizing public opinion phenomena. The
construct of scarcity, conceived in the broadest sense as the lack of some good for a given objective,
is a common denominator of the overall psychology in which affective economic insecurity and
negative evaluations of the national economy take root. Nonetheless, the personal and sociotropic
dimensions of scarcity may yield distinct effects vis-à-vis political attitudes in ways that mirror
the nuances established in extant scholarship. For instance, economic insecurity and evaluations
of the national economy do not uniformly predict political attitudes in the same way (see Melcher
2023), suggesting that the personal and sociotropic dimensions of scarcity may deviate from one
another in their influence on public opinion.
Considered along these lines, it’s possible that personal experiences of scarcity and
sociotropic perceptions of scarcity initiate distinct psychological dynamics that differentially
implicate the inequality-reinforcing effects theorized in previous sections. For instance, when it
comes to economic system justification attitudes, personal experiences of scarcity may shortcircuit the theorized dynamic in which the threat of scarcity engenders system justification as a
means of psychological relief. A person experiencing scarcity in their own life is more likely to
identify with and feel solidarity towards the ‘have-nots’ of society, whose hardship is otherwise
legitimized from the standpoint of economic system justification. By contrast, a person whose
personal life is relatively free of scarcity would perhaps more unabatedly justify the economic
system, holding constant all other contributing factors. In this sense, sociotropic scarcity may

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operate as a hierarchy-enhancing force (as theorized above), while personal scarcity may act as a
hierarchy-attenuating force. This possibility is examined in greater empirical detail in the sections
below and hypothesized as follows:
H6: The positive relationship between scarcity and inequality-reinforcing public opinion
will be stronger for sociotropic scarcity than personal scarcity.
8 Scarcity Psychology Across Partisanship and Cultural Orientation
The influence of partisanship in American politics is far-reaching, shaping myriad public
opinion phenomena related to social identity and information processing (Mason 2018;
Derreumaux et al. 2023). Partisanship is closely interconnected with liberal and conservative
ideology in American politics, with white Americans being the most ideologically sorted racial
group in their partisan affiliations (Enders and Thornton 2024). This partisan sorting results in
white Democrats consistently identifying as liberal and white Republicans consistently identifying
as conservative (ibid). As such, to understand the influence of partisanship on the scarcity
psychology of white Americans, we can draw upon extant scholarship that theorizes the
relationship between ideology and threat psychology. This scholarship provides a foundation for
stipulating a series of competing hypotheses regarding the effects of scarcity on inequalityreinforcing public opinion.
First, and perhaps most straightforwardly, scarcity psychology among white Americans
may adhere to the ‘conservative-shift’ hypothesis. As summarized by Burke et al. (2013) and
elaborated in Jost (2021), one school of thought theorizes that the perception of existential threat
tends to push political attitudes in a conservative direction, regardless of a person’s ideological
predispositions. The underlying logic of the conservative-shift hypothesis is that conservatism
offers a relatively stable and unambiguous conception of the world that is more effective than

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liberalism at pacifying existential distress. Applied to the threat of scarcity, this school of thought
would predict a positive relationship between perceptions of scarcity and inequality-reinforcing
public opinion, on the grounds that scarcity ‘shifts’ attitudes towards the conservative end of the
spectrum, which is typically characterized by an overarching acceptance of inequality (Jost 2021).
Extrapolating further, the conservative-shift hypothesis would predict white Americans of all
partisan stripes to exhibit public opinion in line with H1-H5, as ideological predispositions do not
condition the effects of threat in this school of thought. This expectation is formalized as follows:
H7: Scarcity will be positively correlated with inequality-reinforcing public opinion
among white Americans, regardless of partisanship.
Second, and in contrast to the conservative-shift hypothesis, scarcity psychology among
white Americans may instead adhere to the ‘worldview-defense’ hypothesis. According to this
school of thought, existential threats are likely to reinforce people’s pre-existing ideological
worldviews, thus intensifying liberal convictions among Democrats while strengthening
conservative convictions among Republicans (Psyzczynski et al. 2021). The worldview-defense
hypothesis has roots in terror management theory (TMT), which contends that the human ability
to consciously anticipate one’s death sets in motion a deeply disturbing psychological experience
that is allayed through the development of belief systems (Becker 1973; Solomon et al. 2015). In
the face of existential distress, belief systems of all varieties are theorized as helping restore
psychological composure by providing a framework of meaning-making that boosts an
individual’s self-esteem in a way that helps the individual psychologically transcend the anxieties
of their mortal lifetime (ibid). Applying the worldview-defense hypothesis to scarcity psychology
across partisanship, we would expect partisan heterogeneity in the relationship between scarcity

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and inequality-reinforcing public opinion, with white Democrats exhibiting a negative relationship
and white Republicans exhibiting a positive relationship. Because the inequality-reinforcing public
opinion analyzed in my study has a conservative bent, the worldview-defense hypothesis would
expect conservative Republicans to double down on these attitudes in response to scarcity while
liberal Democrats would veer away. This expectation is formalized below:
H8a: Scarcity will be negatively correlated with inequality-reinforcing public opinion
among white Democrats.
H8b: Scarcity will be positively correlated with inequality-reinforcing public opinion
among white Republicans.
Last, and in contrast to both the conservative-shift and the worldview-defense hypotheses,
scarcity psychology among white Americans may exhibit patterns that reflect expectations at the
intersection of affective intelligence theory and the social-psychology of distributive justice.
According to affective intelligence theory (AIT), the effect of threat on political attitudes is
conditional on whether a threat activates emotions of fear or anger (Marcus et al. 2000; Neuman
et al. 2007). This conditionality occurs because fear and anger induce distinct modes of judgment:
one conscious (fear), and the other preconscious (anger). In cases where threat elicits anger,
individuals rely with a degree of automaticity on habituated practices, including their ideological
predispositions, when making political judgments. In turn, anger-based responses to threat would
yield public opinion patterns in line with the worldview-defense hypothesis. In contrast, when
threat elicits fear, individuals depart from habituated practices and make political judgments more
deliberatively, such that the resulting political attitudes may deviate from the ideological
predispositions associated with one’s partisan identity.

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Keeping AIT in mind, scholarship on the social psychology of distributive justice offers
insight into how fear-based responses to threat may unfold across partisanship. As theorized by
Deutsch (1985), fairness judgments regarding distributive justice involve cognitive appraisals that
are varyingly construed in terms of principles related to equality, on the one hand, and equity, on
the other. When construed in terms of equality, fairness is appraised based on whether ‘rewards’
are equally distributed (Deutsch 1985; Rasinski 1987). Conversely, when construed in terms of
equity, fairness is appraised based on whether rewards are distributed in proportion to inputs and
deservingness (ibid). These principles for judging fairness are habitually espoused among liberals
and conservatives in different ways. Whereas liberals tend to endorse equality over equity,
conservatives tend to endorse equity over equality (Rasinski 1987).
Extrapolating these liberal-conservative patterns to partisanship, white Democrats may
habitually form political attitudes based on equality principles, while white Republicans may
habitually form political attitudes based on equity principles. In turn, if perceptions of scarcity
activate emotions of fear, affective intelligence theory would expect white partisans to deviate
from their habitual modes of judging fairness. In the context of my study, this dynamic would
result in partisan heterogeneity in the relationship between scarcity and inequality-reinforcing
public opinion. For white Democrats, scarcity-induced fear would engender a departure from
habitual equality-based judgments, producing a relatively greater emphasis on deservingness that
could amplify inequality-reinforcing effects. By contrast, for white Republicans, scarcity-induced
fear would engender a departure from habitual equity-based judgments, producing a relatively
greater concern for egalitarianism that could attenuate inequality-reinforcing effects. This
expectation is summarized as follows:

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H9a: Scarcity will be positively correlated with inequality-reinforcing public opinion
among white Democrats.
H9b: Scarcity will be negatively correlated with inequality-reinforcing public opinion
among white Republicans.
As discussed in Section 5, a central component of my overall theory focuses on how the
cultural influence of individualism may shape the threat salience of scarcity in American politics.
In other words, the implications of scarcity may be especially threat-inducing for white Americans
who are most aligned with the dominant culture of individualism. As such, perceptions of scarcity
may more powerfully engender inequality-reinforcing public opinion at higher levels of
individualism. This expectation is formalized as follows:
H10: Higher levels of individualism will strengthen the positive relationship between
scarcity and inequality-reinforcing public opinion.
9 Data and Methods
To analyze my theory regarding the inequality-reinforcing impact of scarcity psychology
in American politics, this paper leverages an original survey dataset on the political attitudes of
white Americans. I’ve chosen to focus my study on a sample of white Americans for both
theoretical and practical reasons.
First, much of the literature that examines the psychological effects of scarcity relies on
primarily white samples. This limitation is particularly applicable to the scholarship motivating
my analysis of racial attitudes. Because prior research has relied on white samples, and because
much of my theory draws upon this research, I focus on white Americans as a starting point for
testing how previously demonstrated effects translate when the dependent variables proxy

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attitudinal outcomes that are more explicitly political in nature. By closely mirroring the racial
composition of prior study samples, I can more narrowly assess whether prior effects extend to the
public opinion outcomes in my study.
Second, practically speaking, a thorough examination of how the effects of scarcity
compare across different racial groups would require a large and representative sample. Moreover,
ensuring the sample reflects the partisan spectrum of the American public while also analyzing
racial differences would require an extensive survey budget. Due to budget constraints, I focus
here on the attitudes of white Americans as a first step in analyzing scarcity, beyond which further
studies can more precisely assess racial differences. While limited in its scope, this study
nonetheless offers a nuanced portrait regarding the factors that shape scarcity among a racially
dominant group. This contribution serves the objectives of my overall dissertation, as the political
attitudes among those with racial privilege may play an especially prominent role in perpetuating
inequality.
The data for this study come from an original survey fielded by Qualtrics Recruitment
Services between June 17th and August 4th of 2024. The survey collected responses from a total
of 1,555 participants, including 687 men, 855 women, 12 non-binary people, and 1 participant who
answered “prefer not to say.” Moreover, the sample includes participants across political parties,
with 543 Democrats, 584 Republicans, and 428 Independents. To analyze the partisan patterns of
scarcity psychology, I conduct analyses on the full sample and party-specific subsets.
As previously discussed, my study operationalizes a distinction between experiences of
personal scarcity and perceptions of sociotropic scarcity. The measurement approach for each
variable parallels one another, drawing from the work of Roux et al. (2015). Personal scarcity is
measured by averaging each respondent’s agree/disagree ratings of four statements: (1) My

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resources are scarce; (2) I don’t have enough resources; (3) I need to protect the resources I have;
and (4) I need to acquire more resources. The sociotropic scarcity variable is measured the same
way but in regards to the following statements: (1) Resources in the United States are scarce; (2)
The United States doesn’t have enough resources; (3) The United States needs to protect the
resources it has; and (4) The United States needs to acquire more resources. To account for the
influence of related variables, such as economic insecurity and perceptions of the national
economy, my survey also asks participants (1) how worried they are about their current financial
situation and (2) whether they believe the nation’s economy has gotten better, stayed about the
same, or gotten worse over the past year. These variables are analyzed alongside standard controls
related to demographic and other background information, including age, being from the south,
education, household income, ideology, and political knowledge.
In addition, my survey collects data on psychological constructs implicated in my broader
theory. These variables provide insight on the participant’s personality and cultural orientation, as
proxied by social dominance orientation (SDO), vertical individualism (VI), and horizontal
collectivism (HC). While the SDO scale measures a person’s sociopolitical disposition regarding
preferences for group hierarchy and dominance (Pratto et al. 2013), the VI and HC scales offer
proxies for analyzing a participant’s degree of alignment with American political culture (Triandis
and Gelfand 1998). Deriving from a broader typology theorized in cultural psychology research,
vertical individualism and horizontal collectivism offer traction for analyzing individual-level
comportment with cultural emphases on individualistic competition (as captured by the VI scale,
which typifies the dominant culture in American society) versus egalitarian collectivism (as
captured by the HC scale, which is relatively counter-cultural in the United States). My study
utilizes short versions of each scale that have been validated by Sivadas et al. (2008) on samples

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of American participants. A full description of the survey items used to measure SDO, VI, and HC
is available in Appendix Table A2. Moreover, summary statistics and measurement descriptions
for each explanatory and outcome variable are provided in Appendix Tables A1 - A4.
As previously discussed, this study analyzes the inequality-reinforcing effects of scarcity
by focusing on a range of dependent variables related to racial, economic, and distributive
attitudes. The two constructs analyzed in regards to racial attitudes include (1) perceptions of
racialized job competition and (2) racial resentment. The former is measured via responses to the
following question: How likely is it that many whites are unable to find a job because employers
are hiring minorities instead? The latter is measured by averaging each respondent’s
agree/disagree ratings of four statements: (1) I resent any special considerations that African
Americans receive because it’s unfair to other Americans; (2) For African Americans to succeed
they need to stop using past racism and slavery as excuses; (3) Special considerations for African
Americans place me at an unfair disadvantage because I have done nothing to harm them; and (4)
African Americans bring up race only when they need to make an excuse for their failure. The
racialized competition variable draws from the 2020 American National Elections Study (ANES),
while the racial resentment variable draws from the work of Davis and Wilson (2021).
To measure economic attitudes in line with my theory, I collect responses to select items
from Jost and Thompson’s (2000) economic system justification scale. The selected items include
all statements in the scale with a factor loading of 0.5 or higher, based on a factor analysis
conducted in Azevedo et al. (2019) using a YouGov sample of U.S. citizens. The 7 items that meet
this criteria include the following: (1) If people work hard, they almost always get what they want;
(2) Most people who don’t get ahead in our society should not blame the system; they only have
themselves to blame; (3) Economic differences in the society reflect an illegitimate distribution of

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resources (reverse scored); (4) Economic positions are legitimate reflections of people’s
achievements; (5) Equal distribution of resources is unnatural; (6) It is unfair to have an economic
system which produces extreme wealth and poverty at the same time (reverse scored); and (7)
There is no point in trying to make incomes more equal.
To assess the relationship between scarcity and more policy-oriented dependent variables,
my survey also measures distributive attitudes on welfare and redistribution policy. To measure
public opinion on welfare, my survey collects responses to the following question: Do you support
an increase in the funding of government programs for helping the poor and the unemployed with
education, training, employment, and social services, even if this might raise your taxes? This
question draws from the work of Margalit (2013), which emphasizes the importance of designing
welfare-related survey questions such that the tradeoff in personal tax hikes is emphasized. To
measure public opinion on redistribution, my survey asks participants: Do you favor, oppose, or
neither favor nor oppose the government trying to reduce the differences in income between the
richest and poorest households? This question draws from the 2020 ANES.
10 Results
This section begins with a brief descriptive overview of how perceptions of scarcity are
distributed across partisanship. Then, in Sections 10.2-10.4, I present coefficient plots that
visualize the results from a series of linear regression models conducted on my full sample as well
as each party subset,10 analyzing the correlation of personal and sociotropic scarcity to inequality10 The party subsets analyzed in this paper were subsetted such that all Independents were analyzed together, regardless
of whether the respondent ‘leaned’ towards one party or the other. As a robustness check, I replicated my analyses
using subsets where Independent-leaners are combined with the Democrat and Republican samples. In addition, I also
replicated my analyses using subsets based on ideology (i.e. liberals, moderates, and conservatives). On balance, the
party subset analyses presented in this paper generate comparable results to the ideology and party+lean subsets, with
the main differences pertaining to levels of statistical significance.

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reinforcing public opinion. Complete tables for each regression model are included in Appendix
B.11 All explanatory and outcome variables in my regression analyses are rescaled on a 0-1 scale
to improve clarity of interpretation. Complete tables of descriptive statistics on all rescaled
variables are available in Appendix A.
In Section 10.5, I present interaction plots that visualize the interaction between
perceptions of scarcity and vertical individualism for select dependent variables. These interaction
plots are derived from an additional series of linear regression models that are presented in
Appendix C. Through these analyses, I examine whether and how the psychology of scarcity in
American politics is shaped by cultural traditions of individualism that may impact public opinion
differently across partisan identities. Section 11 includes a reflection on the study’s limitations and
an elaborated discussion of select findings.
10.1 Perceptions of Scarcity Across Political Parties
As illustrated in Figures 1-2, perceptions of scarcity range from minimal to strong across
each partisan sample. Figures 1-2 display the party-specific distributions of personal and
sociotropic scarcity perceptions. Both personal and sociotropic scarcity perceptions are relatively
normal yet slightly skewed, as many participants within each party report high levels of personal
and sociotropic scarcity.
Though comparably distributed, perceptions of scarcity do meaningfully differ across
partisanship. Regarding personal scarcity, Republicans report the highest levels (M = 4.88, SD =
1.41), Democrats report the lowest (M = 4.66, SD = 1.55), and Independents fall in the middle (M
11 Note that the total N included in each regression differs slightly from the reported sample size due to missing values
on the household income variable. These missing values correspond with responses of “prefer not to answer” and
“don’t know.” A total of 10 Democrats, 10 Independents, and 7 Republicans provided these answers and are thus
omitted from the regression models.

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= 4.80, SD = 1.47). This same general pattern extends to sociotropic scarcity, where Republicans
again report the highest levels (M = 4.72, SD = 1.27), Democrats report the lowest (M = 4.16, SD
= 1.29), and Independents fall in the middle (M = 4.44, SD = 1.23).
A one-way ANOVA was performed to compare the mean personal and sociotropic scarcity
scores of each partisan sample, revealing a statistically significant difference between at least two
groups for personal scarcity (F(2, 1552) = 3.153, p < .05) and sociotropic scarcity (F(2, 1552) =
27.11, p <.001). Digging into this further, a post hoc Tukey test shows that perceptions of personal
scarcity differ significantly between Democrats and Republicans (p < .05), with neither party
differing significantly from Independents. In contrast, a post hoc Tukey test demonstrates that all
three partisan samples differ significantly from one another in their levels of perceived sociotropic
scarcity (p < .01).
Taken as a whole, these patterns indicate that white Republicans perceive higher levels of
both sociotropic scarcity and personal scarcity when compared to white Democrats. While distinct
in this regard, respondents within each partisan group are similar in that their mean personal
scarcity scores are always higher than their mean sociotropic scarcity scores. A series of paired
samples t-tests were performed to examine within-group differences in personal versus sociotropic
scarcity among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. For each group, personal scarcity
scores were significantly greater than sociotropic scarcity scores (Democrats → t(542) = 7.77, p
< 0.01; Independents → t(427) = 4.96, p < 0.01; Republicans → t(583) = 2.90, p < 0.01). In turn,
while Republicans exhibit stronger overall perceptions of scarcity than their Democratic
counterparts, personal scarcity surpasses sociotropic scarcity across the partisan spectrum.

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Figure 1: Distribution of Personal Scarcity Perceptions Across Party

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Figure 2: Distribution of Sociotropic Scarcity Perceptions Across Party
10.2 Scarcity and Racial Attitudes
To begin, I’ll first summarize my results regarding perceptions of racialized job
competition and racial resentment, presented in Figures 3 and 4. For racialized competition and
racial resentment, a common pattern emerges regarding sociotropic versus personal scarcity.
Despite exhibiting no correlation to racialized competition, personal scarcity does positively and
significantly predict racial resentment when analyzing the full sample (b = 0.066, p < 0.05), though
not when disaggregating across party subsets. While the effects of personal scarcity are
inconsistent, sociotropic scarcity positively and significantly predicts both racialized competition
(RC) and racial resentment (RR). This pattern is evident when analyzing the full sample (bRC =
.209, p < .01; bRR = .239, p < .01) as well as each party subset (bRC(D) = .174, p < .05; bRC(R) = .235,

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p < .01; bRC(I) = .193, p < .05; bRR(D) = .268, p < .01; bRR(R) = .210, p < .01; bRR(I) = .164, p < .05),
even when accounting for related variables such as economic insecurity and negative perceptions
of the national economy. In line with my overall theory, these results suggest that perceptions of
sociotropic scarcity may shift public opinion in a direction that converges with that of other
theorized factors including conservative ideology, social dominance orientation, and vertical
individualism (all of which positively and significantly predict racial attitudes, albeit not as
consistently in the Republican sample). Though falling short of statistical significance in some
models, horizontal collectivism tends to correspond with lower levels of racialized competition
and racial resentment, illustrating the contrast between the influence of sociotropic scarcity and
that of counter-cultural collectivist propensities in American society.
Taken as a whole, these patterns offer support for H1-H2 and H6-H7. Where statistically
significant, scarcity is positively correlated with racial attitudes that reinforce inequality in a
manner that supports my core theory (H1-H2) while also reflecting a conservative-shift among
white Americans of all partisan stripes (H7). These results likewise expand upon extant findings
that demonstrate a positive relationship between economic insecurity, perceptions of the national
economy, and racial resentment (see Melcher 2023). Moreover, the inequality-reinforcing patterns
are stronger for sociotropic scarcity than personal scarcity (H6), illustrating the nuances of scarcity
psychology vis-a-vis racial attitudes.

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Figure 3: Racialized Competition Coefficient Plot (95% Confidence Intervals)
Age, education, region (home state in the South), gender, household income, household size, and
political knowledge are controlled for in all linear regression models. Complete regression
results are presented in Appendix Table B1.

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Figure 4: Racial Resentment Coefficient Plot (95% Confidence Intervals)
Age, education, region (home state in the South), gender, household income, household size, and
political knowledge are controlled for in all linear regression models. Complete regression
results are presented in Appendix Table B2.

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10.3 Scarcity and Economic Attitudes
Turning to the relationship between scarcity and economic system justification, we begin
to see patterns emerge that distinguish not only personal and sociotropic scarcity but also
differences across partisanship. The results in Figure 5 suggest that my theory regarding
inequality-reinforcing effects vis-a-vis economic attitudes (H3) is most applicable for sociotropic
scarcity among Democrats. In the Democratic subset, I observe a positive and statistically
significant correlation between sociotropic scarcity and economic system justification (b = .093, p
< .01). Meanwhile, Republicans exhibit the opposite pattern, with sociotropic scarcity exhibiting
a negative (and statistically significant) correlation to economic system justification (b = -0.117, p
< .01). This divergence between Democrats and Republicans in response to sociotropic scarcity
points to partisan heterogeneity that is consistent with the fear-based mechanisms of affective
intelligence theory (H9a-H9b). Moreover, it suggests that supporters of the Democratic Party – i.e.
the party that is seen as most progressive in its political agenda – are the very constituents for
whom perceived conditions of sociotropic scarcity predict inequality-reinforcing economic
attitudes. While Democrats and Republicans exhibit distinctive patterns vis-a-vis sociotropic
scarcity, the results for the full sample and Independents fall short of statistical significance.
In contrast to sociotropic scarcity among Democrats yet consistent with H6, my analyses
of economic system justification suggest that personal scarcity may operate as a hierarchyattenuating force. Though falling short of statistical significance when subsetting on partisanship,
personal scarcity exhibits a negative and statistically significant correlation to economic system
justification when analyzing the full sample (b = -0.047, p < .05). This pattern mirrors that of
economic insecurity and reflects the value of distinguishing between the personal and sociotropic
dimensions of scarcity, particularly insofar as experiences of personal scarcity may mitigate

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system-justifying tendencies. These results also tentatively suggest that, when analyzing economic
system justification, H6 holds for all parties, as each party subset trends in the same direction as
the full sample results.
Beyond these core findings, my results for economic system justification (ESJ) reiterate
the inequality-reinforcing patterns of conservative ideology, social dominance orientation, and
vertical individualism, all of which positively and significantly predict ESJ in the full sample and
each party subset. The results for horizontal collectivism (HC) are statistically insignificant in all
models except the Republican sample, where HC counter-intuitively exhibits a positive correlation
with ESJ (b = .125, p < .01). This pattern contradicts my theoretical expectations and potentially
points to underspecified heterogeneity in how cultural orientations of reciprocity and cooperation
manifest across political parties.

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Figure 5: Economic System Justification Coefficient Plot (95% Confidence Intervals)
Age, education, region (home state in the South), gender, household income, household size, and
political knowledge are controlled for in all linear regression models. Complete regression
results are presented in Appendix Table B3.
10.4 Scarcity and Distributive Attitudes
When looking at the relationship between scarcity and distributive attitudes, as proxied by
policy opinion on welfare and redistribution, further evidence emerges suggesting partisan

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heterogeneity in scarcity psychology that aligns with affective intelligence theory (H9a-H9b). As
was the case for ESJ, Democrats stand out as the only sample for which sociotropic scarcity
exhibits a positive and statistically significant correlation to anti-welfare attitudes (b = .10, p < .05)
and anti-redistribution attitudes (b = .14, p <.05). In contrast, and mirroring earlier patterns,
Republicans exhibit the opposite relationship, with sociotropic scarcity negatively and
significantly predicting anti-welfare (b = -0.136, p < .05) and anti-redistribution (b = -0.245, p <
.01). As illustrated in Figures 6-7, these patterns provide further support for the fear-based
mechanisms of affective intelligence theory outlined in H9a-H9b, suggesting that Democrats are
the only group of voters for whom sociotropic scarcity correlates with inequality-reinforcing
distributive attitudes.
When it comes to sociotropic scarcity and distributive attitudes, the results for
Independents are statistically insignificant across the board. Nonetheless, the direction of the
sociotropic scarcity coefficient among Independents helps explain the results for antiredistribution attitudes observed in the full sample. In my analysis of the correlation between
sociotropic scarcity and opposition to redistribution, Independents trend in a similar direction as
Republicans. In turn, the converging trend among Independents and Republicans seemingly
contributes to the negative and significant correlation observed in the full sample (b = -0.073, p <
.05). Unpacking the partisan patterns that underlie the full sample is important insofar as the
aggregated results obscure inequality-reinforcing effects among Democrats that ultimately support
the expectations of H9a-H9b.
Turning to the results for personal scarcity, I observe further evidence suggesting the
hierarchy-attenuating impact of personal scarcity in line with H6. While statistically insignificant
across the board when analyzing anti-welfare attitudes, personal scarcity nonetheless exhibits a

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negative and statistically significant correlation to anti-redistribution attitudes when analyzing the
full sample (b = -0.088, p < .05). Though trending in the same direction as personal scarcity,
economic insecurity falls short of statistical significance, pointing to the relative strength of
personal scarcity as a psychological influence on redistributive attitudes.
Finally, the results for anti-welfare and anti-redistribution attitudes broadly reiterate the
influence of conservative ideology, social dominance orientation, vertical individualism, and
horizontal collectivism observed in earlier analyses. For both anti-welfare and anti-redistribution
attitudes, conservatism and SDO exhibit a positive and statistically significant relationship, again
aligning with the directional impact of sociotropic scarcity among Democrats. Though largely
insignificant for redistributive attitudes, the VI and HC scales exhibit the expected relationship to
welfare attitudes, with VI corresponding to increased welfare opposition and HC corresponding to
reduced welfare opposition. This pattern emerges when analyzing the full sample as well as the
Republican subset and partially when analyzing Independents.

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Figure 6: Opposition to Welfare Coefficient Plot (95% Confidence Intervals)
Age, education, region (home state in the South), gender, household income, household size, and
political knowledge are controlled for in all linear regression models. Complete regression
results are presented in Appendix Table B4.

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Figure 7: Opposition to Redistribution Coefficient Plot (95% Confidence Intervals)
Age, education, region (home state in the South), gender, household income, household size, and
political knowledge are controlled for in all linear regression models. Complete regression
results are presented in Appendix Table B4.

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10.5 The Interactive Influence of Scarcity and Individualism
As theorized in Section 5 and hypothesized in H10, I expect individualism to strengthen
the positive relationship between scarcity and inequality-reinforcing public opinion. To probe this
component of my theory, I conduct further regression analyses in which I examine the interaction
between vertical individualism (VI) and perceived scarcity. A positive and significant interaction
term would lend support to my overarching theory regarding the role of individualistic culture in
scarcity psychology. As visualized in Figures 8-11 and presented in Appendix Tables C1-C10, my
theory is substantiated for select dependent variables in a manner that further illustrates partisan
heterogeneity in scarcity psychology.
Focusing on racial attitudes, I first analyze interactions for the full sample. Figure 8
presents interaction plots for both racialized competition and racial resentment, all of which derive
from models presented in Appendix Tables C1-C4. In the interaction plots, I visualize the
relationship between scarcity and each outcome variable at different levels of vertical
individualism, where “low VI” is one standard deviation below the sample mean and “high VI” is
one standard deviation above the sample mean. Taken as a whole, my findings suggest that the
theorized influence of individualism in scarcity psychology is most applicable when it comes to
perceptions of sociotropic scarcity. While the interaction between VI and personal scarcity falls
short of statistical significance in the full sample, the interaction between VI and sociotropic
scarcity is positive and statistically significant for both racialized competition (b = .263, p < .05)
and racial resentment (b = .227, p < .05). For both racial DVs, the main effects of sociotropic
scarcity become insignificant once the interaction between sociotropic scarcity and VI is accounted
for, suggesting that the inequality-reinforcing impact of sociotropic scarcity is meaningfully

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contingent on a person’s degree of vertical individualism (see Model 2 in Appendix Tables G1 and
H1).
Figure 8: Interaction Plots for Racial Attitudes (Full Sample)
Note: The full regression results for racial resentment are available in Appendix Tables C1-C2.
The full regression results for racialized competition are presented in Appendix Tables C3-C4.
To further unpack these patterns, I analyze the interaction between scarcity and VI for each
party subset, as visualized in Figures 9-10 and presented in Appendix Tables C1-C4. Starting with
racialized competition, I find that Democrats, once again, exhibit patterns that align most closely

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with my theory. For racialized competition among Democrats, both sociotropic scarcity and
personal scarcity positively and significantly interact with vertical individualism (VI*sociotropic
→ b = 0.426, p < .05; VI*personal → b = .399, p < .05). In both cases, the main effects of
sociotropic scarcity and personal scarcity lose statistical significance, thus reinforcing the
interactive nature of scarcity and individualism for Democratic public opinion. This same dynamic
is true for Independents when it comes to sociotropic scarcity, where its interaction with VI is
likewise statistically significant (b = .608, p < .05). However, the patterns of cross-party similarity
end there, as personal scarcity does not significantly interact with VI among Independents and
neither personal nor sociotropic scarcity significantly interact with VI among Republicans. These
findings suggest that H10 is most applicable for Democrats and secondarily for Independents when
analyzing racialized competition.

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Figure 9: Interaction Plots for Racialized Competition (Across Partisanship)
Note: The full regression results for racialized competition are presented in Appendix Tables
C1-C2.
Turning to racial resentment in Figure 10, the results suggest that the interaction between
sociotropic scarcity and vertical individualism in the full sample is largely driven by Independents.
While neither personal nor sociotropic scarcity significantly interacts with VI among Democrats
and Republicans, there is a positive and significant interaction between sociotropic scarcity and
VI among Independents (b = .540, p < .05). Moreover, for Independents, the main effect of

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sociotropic scarcity loses significance when accounting for its interaction with VI, further
suggesting the interconnection of these constructs in public opinion as hypothesized in H10.
Figure 10: Interaction Plots for Racial Resentment (Across Partisanship)
Note: The full regression results for racial resentment are presented in Appendix Tables C3-
C4.
While the interaction analyses for racial attitudes underscore the importance of cultural
factors in shaping scarcity psychology (among Democrats and Independents, in particular), the

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results for economic and distributive attitudes are less consistent in this regard. For attitudes on
welfare and redistribution, the interaction between vertical individualism and scarcity, whether
personal or sociotropic, is never statistically significant (see Appendix Tables C7-C10). For
economic system justification, neither personal nor sociotropic scarcity interacts significantly with
vertical individualism when analyzing the full sample (see Appendix Table C5-C6). However,
when analyzing the party-specific subsets (as visualized in Figure 11), we see a significant
interaction between VI and personal scarcity among Independents (b = .272, p < .05). Interestingly,
this positive interaction occurs alongside a negative and significant main effect of personal scarcity
(b = -0.156, p < .05). As such, for Independents, the relationship between personal scarcity and
economic system justification appears to be especially dependent on a person’s degree of vertical
individualism, as the correlation shifts from negative to positive with increasing levels of VI (see
Appendix Table C5).

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Figure 11: Interaction Plots for Economic System Justification (Across Partisanship)
Note: The full regression results for economic system justification attitudes are available in
Appendix Tables C5-C6.

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11 Discussion
The foregoing analyses offer insight into the nuanced patterns by which scarcity
psychology shapes public opinion among white Americans. Nonetheless, the present study is
limited in terms of causal inference. The relationships established in Sections 10.2-10.5 are
correlational, and thus the causal nature of scarcity’s influence on public opinion has yet to be
persuasively demonstrated. Future research is necessary to develop effective methods for
experimentally manipulating scarcity and assessing causality in its relationship to political
attitudes. To this end, the survey analyzed here included an experimental manipulation adapted
from Roux et al. (2015) and Griskevicius et al. (2010) that randomly assigned participants to
complete episodic recall tasks that were designed to activate perceptions of scarcity; however, this
technique did not shift perceptions of personal and sociotropic scarcity as intended (more details
are available in Appendices D-E). The ineffectiveness of the experimental component points to
the challenges inherent in activating scarcity within the context of an online survey, suggesting the
potential necessity of alternative methods, such as the lab-based approaches utilized in extant
studies (see Huijsmans et al. 2019).
Beyond advancing the causal analysis of scarcity, future research should focus on
elucidating the partisan heterogeneity observed in this study. The results for the Republican sample
necessitate further clarification, as the hierarchy-attenuating implications of Republican public
opinion observed in the relationship between sociotropic scarcity and economic/distributive
attitudes contradicts my overarching theory (H3-H5). Moreover, the counter-intuitive pattern in
which horizontal collectivism (HC) predicts lower economic system justification among
Republicans is peculiar, suggesting either that HC works differently across party or that the
measurement of HC lacks construct validity. Along the lines of this latter possibility, future

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research should explore additional measures for cultural orientation to assess the robustness of the
patterns found here, particularly given the limitations of explicit measurement approaches for
cultural constructs (see Kitayama et al. 2009). Furthermore, future studies should examine the
partisan heterogeneity observed in the interaction between scarcity and vertical individualism in
order to clarify the emotional mechanisms that render individualistically-oriented Democrats and
Independents especially responsive to scarcity-based threats.
12 Conclusion
While the personal and sociotropic dimensions of scarcity are undoubtedly intertwined in
many cases, my findings point to the nuanced influence of each dimension on the political attitudes
of white Americans. On balance, I find that these dimensions differ from one another in the
consistency and direction by which they correspond with racial, economic, and distributive
attitudes. On the one hand, greater perceptions of sociotropic scarcity consistently correspond with
higher levels of racial resentment and increased perceptions of racialized competition. On the
other hand, greater perceptions of personal scarcity tend to correspond with higher levels of
support for redistribution and reduced support for beliefs that justify the unequal economic status
quo. These patterns characterize public opinion among white Americans, as demonstrated when
analyzing the full sample. Moreover, these patterns reflect the value-add of scarcity psychology as
a parsimonious framework for contextualizing extant scholarship that analyzes the role of
economic insecurity and perceptions of the national economy in public opinion (see Melcher
2023).
The political implications of these patterns are clear when considered in light of how racial,
economic, and distributive attitudes relate to macro-level inequalities. Because race- and classbased inequalities are structurally interconnected in the United States, political efforts to redress

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social hierarchy writ large require a policy strategy that is both racially and economically informed.
At the same time, personal and sociotropic experiences of scarcity seemingly work at a cross
pressure among white Americans. While the personal experience of scarcity may inspire economic
and distributive attitudes that lean egalitarian, the sociotropic perception of scarcity may inspire
racial attitudes that lean hierarchical. In turn, the countervailing influences of personal and
sociotropic scarcity may contribute to the persistence of inequality in the United States by
undermining support for racially progressive agendas among white Americans, even if said
agendas are in their economic self-interest or otherwise aligned with their ideological leanings.
Beneath the surface of this high-level summary lies a pattern of partisan heterogeneity in
the scarcity psychology of white Americans, which is especially apparent when it comes to
sociotropic scarcity. For Democrats, sociotropic scarcity appears to consistently reinforce
inequality via public opinion, with statistically significant results emerging for all five of my
dependent variables, including racial, economic, and distributive attitudes alike. In contrast, for
Republicans, sociotropic scarcity may enhance or attenuate hierarchy depending on the type of
political attitude at hand, with hierarchy-enhancing patterns emerging for racial attitudes and
hierarchy-attenuating patterns emerging for economic and distributive attitudes. This partisan
heterogeneity presents an interesting puzzle that requires further research, particularly insofar as
these patterns do not neatly adhere to extant theories regarding the influence of perceived threats
(such as scarcity) on ideological outcomes. In contrast to theories in which threats are expected to
uniformly engender either a conservative-shift or a worldview-defense effect (Burke et al. 2013),
the divergent patterns among Democrats and Republicans suggest that scarcity may impact public
opinion via emotional mechanisms specified in affective intelligence theory, in which the political
effects of perceived threats depend on whether they generate fear or anger (Marcus et al. 2000;

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Neuman et al. 2007). Future studies that disentangle the emotional mechanisms of personal and
sociotropic scarcity in connection to the social psychology of distributive justice are needed in
order to more rigorously examine this possible explanation of partisan heterogeneity. Moreover,
research analyzing how these patterns compare across racial groups is imperative.
Though necessitating further research, the inequality-reinforcing patterns that distinctively
characterize public opinion among white Democrats point to the political challenges at play in
mitigating inequality in American society, particularly during periods of time when perceptions of
sociotropic scarcity proliferate. In these moments, the political party that champions values of
egalitarianism and equity is potentially undermined by a fair-weathered commitment to these
values among its voter base. While the Democratic Party and its supporters have certainly evolved
in myriad ways since the 1990s, the findings of this study nonetheless shed light on American
politics extending back to the anti-welfare policy agenda highlighted at this paper’s outset. After
all, it was a Democratic presidential administration that pushed welfare retrenchment over the
finish line with the passage of the PRWORA, setting in motion a combination of funding cuts and
policy drift that have decidedly reduced the provision of social services in the United States. The
racialized undercurrents of this policy trajectory are meaningfully contextualized by this study’s
findings regarding the relationship between scarcity and racial attitudes, suggesting that the public
opinion underpinnings of this policy trajectory are alive and well in today’s politics.
Moreover, the interactions between individualism and perceived scarcity observed in this
study point to the cultural influences at play in contemporary scarcity psychology. Driven
primarily by Democrats and Independents, the interaction results reflect how individualism
heightens the threat salience of scarcity and, in turn, escalates racial and economic hierarchy via
political attitudes. While underscoring yet another nuance of inequality-reinforcing public opinion,

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this overall finding reflects the culturally constructed nature of scarcity psychology. If scarcity
psychology is culturally defined, then scarcity psychology can be culturally refined, signifying the
potential for a new paradigm in how scarcity is given meaning in American society.

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Scarcity Framing in American Political Discourse
The Case of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Laura Brisbane, PhD Candidate
University of Southern California
Political Science and International Relations (POIR)
Dissertation Paper #3
Abstract: The perception of scarcity – in relation to myriad objects such as money, jobs, resources,
etc. – powerfully influences cognitive dynamics of attention, such that a given scarcity object may
capture one’s focus when primed and shape one’s political priorities. Following this insight, and
considering the threat salience of scarcity in American political culture, I develop a theory of
scarcity framing in which actors rhetorically set the scope of the policy agenda by problematizing
specific objects of scarcity with political meanings that are congenial to their ideological leanings.
I examine this theory through a content analysis of opinion pieces covering the COVID-19
pandemic in the liberal-leaning New York Times and the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal.
While the literature focuses on economic scarcity, I inductively conceptualize two main categories
of scarcity framing pertaining to objects of both economic scarcity and socio-material scarcity.
Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the frequency with which each scarcity object is
emphasized is partially correlated with publication ideology. Taken as a whole, the content
analysis demonstrates the overall prevalence of scarcity framing in media commentary and lays
the groundwork for future research regarding the role of scarcity framing in opinion formation.

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1 Introduction
The United States is a nation of immense wealth – and yet, if you took as gospel the
political commentary of mass media, you would hardly know it. Instead, you’d have a picture of
America as beset by widespread scarcity, as the frame of scarcity permeates the political discourse
of the United States. Scarcity-laden rhetoric is a central feature of American politics, not just
because it animates the political conversation, but further – because it may (1) play on public
perceptions of threat, (2) accelerate tendencies of us-versus-them conflict, and (3) splinter public
priorities on the left and the right.
At its core, scarcity is a psychological phenomenon. However finite an object may be, that
finitude becomes a matter of perceived scarcity through mental representations and affective states
which convey an appraisal of not enough. Through a combination of direct personal experience
and socially constructed meaning, a person may come to assess that the supply or the accessibility
of some good is scarce relative to a given objective. For reasons previewed below, the implications
of scarcity for American public opinion are significant. Moreover, the psychological manifestation
of scarcity may be powerfully mediated by political discourse. Following this latter premise, I
develop a theory of scarcity framing with the goal of understanding how narratives of scarcity
feature in American political commentary across liberal and conservative media.
As a psychological phenomenon, scarcity is demonstrated in extant studies of American
participants to increase racial discrimination and amplify orientations of competitiveness (as
discussed in Section 2.4; see Krosch et al. 2017; Krosch and Amodio 2019; Roux et al. 2015).
These effects merit further consideration among public opinion researchers and suggest the need
for greater attention to the media context in which perceptions of scarcity are socially constructed.
In this research agenda, I pick up where these studies leave off by applying a political-cultural lens

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to the question of how the framing of scarcity shapes the media landscape within which opinion
formation occurs in American politics. As a first step towards this end, this paper conducts a
content analysis of mainstream political commentary, using coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic
as its case.
The political meaning ascribed to societal developments and public affairs is anything but
given. Instead, political meaning is decisively influenced by the discourses to which members of
the public attend (Just et al. 1996; Zaller 1992). Examining how political meaning is constructed
in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic requires attending to how scarcity is framed in mainstream
political commentary. In the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic took on monumental
proportions. It produced an experience to which no living American could lay prior claim – and
yet, its unfolding as a matter of public understanding proceeded by familiar dynamics of polarized
partisanship. Despite divergent responses along partisan lines, most Americans, whether on the
left or the right, were likely to have experienced the psychological phenomenon of scarcity during
the pandemic. Understanding the framing of scarcity and its impact on political behavior is critical
for comprehending the forces at play throughout the COVID-19 era and its aftermath.
For a consumer culture accustomed to walking the aisles of Walmart Supercenters and
scanning the online search results of next-day Amazon deliveries, the sight of empty shelves and
the inaccessibility of staple items as primary as toilet paper came as a shock. As unemployment
reached heights unseen since the Great Depression, the question of whether one’s current means
were sufficient to meet one’s present and future needs rippled across the country. From the very
beginning, the nation faced a shortage of the personal protective equipment (PPE) necessary to
keep hospital staff and essential workers safe.

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Though Americans of all political stripes have been touched by the psychological
phenomenon of scarcity during COVID-19, the extent to which a given kind or ‘object’ of scarcity
took on political meaning for Americans was likely a function of the media they consumed. This
paper refers to the rhetorical act of emphasizing a particular object of scarcity as scarcity framing.
By zeroing in on a particular scarcity object and portraying it with specific political meaning,
commentators frame the reality of scarcity so as to establish a political perspective and advance a
political agenda. Moreover, and in a more generic sense, by portraying a given issue (e.g. the
COVID-19 pandemic) in terms of scarcity, a political actor promotes an interpretation of the issue
in which its scarcity implications are made salient. This paper theorizes that scarcity framing is a
longstanding feature of American politics which has taken on heightened significance in the wake
of the pandemic’s onset.
As a precursor to examining scarcity framing’s impact on opinion formation, this paper
investigates whether and how scarcity framing features in mainstream political argumentation. To
do so, I conduct a content analysis of opinion pieces published in the New York Times (NYT) and
the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). These two publications are selected on the basis of their ideological
leanings. Relative to one another, the NYT leans liberal and the WSJ leans conservative, providing
a contrast which enables an analysis of ideological differences in scarcity framing (Habel 2012).
The common location of each publication (New York City) ensures that any differences in scarcity
framing cannot be attributed to different local conditions. Furthermore, given their location in the
nation’s major financial hub and their wide readership, the NYT and the WSJ offer a window into
the discourse of the country’s political-economic establishment (ibid).
The analysis presented in this paper is constitutive rather than causal insofar as it examines
what scarcity framing is and how it manifests across liberal and conservative media (Wendt 1998;

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Walsh 2012). Following this approach, my analysis demonstrates that ‘economic scarcity’ (i.e. the
focus of most extant research in psychology) is but one general group within and outside of which
multiple, more nuanced objects of scarcity get framed in news media. Through an initial round of
qualitative analysis, this paper inductively conceptualizes a total of twelve objects of scarcity
framing in COVID-19 commentary. These objects are classified under two main umbrella
categories of scarcity including ‘economic’ scarcity and ‘socio-material’ scarcity. Economic
scarcity encompasses five objects referred to as (1) macroeconomic scarcity, (2) commercial
scarcity, (3) job scarcity, (4) fiscal scarcity, and (5) pocketbook scarcity. Conversely, sociomaterial scarcity encompasses seven objects referred to as (6) resource scarcity, (7) provisional
scarcity, (8) subsistence scarcity, (9) information scarcity, (10) leadership scarcity, (11) temporal
scarcity, and (12) labor scarcity. These objects are defined at greater length in Sections 5.2-5.3 and
summarized in Tables 3 and 4.
A subsequent round of quantitative analysis demonstrates that, while the overall prevalence
of scarcity framing across liberal and conservative media is statistically comparable, the emphasis
placed on the different objects of scarcity framing is at least partially correlated with publication
ideology. The correlational analysis demonstrates a statistically significant difference between the
NYT and the WSJ in the frequency with which objects of economic versus socio-material scarcity
are emphasized. While the NYT more frequently emphasizes objects of socio-material scarcity, the
WSJ more frequently emphasizes objects of economic scarcity. These ideological differences are
especially robust in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic’s onset and ultimately attenuate over
time in a manner that reflects shifting political circumstances.
In the sections that follow, I situate scarcity framing in relation to scholarship in political
communication (Section 2.1) as well as theories of politics and power (Section 2.2). Moreover, I

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build towards a theory of scarcity framing in American politics that considers the role of American
political culture in relation to threat psychology (Section 2.3). In doing so, I aim to integrate
insights from cognitive- and social-psychology into a more politically grounded theory regarding
the cultural resonance of scarcity framing in media and public opinion (Section 2.4). Through this
theory building, I develop and analyze hypotheses regarding the overall prevalence of scarcity
framing in media commentary as well as its ideological patterns.
2 Theory
2.1 Scarcity, Language, and Framing
Media discourse shapes perceptions of political reality by providing the basic narratives
through which members of the public make sense of political issues (Edelman 1985; Searle 1995).
Though widespread scholarship builds upon this basic premise (Lakoff 1991; Somers and Gibson
1994; Rochefort and Cobb 1994; Campbell 2002), less attention has been paid to how American
media portrays political reality such that perceptions of scarcity proliferate. The role of media in
shaping political perception finds distinct prominence in the literature on framing. The act of
framing can be defined as “selecting or highlighting some facets of events or issues, and making
connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and/or solution”
(Entman 2004: 5). Content analyses have examined commonly deployed frames in American
media (Neuman, Just, and Crigler 1992; Boydstun et al. 2014), the framing of crisis by media and
public officials (Edelman 1998; Hart and Tindall 2009; Glazier and Boydstun 2012), as well as the
strategic framing of scarcity in development policy debates (Scoones et al. 2018). This study is
situated at the intersection of these prior content analyses, insofar as it examines how scarcity is
framed in news media commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic.

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To understand why certain frames dominate political discourse, one can consider dynamics
of culture and cognition. Scholars emphasize that the power of a frame is derived from its cultural
congruence or its cultural resonance – that is, from how compatible or salient the frame is in
relation to the cognitive schemas that are habitually used among members of society (Entman
2004; Gamson 1988). The more congruent the frame is with habitual schemas, the more widely
the frame is accepted, transmitted, and, in turn, integrated into public narratives (Entman 2004).
For reasons elaborated in Section 2.3, I theorize that scarcity is a culturally resonant frame in
American politics and thus likely to feature prominently in both liberal and conservative media.
2.2 Scarcity, Politics, and Power
The definition of politics as a competition over who gets what, when, and how maintains a
foothold in political science (Lasswell 1936). While this definition offers analytic value, it eclipses
the ‘second face’ of power from which scarcity framing derives its rhetorical force. This second
face speaks to the power exercised in acts that limit the scope of the political debate to issues and
positions that are compatible with the preferences of the actor (Schattschneider 1960; Bachrach
and Baratz 1962).
Scarcity framing embodies this second face of power by spotlighting a particular object of
scarcity and implicitly casting into the shadows those which do not serve an actor’s political
prerogatives. The scarcity objects emphasized by a political actor set the terms of the debate,
thereby limiting the scope of the policy agenda. For instance, if a political actor opposes minimum
wage increases on the grounds that a higher cost of labor deters employers from hiring workers,
and media commentary emphasizes job scarcity while remaining silent on income scarcity, then
the terms of the debate favor opponents of minimum wage hikes.

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With this in mind, we can say that power is not simply held by those who decide who gets
what scarce resource. More inconspicuously, power is held by those who define which object of
scarcity matters in the first place. If advocates of a particular policy position can saturate the media
landscape with ‘mentions’ of specific scarcity objects such that those objects become more
cognitively accessible for members of the public, then preferences for a congenial policy agenda
may proliferate (Block 1996). Following this premise, we can expect liberal and conservative
media to emphasize different objects of scarcity, such that scarcity is framed in a manner that is
compatible with their respective agendas.
The insights of cognitive psychology regarding scarcity’s effects on dynamics of attention
support my theory regarding the role of scarcity framing in setting the terms of the debate. As put
by Mullainathan and Shafir (2013), “scarcity captures the mind” (7). When perceiving or
experiencing scarcity, a person becomes preoccupied by it. The mind returns constantly to the
particular object at hand, which in turn changes how we perceive, how we deliberate, and how we
act. When facing a particular object of perceived scarcity, a person attends single-mindedly to
managing that scarcity to the neglect of other values and to the detriment of balanced decisionmaking (ibid).
These effects may translate to scarcity framing and, in turn, shape not just the direction but
also the quality of public attention. Because perceptions of scarcity tend to engross one’s attention
and engender tunnel-vision effects on cognition, ideological differences in scarcity framing may
splinter policy priorities and reinforce the polarized conviction with which they are supported on
the left and the right. This theoretical possibility motivates the present content analysis.12
12 The current paper provides an essential first step to any causal analysis by investigating the presence of scarcity
framing in two media sources (i.e. the NYT and the WSJ). Future experimental research will examine the effects of
scarcity framing found most commonly in these sources.

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2.3 Scarcity Framing, Threat Psychology, and American Political Culture
In addition to capitalizing on cognitive dynamics of attention, the propagation of scarcity
constructs via media framing may play on perceptions of threat among the public. In this section,
I discuss the salience of scarcity threats in a general psychological sense as well as in relation to
features of American political culture. To elaborate this latter point, I emphasize cultural
perspectives and narratives that reflect American individualism. My main argument here is that
American individualism sets the stage for scarcity to engender perceptions of zero-sum social
conflict that, in turn, make scarcity that much more threatening. This threat salience may contribute
to the cultural resonance of scarcity framing in American politics.
Scarcity constitutes a kind of threat emanating from conditions of the social environment,
rendering it related to yet distinct from the normative threats studied elsewhere (e.g. Feldman and
Stenner 1997). In the face of perceived scarcity, members of the public may experience a felt sense
of existential fear regarding their ability to meet their basic needs. This response to scarcity may
occur across a wide range of contexts including and beyond the United States. That said, while
scarcity as an existential threat may resonate across diverse societies, the American ethos of
individualism renders scarcity an especially salient source of threat by virtue of its cultural
implications.
The distinction between individualism and collectivism represents a core axis along which
cultures are distinguished in psychological research (Triandis 1995).13 As emphasized by scholars
of cultural psychology, American culture – that is, its assemblage of socially shared meanings and
associated behavioral practices – is uniquely individualistic (Kitayama and Uskul 2011). In
13 This distinction is also commonly referred to as independence versus interdependence (Kitayama and Uskul
2011).

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contrast to the more collectivist cultures of Eastern societies that are oriented around social
harmony and coordination as well as relational attachment and social obligation, Western societies
embrace cultural ideas and conventions guided by self-promotion, self-expression, and selfsustenance (ibid). On this point of differentiation, the United States stands out even among
Western societies, with North Americans proving decidedly more individualistic than Europeans
(Kitayama et al. 2009). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, implicit psychological tendencies of
individualism are widespread across the contemporary United States (Kitayama et al. 2010).
To appreciate the cultural salience of scarcity as a form of threat and, in turn, the cultural
resonance of scarcity framing in American political discourse, the implications of American
individualism in relation to scarcity are critical. Extant scholarship analyzes the written accounts
of influential thinkers within the philosophical tradition of classical liberalism and considers the
construction of scarcity therein (Xenos 1987; Tellmann 2017). Embedded across accounts within
this tradition, which itself shaped the cultural tendencies of early colonial America, is a political
perspective on distributive ethics wherein individualistic competition is considered the just
mechanism by which resources and wealth ought to be distributed.14

We can see this perspective at play in the American value of meritocracy. Moreover, this
perspective carries into the cultural narrative surrounding the American frontier and the ongoing
faith in the American dream, in which the individual is at the center of a story that culminates in
upward mobility (Bellah et al. 1985). While these narratives have historically been promoted
against a backdrop portrayal of America as a place of abundance (Kitayama et al. 2010), these
narratives and their underlying emphasis on individualistic competition take on threat-inducing
14 I explore this point at greater length in my dissertation project via an analysis of how scarcity is constructed in
canonical political texts by John Locke and Thomas Malthus. Note that this distributive ethic of individualism has
historically been race-gendered (see Turner 2008).

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moral contours when conditions of scarcity arise. The stakes attached to an ‘every man for himself’
mentality become more dire under circumstances of scarcity. Such circumstances turn
individualistic competition into a zero-sum social conflict, thereby amplifying the threat salience
of scarcity as a function of its cultural implications.
In turn, framing political issues in terms of scarcity may play on a threat connotation that
is culturally salient for Americans whose daily lives are structured by cultural practices in which
scarcity and conflict are linked. Examples of such practices include those involved in the
competitive contexts of employment and education, where opportunities are often scarce relative
to demand. In turn, media commentators driven by an incentive to attract public attention and
persuade an audience are likely to utilize scarcity framing as a culturally resonant approach for
political influence, whether consciously or otherwise.
2.4 Scarcity Framing and Socio-Cognitive Implications
Considering the connection between scarcity and conflict that’s amplified in American
culture, we can both (1) recognize the threatening connotations of scarcity in America and its
resultant resonance as a frame, and (2) integrate findings from social and cognitive psychology as
further evidence regarding the cultural salience of scarcity in American politics. In this section, I
review the effects of scarcity demonstrated in extant studies. These effects are theoretically
meaningful insofar as they exemplify how scarcity-based conflicts unfold in America. In turn,
these effects point to the potential implications of scarcity framing for American politics.
In line with the cultural implications of scarcity discussed in Section 2.3, extant studies
demonstrate that Americans exhibit a cognitive association between scarcity and competition
(Roux et al. 2015). Building on this finding, researchers demonstrate that, when experimentally
primed to perceive scarcity, participants are more likely to pursue self-enhancing behaviors (ibid).

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Moreover, this effect is mediated by an increased orientation of competitiveness (ibid). As
emphasized by the studies’ authors, the scarcity-competition link and its associated behavioral
script of self-enhancement is likely learned through repeated engagement in or exposure to
congruent cultural practices (ibid). Extrapolating from these insights, we can postulate that
perceptions of scarcity may precipitate a greater sense of conflict among the public and, in turn,
refashion an individual’s political loyalties as that much more zero-sum. The real-world
ramifications of zero-sum thinking that may intensify amid widespread scarcity framing are
especially problematic in light of ongoing political polarization and the breakdown of democratic
processes of compromise.
To this point, an individual’s political loyalties may be rooted in both racial and partisan
identities that have become increasingly entangled (Mason 2018). In turn, scarcity may compound
tendencies among the public to interpret politics and formulate attitudes through an us-versus-them
lens, in part as a matter of individualistic self-enhancement. In the context of racial hierarchy,
one’s strategy of self-enhancement, as consciously or unconsciously motivated by scarcity
perceptions, is likely to take distinct form based on one’s position in the racial hierarchy of
American society and one’s psychological profile (Masuoka and Junn 2013; Krosch et al. 2017).
Though conjectural in the context of the present study, this theoretical premise is compatible with
extant scholarship demonstrating that scarcity increases racial discrimination among participant
samples consisting of majority white Americans (Krosch et al. 2017; Krosch and Amodio 2019).
While the link between individualism and racial identity in relation to scarcity requires further
examination, the social psychology literature to date suggests that perceptions of scarcity may
exacerbate conflicts in American politics at the intersection of race and partisanship.

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Taken as a whole, these effects of scarcity are consistent with my theoretical argument
regarding the cultural resonance of scarcity framing. The salience of scarcity in relation to the
ethos of individualism is reflected in research demonstrating cognitive-behavioral linkages
between scarcity, competition, and self-enhancement. Moreover, the racial discrimination effects
of scarcity reflect a racialized manifestation of the scarcity-conflict connection that’s habitually
reinforced in American cultural practices. Insofar as scarcity represents a form of threat, and
insofar as its threat-salience intensifies as a function of its association with conflict in American
political culture, we can expect scarcity framing to feature widely in American media due to its
cultural resonance.
2.5 Theoretical Overview
The link between scarcity and conflict may strike the reader as common-sensical. However,
alternative understandings of scarcity are prominent in cultures outside the dominant American
tradition. For instance, evident across Indigenous traditions is a worldview wherein scarcity is
understood to require cooperative responses via social relations of reciprocity and egalitarianism
(Kimmerer 2013).15 While a cooperative response to scarcity may not be completely absent in
American cultural practices, converging evidence reviewed above suggests that the default
connotation of scarcity in mainstream, white-dominant American society is that of conflict. For
this reason, the importance of scarcity framing in American political discourse is twofold: (1)
media commentary may regularly prime the American public to perceive scarcity via widespread
scarcity framing, and (2) the objects of scarcity that take on political meaning may differ based on
the ideological leaning of a media source. I elaborate each of these points in turn.
15 This point is likewise explored at greater length in my dissertation project via a discussion of insights from
interlocutors of select Indigenous cultures.

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First, scarcity framing is likely to be prevalent across American media due to its
threatening, conflict-riddled cultural implications and its concomitant cultural resonance. The
cultural meaning that surrounds scarcity in America renders the general prevalence of scarcity
framing a potentially inflammatory media phenomenon. The effects of scarcity on competitiveness
and racial discrimination support this premise.
Second, by virtue of scarcity’s cultural resonance as well as its cognitive effects on
attention, scarcity framing represents a potent domain in which liberal and conservative media
may set the terms of the political debate in accordance with their respective agendas. In turn, the
prevalence of object-specific differences in scarcity framing across ideological media may further
exacerbate political divides by widening the gulf between policy priorities on the left and the right.
Taken as a whole, my theory of scarcity framing builds on past framing literature as well
as scholarship on threat psychology in American politics. By focusing on scarcity as a kind of
threat with culturally specific meaning, and by emphasizing the role of media framing in shaping
scarcity perceptions, this research contributes new insights at the intersection of political
communication and political psychology.
3 Hypotheses
My theory thus far generates predictions at two levels of analysis. First, if scarcity is a
culturally salient form of threat in mainstream American society, we can expect to see a high
prevalence of scarcity framing across both liberal and conservative media commentary. When
considering the theory at this level, we can hypothesize about scarcity framing in broad strokes,
without addressing the specific objects targeted. In this vein, and in line with my theory regarding
the salience of scarcity among Americans aligned with the dominant culture, we might expect that

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generic scarcity framing will occur at comparable rates across publication ideology. This
expectation is formalized below.
H1: Liberal and conservative media are likely to be statistically indistinguishable in the
overall frequency with which scarcity framing occurs.
In addition to hypotheses regarding scarcity framing at this more generic level, we can also
stipulate hypotheses regarding scarcity framing at the level of object-specific patterns. Because
liberal and conservative media often promote different policy agendas, and if scarcity framing is
indeed a device for rhetorically setting the scope of the political debate, we can expect that the
frequency of scarcity framing in relation to specific scarcity objects will differ across publication
ideology in a statistically significant manner. This expectation is formalized below in broad terms.
H2a: Liberal media is likely to emphasize certain objects of scarcity more frequently than
conservative media.
H2b: Conservative media is likely to emphasize certain objects of scarcity more frequently
than liberal media.
4 Methods
To examine scarcity framing in mainstream political commentary across liberal and
conservative media, I analyze opinion pieces published in the New York Times and the Wall Street
Journal (Habel 2012).16 I examine opinion pieces because I am interested in how scarcity is
constructed in political argumentation. Opinion pieces provide an opportunity for a political actor
to articulate their view on a given topic at length. Though an opinion piece may include multiple
16 My sample includes op-eds as well as columns while excluding editorials and letters-to-the-editor.

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sub-arguments, an opinion piece generally conveys a single perspective within which a particular
object or constellation of objects of scarcity framing is liable to emerge. While opinion pieces do
not always prescribe a concrete policy action, they typically articulate a coherent interpretation of
political reality, at minimum. Examining how scarcity is constructed and framed in opinion pieces
across prominent liberal- and conservative-leaning publications improves our sense of the political
contours along which scarcity is framed. Although there are many angles through which the
construction and framing of scarcity could be examined, this paper begins at the basic level of
scarcity framing objects so as to lay a foundation upon which more nuanced analyses can build.
As has been emphasized throughout, I approach the study of scarcity framing by examining
commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic. In this sense, the COVID-19 pandemic serves as a case
in which the theory of scarcity framing is applied. Analyzing the patterns of scarcity framing in
the context of a single case ensures that the patterns diverge primarily on the basis of publication
rather than on the focus of the articles at hand.
To collect the opinion pieces, I searched for articles published across two time periods in
2020 and 2021, using the Proquest Central Database.17 The 2020 sample encompasses articles
published between January 1, 2020 and May 31, 2020. The 2021 sample encompasses articles
published between January 1, 2021 and May 31, 2021. Both samples are analyzed insofar as they
reflect different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and represent the evolving political context
under different presidential administrations (with President Trump in 2020 and President Biden in
2021). While I present my analysis of the content here by focusing on the full sample including
both the 2020 and 2021 datasets, I build towards an analysis that compares patterns across time,
thereby adding nuance to the dynamics of scarcity framing in the COVID-19 pandemic.
17 My search criteria and dates of collection are outlined in Tables F1 and F2 of the Appendix.

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To conduct my analysis, I focus on a subset of the total articles collected.18 I analyze 75
articles per publication for both the 2020 sample and the 2021 sample, producing an overall dataset
of 300 articles. I collected articles across each publication using a procedure of random sampling
with replacement.19 As I closely read the articles, I recorded my observations in written memos
and I collected extensive examples of scarcity framing in quoted passages.
The content analysis combines qualitative and quantitative techniques. Through an initial
phase of qualitative analysis, this paper identifies twelve objects of scarcity framing, which are
elaborated in the results section and categorized in broad terms as examples of either ‘economic
scarcity’ or ‘socio-material scarcity.’ I then apply these objects of scarcity framing to a quantitative
analysis in which I conduct Pearson’s Chi-Squared tests for each scarcity object as well as KruskalWallis tests for the broader categories of economic and socio-material scarcity to compare the
frequency of mentions across the NYT and the WSJ. This analysis illuminates the extent to which
differences across publication are statistically significant and thus provides a preliminary
exploration of the ideological-correlates of scarcity framing in news media.
The qualitative phase of the content analysis draws its methodology primarily from a
grounded theory approach insofar as the objects of scarcity framing are inductively conceptualized
(Strauss and Corbin 1994; Herring 2018). However, it should be noted that I came to the data with
some recognition of the potential objects of scarcity that were likely to emerge, given the objects
examined in prior literature. For instance, I began my analysis with some awareness that previous
works had studied scarcity as it pertains to the economy and resources. Acknowledging this
18 Total articles collected include 515 opinion pieces from the New York Times and 506 opinion pieces from the
Wall Street Journal, amounting to a combined 1,021 articles.
19 A total of 11 randomly sampled articles were replaced with the next article in chronological order for reasons
related to: (1) duplicate articles, (2) articles that did not mention COVID-19 or coronavirus in-text (despite carrying
the subject tag on the Proquest Central Database), or (3) deviated from the standard opinion piece format (e.g.
letters-to-the-editor, podcast promotions, video pieces, etc).

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awareness, my approach to conceptualizing the objects of scarcity framing proceeded, by and
large, from the ground-up.
Upon identifying the scarcity objects, I hand-coded each article for whether it mentioned
each scarcity object. To do so, I created a dummy variable for each scarcity object, which is coded
as 1 if the object is mentioned in an article at least once and 0 if it is not. Each article could be
coded as mentioning more than one scarcity object; however, the variable for a given scarcity
object (e.g. resource scarcity) is measured as a 1 even if the article includes multiple references to
that object. While object-specific mentions are treated as a binary measure in my analyses, I
measure the umbrella categories of economic scarcity and socio-material scarcity as count
variables, representing the sum of all object-specific mentions belonging to the category. As I
hand-coded the articles for scarcity object mentions, I recorded passages which seemed
particularly emblematic of the object’s central tendency and conceptual scope. I also recorded
passages which border on the object’s central tendency and conceptual scope, but fall short in
terms of signal strength to constitute a clear scarcity mention. Tables G1-G12 in the Appendix
provide examples of coding decisions for each scarcity object.
5 Results
5.1 The Overall Prevalence of Scarcity Framing
Before presenting analysis that differentiates scarcity framing across its economic and
socio-material categories, I’ll first discuss the overall prevalence of scarcity framing with reference
to descriptive statistics. I’ll then compare the prevalence of scarcity framing across the NYT and
the WSJ as hypothesized in H1.

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As displayed in Table 1, scarcity framing is used in three quarters of the articles in my
sample, with only about one quarter of articles omitting any mention of scarcity. Likewise
illustrated in Table 1, over half of all articles included mentions of multiple scarcity objects,
reflecting a recurring dynamic in which multiple objects of scarcity are framed as interconnected.
This multi-object, interconnected framing of scarcity is noteworthy insofar as these constructions
present an interlocking causal narrative of scarcity objects that deepens their political meaning.
Table 1: Frequency of Articles Mentioning Zero, One, or Multiple Scarcity Objects
Sample Zero mentions One object mention Multiple object mentions
Total (n=300) 25.00% | 75 articles 21.33% | 64 articles 53.66% | 161 articles
NYT (n=150) 24.00% | 36 articles 20.66% | 31 articles 55.33% | 83 articles
WSJ (n=150) 26.00% | 39 articles 22.00% | 33 articles 52.00% | 78 articles
To assess whether the NYT and the WSJ differ in the overall prevalence of scarcity framing,
I conduct Kruskal-Wallis tests to analyze the frequency of scarcity framing across publication
within each time period (i.e. 2020, 2021, and the full sample including both periods). I measure
the frequency of scarcity framing per article by summing across all twelve scarcity-object
variables. As displayed in Table 2, and consistent with H1, my results demonstrate that the NYT
and the WSJ are not statistically distinguishable in terms of the overall prevalence of scarcity
framing.20 The comparable frequency of scarcity mentions across the NYT and the WSJ suggest
that scarcity framing is prevalent across a range of ideological media, thus supporting my theory
regarding its broad cultural resonance in American politics.
20 I also analyze the overall prevalence of scarcity framing by measuring the frequency of scarcity framing as a
binary variable, constructed such that an article is coded as 1 if it mentions any scarcity object at least once and 0 if
it does not. Presented in Table H1 of the Appendix, my results are consistent when utilizing this binary measurement
strategy.

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Table 2: Frequencies and Chi-Squared Tests for Total Number of Scarcity Mentions
Time Frame NYT frequency WSJ frequency Chi-squared and P-value
Full sample 331 277 Χ² (1, N=300) = 2.39, p = .122
2020 sample 186 150 Χ² (1, N=150) = 1.87, p = .171
2021 sample 145 127 Χ² (1, N=150) = 0.70, p = .402
5.2 Defining the Objects of Economic Scarcity Framing
Having established the widespread presence of scarcity framing in my sample and
demonstrated its prevalence across liberal and conservative media, I’ll now elaborate the meaning
of each scarcity object in my coding scheme as a foundation for discussing my category- and
object-specific analyses. Table 3 presents a summary definition for each scarcity object under the
economic scarcity category.
Table 3: Objects of Economic Scarcity Framing
Object Definition
Macroeconomic contraction, suffering, or destruction of the economy at the macro-level
Commercial insufficient commercial opportunity among profit-seeking actors and
industries
Job rising unemployment, job losses, and job market collapse
Fiscal loss of tax-based revenue; unsustainable budget deficits and government
debt
Pocketbook lack of disposable income and circumstances of poverty at individual- and
group-level

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Objects belonging to the umbrella category of economic scarcity all relate the multiple
arenas and activities through which the economy takes form and obtains meaning in political
discourse. Macroeconomic scarcity encompasses references to the contraction, suffering, or
destruction of the economy at the macro-level. This scarcity object encompasses concerns about
declining levels of GDP, the onset of economic recession or depression as well as inflation, and
the ‘collapse’ or ‘shrinking’ of the economy writ large. Economic scarcity mentions are coded as
‘macroeconomic scarcity’ when they concern the economy as an entity unto itself.
Commercial scarcity encompasses references to insufficient commercial opportunity
among profit-seeking actors and industries. This scarcity object encompasses concerns regarding
business closures, stock market crashes, reduced consumer demand, and commercial revenue
losses. Commercial scarcity refers to the kinds of scarcity that implicate the concerns of
proprietors, who are conceptualized by Commons (1934) as buyers, sellers, lenders, borrowers,
landlords, and tenants, all of whom have the prospect of making money, owning property, or
renting/purchasing goods. While macroeconomic scarcity encompasses macro-level constructions
pertaining to the economy as a whole, commercial scarcity encompasses meso- and micro-level
constructions pertaining to specific actors and industries. A recurring image of commercial scarcity
in my sample includes that of ‘commercial ghost towns’ amid COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies.
Perhaps most straightforwardly, job scarcity encompasses references to rising
unemployment, job losses, and job market collapse. Moreover, this scarcity object includes
concerns regarding the loss of employment opportunities and job security. Job scarcity is
commonly portrayed in both thematic and episodic terms (Iyengar 1990) via references to national
unemployment statistics as well as references to individuals who have lost their jobs and/or cannot
find a job.

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Fiscal scarcity encompasses references to unsustainable budget deficits and government
debt as well as government losses of tax-based revenue. As such, fiscal scarcity encompasses
concerns regarding the inability of the government (local, state, or national) to fund its activities
and, in some cases, invokes an asserted need to cut government spending. This scarcity object is
often referred to in terms of ‘fiscal crisis’ and occasionally through imagery wherein states and
cities face ‘a red-ink cascade.’
The final economic scarcity object includes pocketbook scarcity. Borrowing terminology
used in extant public opinion scholarship (Kinder and Kiewiet 1981), pocketbook scarcity refers
to a lack of disposable income and circumstances of poverty at the individual-, group-level, or
societal-level. As such, pocketbook scarcity encompasses concerns related to people not having
enough money or personal finances. At the individual-level and group-level, this scarcity object
commonly appears via references to lost livelihoods, being poor, living paycheck to paycheck,
personal bankruptcies, and battered 401(k)s. At the societal-level, this object commonly appears
via references to poverty statistics. Though such statistics are often treated by researchers as
macroeconomic indicators, in the context of my study, I code poverty statistics as pocketbook
scarcity on the premise that such references evoke political concerns regarding the economic wellbeing of actual people in a manner that is distinct from concerns regarding the economy as an
abstract entity.
5.3 Defining the Objects of Socio-material Scarcity
While hypothetically connected to economic scarcity, and in some instances constructed
in media commentary as such, socio-material scarcity encompasses the kinds of scarcity that are
less straightforwardly economic in kind. True to its name, socio-material scarcity includes

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instances of scarcity that are more social or material in substance. Table 4 presents a summary
definition for each scarcity object under the socio-material scarcity category.
Table 4: Objects of Socio-material Scarcity Framing
Object Definition
Resource physical shortages of essential goods and equipment
Provisional inadequacy of services pertaining to public goods (e.g. health, safety,
education)
Subsistence lack of survival necessities such as food, water, and shelter
Information deficiencies of data and scientific study
Leadership absence of government guidance and administrative capacities
Temporal circumstances under which there is not enough time for a given objective
Labor deficient supply of workers/personnel from an organizational or employer
perspective
Perhaps most recognizable among the socio-material scarcity objects is that of resource
scarcity. This object includes references to physical shortages of essential goods and equipment.
In the context of my sample focused on COVID-19 commentary, resource scarcity is often
concerned with the supply of covid-19 tests, lab paraphernalia, vaccines, ventilators, and hospital
capacity, as well as the inaccessibility of consumer staples. Resource scarcity is commonly
referenced in explicit terms with references to outright ‘shortages of tests’ as well as images of
overcrowded hospitals.
Provisional scarcity encompasses references to the inadequacy of services pertaining to
public health, public safety, and public education. The term provisional is applied here insofar as
it pertains to whether a public good is being sufficiently provided, whether it be a government or
private provider at hand. In my sample, provisional scarcity encompasses references to ‘America’s

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tattered social safety net’ and the ‘lack of sufficient systems of health care’ as well as school
closures and cuts to police departments.
Subsistence scarcity encompasses references to the lack of basic survival necessities such
as food, water, and shelter. This scarcity object is concerned with whether people have enough
access to the basic goods on which their subsistence depends. In my sample, common instances of
subsistence scarcity include references to hunger and homelessness. Moreover, in some instances,
subsistence scarcity and pocketbook scarcity overlap. Examples in this regard include references
to ‘starvation wages’ and people ‘struggling to pay rent.’ In such instances, the implications of
pocketbook scarcity for subsistence are embedded in the phrasing, resulting in the article being
coded as 1 for both pocketbook scarcity and subsistence scarcity.
Information scarcity encompasses references to deficiencies of data and scientific study.
Across my sample, information scarcity relates to the inadequate supply or quality of data. While
information scarcity implicates general conditions of uncertainty, my coding procedure was
narrow such that information scarcity was only coded as 1 when a reference to the inadequate
supply or quality of existing data and scientific study was invoked. General references to
uncertainty are thus excluded from this object. Moreover, references to misinformation are
likewise excluded from this object.
Leadership scarcity encompasses the absence of government guidance and administrative
capacities. This object is concerned with the unwillingness and/or the inability of incumbent
officials and agencies to take responsive action. Instances of leadership scarcity include references
to a ‘stunning lack of leadership,’ to the ‘hollowing out’ of government agencies, and to a ‘messy,
uncoordinated under-response.’ As with the previous objects, leadership scarcity involved careful
discernment in coding decisions. Criticisms of leadership abounded in my sample; however, the

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nature of such criticisms had to involve an absence of leadership to count as leadership scarcity. I
excluded instances in which a leader took action, even if that action is portrayed as an example of
flawed leadership.
Temporal scarcity includes references to circumstances under which there is not enough
time for a given objective. Examples of temporal scarcity include references to time having
‘expired,’ ‘time constraints,’ and ‘urgency.’ Temporal scarcity is often emphasized alongside other
objects, such as that of provisional scarcity (e.g. medical professionals ‘cannot spare the extra
minutes’ needed to provide quality care), commercial scarcity (e.g. ‘the money may not arrive in
time’ to small businesses), and macroeconomic scarcity (e.g. ‘the American economy in a race
against time’).
Last, labor scarcity encompasses references to the deficient supply of workers or personnel
from an organizational or employer perspective. Through my sample and across each time period,
labor scarcity was commonly referenced in relation to other objects of scarcity in my coding
scheme. For instance, in the 2020 sample, mentions of labor scarcity included references to
‘staffing shortages’ at hospitals. These references were coded as both labor scarcity and
provisional scarcity, insofar as they relate to the supply of labor needed for the provision of public
health. Similarly, in the 2021 sample, mentions of labor scarcity included references to the
predicament of employers who can’t ‘compete’ with stimulus checks that ‘reduced work
incentives’ among potential employees. Such instances were coded as labor scarcity as well as
commercial scarcity, insofar as they relate to the supply of labor for commercial purposes.
5.4 Ideological Patterns of Scarcity Framing
Overall, my analysis demonstrates patterns of both ideological difference as well as
ideological similarity in the frequency with which specific objects of scarcity are targeted in media

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commentary. Before digging more deeply into each time period, my discussion here will first begin
with a broad overview, focusing on my full sample including articles from both the 2020 and the
2021 time periods. The percentage of total articles in the NYT and the WSJ that mention each object
of economic scarcity and socio-material scarcity is visualized in Figures 12 and 13, respectively.
The frequency counts and corresponding statistical tests comparing the NYT and the WSJ are
presented in Table 5.
Figure 12: Percentage of Total Articles that Mention Objects of Economic Scarcity

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Figure 13: Percentage of Total Articles that Mention Objects of Socio-material Scarcity

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Table 5: Frequencies and Chi-Squared Tests Across Scarcity Objects | Full Sample
*p < 0.10, **p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01
Scarcity Object NYT frequency WSJ frequency Chi-squared and P-value
socio-material*** 184 107 Χ² (1, N=300) = 15.78, p < .001
resource 47 39 Χ² (1, N=300) = 0.80, p = .372
provisional*** 60 34 Χ² (1, N=300) = 9.68, p = .002
subsistence*** 37 11 Χ² (1, N=300) = 15.50, p < .001
information 12 5 Χ² (1, N=300) = 2.24, p = .134
leadership*** 14 2 Χ² (1, N=300) = 7.99, p = .005
temporal 7 5 Χ² (1, N=300) = 0.09, p = .768
labor 7 11 Χ² (1, N=300) = 0.53, p = .466
economic 147 170 Χ² (1, N=150) = 1.70, p = .193
macroeconomic 38 46 Χ² (1, N=300) = 0.81, p = .368
commercial** 29 47 Χ² (1, N=300) = 5.09, p = .024
job 32 28 Χ² (1, N=300) = 0.19, p = .665
fiscal** 10 22 Χ² (1, N=300) = 4.23, p = .040
pocketbook 38 27 Χ² (1, N=300) = 1.96, p = .161
Across the 150 articles analyzed in each publication between 2020 and 2021, the NYT
included a total of 184 socio-material scarcity mentions (with at least one mention in 67.33% of
NYT articles) while the WSJ included a total 107 socio-material scarcity mentions (with at least
one mention in 50.67% of WSJ articles). Moreover, the WSJ included a total of 170 economic
scarcity mentions (with at least one mention in 56.67% of WSJ articles) while the NYT included a
total of 147 economic scarcity mentions (with at least one mention in 49.33% of NYT articles).
When analyzing the full sample at the level of scarcity categories, my findings demonstrate that,
while the ideological difference in overall economic scarcity framing falls short of statistical

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significance, the ideological difference in overall socio-material scarcity framing is statistically
significant.
When comparing the NYT and the WSJ across each specific scarcity object, more nuanced
patterns emerge. The NYT more frequently emphasizes provisional, subsistence, and leadership
scarcity, while the WSJ more frequently emphasizes commercial and fiscal scarcity. As specified
in Table 5, these object-specific differences across publication ideology are statistically significant,
supporting my theory regarding scarcity framing as an agenda-setting tool. To further appreciate
this point, it’s instructive to subset the sample by time period and analyze the ideological patterns
of scarcity framing with closer consideration of the surrounding political context. The analyses for
the 2020 and 2021 time periods are presented in Table 6 and Table 7. 21
21 Note that information, leadership, and temporal scarcity objects were infrequently mentioned in the 2021 sample
and thus do not amount to a large enough sample size to conduct Chi-Squared tests. These objects are thus excluded
from my analysis of the 2021 sample.

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Table 6: Frequencies and Chi-Squared Tests Across Scarcity Objects | 2020 Sample
*p < 0.10, **p < 0.05, ***p < 0.01
Scarcity Object NYT frequency WSJ frequency Chi-squared and P-value
socio-material*** 118 54 Χ² (1, N=150) = 19.85, p < .001
resource* 33 21 Χ² (1, N=150) = 3.50, p = .061
provisional*** 36 18 Χ² (1, N=150) = 8.36, p = .003
subsistence*** 18 5 Χ² (1, N=150) = 7.39, p = .007
information 9 3 Χ² (1, N=150) =2.26, p = .132
leadership*** 11 0 Χ² (1, N=150) = 9.81, p = .002
temporal 6 4 Χ² (1, N=150) = 0.11, p = .743
labor 5 3 Χ² (1, N=150) = 0.13, p = .716
economic** 68 96 Χ² (1, N=150) = 4.83, p = .027
macroeconomic*** 12 27 Χ² (1, N=150) = 6.79, p = .009
commercial 22 28 Χ² (1, N=150) =0.75, p = .387
job 16 18 Χ² (1, N=150) = 0.04, p = .845
fiscal 4 9 Χ² (1, N=150) = 1.35, p = .246
pocketbook 14 14 Χ² (1, N=150) = 0, p = 1.00

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Table 7: Frequencies and Chi-Squared Tests Across Scarcity Objects | 2021 Sample
*p < 0.10, **p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01
Scarcity Object NYT frequency WSJ frequency Chi-squared and P-value
socio-material 66 53 Χ² (1, N=150) = 1.17, p = .279
resource 14 18 Χ² (1, N=150) = 0.36, p = .550
provisional 24 16 Χ² (1, N=150) = 1.67, p = .196
subsistence*** 19 6 Χ² (1, N=150) = 6.91, p = .009
information 3 2 -
leadership 3 2 -
temporal 1 1 -
labor 2 8 Χ² (1, N=150) = 2.68, p = .101
economic 79 74 Χ² (1, N=150) = 0.11, p = .741
macroeconomic 26 19 Χ² (1, N=150) = 1.14, p = .298
commercial** 7 19 Χ² (1, N=150) = 5.63, p = .018
job 16 10 Χ² (1, N=150) = 1.16, p = .281
fiscal 6 13 Χ² (1, N=150) = 2.17, p = .141
pocketbook* 24 13 Χ² (1, N=150) = 3.59, p = .058
My analyses of scarcity framing in the initial 2020 sample reflect relatively robust
ideological differences. Amid the immediate onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, liberal and
conservative media framed the pandemic in terms of divergent constellations of scarcity objects.
Compared to one another, the NYT more frequently emphasized provisional, subsistence, and
leadership scarcity, while the WSJ more frequently emphasized macroeconomic scarcity.
Moreover, when aggregated to the level of categories, the NYT more frequently emphasized socio-

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material scarcity, while the WSJ more frequently emphasized economic scarcity. These
differences in scarcity framing at the object- and category-level are statistically significant.
What’s noteworthy in the 2020 sample is the relatively clean differentiation with which the
NYT and the WSJ more frequently emphasized objects of socio-material and economic scarcity,
respectively. This basis of differentiation becomes less pronounced in the 2021 sample. While
some ideological patterns at the object-level persist in 2021 (i.e. differences on subsistence and
commercial scarcity), the aggregated patterns of socio-material and economic scarcity framing
across the NYT and the WSJ disappear in 2021. Moreover, the NYT outnumbers the WSJ in its
frequency of pocketbook scarcity mentions in 2021 (albeit only at the p<0.10 level), exemplifying
an instance in which liberal media more frequently emphasizes an economic scarcity object.
Considered as a whole, the analyses by time period illustrate how the ideological patterns of
scarcity framing evolved over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and with the change in
presidential administrations.
6 Discussion
Some observations regarding the political circumstances of each time period may shed light
on the over-time trajectory of scarcity framing patterns in COVID-19 commentary. The 2020 time
period occurred at the beginning of the outbreak when uncertainty was high. Donald Trump was
president and liberal-leaning constituencies were relatively unified in opposition to the Trump
administration. In addition, the 2020 time period included more widespread and intensive shelterin-place policies, with support among Democratic officials and resistance among Republican
officials. Broadly speaking, the talking points in favor of shelter-in-place policies more
consistently mentioned socio-material scarcity concerns, whereas the talking points in opposition
to shelter-in-place policies more consistently relied on economic scarcity concerns.

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Moreover, the nascent stage of the COVID-19 pandemic lent itself to divergent framings
of socio-material and economic scarcity. With Americans isolated at home, the news media and
its commentators filled a knowledge vacuum that was ripe for starkly discrepant portrayals of
political reality. With Trump’s legacy riding on the nation’s economic performance, and with the
stakes intensifying in the run-up to the November 2020 presidential election, conservative media
frequently emphasized macroeconomic scarcity and commonly put the blame on Democraticaffiliated shelter-in-place policies. Conversely, liberal media aided the Trump opposition by
emphasizing provisional, subsistence, and leadership scarcity over and above the other objects,
often blaming Trump and Republicans for exacerbating these sources of scarcity and related
suffering.
While the political utility of socio-material versus economic scarcity framing for liberal
and conservative media was relatively clear-cut in the 2020 sample, framing incentives shifted
along with the changing political circumstances of 2021. Throughout the 2021 sample, the
COVID-19 vaccine was increasingly accessible among Americans, which reduced the severity of
hospital strain and that of corresponding shortcomings in healthcare, relatively speaking.
Moreover, President Biden assumed office, resulting in a change of presidential leadership and
change of policy.
Throughout the 2021 time period, Congress was debating, and ultimately passed, the
American Rescue Plan, with strong support among Democrats and little-to-none among
Republicans. The American Rescue Plan provided direct relief via stimulus checks to members of
the public and ultimately received divergent framings across liberal and conservative media;
however, these framings did not neatly adhere to the previous patterns of socio-material versus
economic scarcity. In the NYT, commentators emphasized the ongoing ramifications of the

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COVID-19 pandemic in terms of both subsistence and pocketbook scarcity, thereby crosscutting
the socio-material versus economic distinction. This pattern of scarcity framing in the NYT, along
with its greater emphasis on macroeconomic scarcity relative to 2020, supported the necessity of
the American Rescue Plan as a stimulus package, thus aiding the policy agenda of President Biden
and congressional Democrats.
Conversely, congressional Republicans opposed the American Rescue Plan and often
received support in the rhetorical contributions of conservative media. In the WSJ, commentators
emphasized the ongoing impact of the pandemic on commercial scarcity and framed the American
Rescue Plan as an overreach of big government that risked crowding out private commerce and
undermining the efforts of labor-seeking employers amid the ‘Great Resignation.’ Moreover, the
WSJ tempered its emphasis on macroeconomic scarcity, often criticizing the American Rescue
Plan as out of proportion with the needs of an already-recovering economy.
While this discussion portrays an inherently simplified portrait of media framing during
COVID-19, the political circumstances highlighted exemplify the contextual factors underlying
the ideological patterns of scarcity framing in my analysis. As pandemic conditions evolved
alongside changes in policy and presidential leadership, commentators on the left and the right
emphasized specific scarcity objects as a means for setting the terms of the political debate in their
favor. These findings speak to the role of the media in conveying information about COVID-19
through politically-motivated patterns of scarcity framing.
7 Limitations
The findings of this study offer a window into scarcity framing as it unfolded in the context
of the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus on a single case (i.e. the pandemic) inherently comes with
limitations. One limitation relates to the idiosyncrasies of certain scarcity objects included in my

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coding scheme, as some scarcity-object constructions observed in my sample may be relatively
unique to the pandemic. For instance, the widespread focus on vaccines within resource scarcity
would not likely replicate when focusing on other issue areas (such as climate change).
Acknowledging this limitation in generalizability, the basic finding of ideologically-motivated
patterns in scarcity framing is likely applicable to a wide range of issue areas. The results of my
study support the core premise that the rhetorical construction of scarcity serves as a kind of ground
zero for issue framing across political ideology. As such, we can understand scarcity framing as
providing the pretext for advancing an ideological agenda via mass media. This function of scarcity
framing is likely at play in the framing of political issues beyond the case of the COVID-19
pandemic. Nonetheless, future research is needed to assess the generalizability of this study’s
findings, specifically in regards to ideological patterns of economic versus socio-material scarcity
framing.
In addition to the object-specific constructions of scarcity, the overall prevalence of
scarcity framing observed in this study is potentially attributable to my case selection of the
COVID-19 pandemic. Media commentary on COVID-19 may differ from other issue areas due to
the pandemic’s crisis-level proportions. In other words, political issues, such as COVID-19, that
create moments of acute crisis may precipitate higher rates of scarcity framing as compared to
political issues that emerge gradually and less disruptively. If true, the analysis here may
exaggerate the prevalence of scarcity framing in media commentary relative to other issue areas
and in comparison to times of relative stability. Future research focused on applying this study’s
analytical framework to other issue areas is needed to assess this possibility.
While this paper’s case selection may limit our ability to extrapolate the frequency of
scarcity framing to non-crisis issue areas in American media, it’s worth noting that the prevalence

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of scarcity framing is arguably a contributing factor to whether an issue gets construed by the
public as a crisis in the first place. In other words, the pervasiveness of scarcity rhetoric in the
framing of a given political issue may directly contribute to public perception of the issue as a
crisis-level problem. As put by Murray Edelman, “a crisis, like all news developments, is a creation
of the language used to depict it” (Edelman 1988: 31). In turn, the study of scarcity framing as it
may differ between ‘crisis’ and ‘non-crisis’ issue areas is inherently complicated, as the prevalence
of scarcity framing in mass media may importantly influence whether an issue is perceived as a
crisis in the public eye.
Beyond these limitations, the present study necessitates further research to assess how the
findings may extend to a larger sample of news media publications and when analyzed by multiple
coders. As elaborated in Appendix G, this study’s reliance on a single coder entails a level of
subjectivity that undermines the study’s reliability and replicability. Moreover, this study’s focus
on two media publications during two 6-month time frames leaves open the possibility that the
observed patterns of scarcity framing may differ when comparing a different set of news outlets at
different stages of the pandemic. Acknowledging these shortcomings, the core finding of
ideological patterns in scarcity framing supports the broader theory motivating this study, thus
illuminating the role of scarcity framing as a culturally resonant source of media manipulation that
is used to advance political agendas on the left and the right.
8 Conclusion
Through a content analysis of scarcity framing in COVID-19 media commentary, this
paper demonstrates that scarcity framing features in political discourse as a rhetorical device by
which ideological actors present a version of political reality that conforms to their political
prerogatives. Generally speaking, my analyses indicate that liberal and conservative media

167
differentially emphasized socio-material scarcity and economic scarcity, with objects in the former
category receiving greater emphasis in the NYT and objects in the latter category receiving greater
emphasis in the WSJ. However, this overall pattern obscures more nuanced findings that emerge
when analyzing scarcity framing over time. In the immediate onset of the COVID-19 pandemic,
the distinctive patterns across publication ideology of socio-material versus economic scarcity
framing are most pronounced; however, as political circumstances shift moving into 2021, the
distinction between socio-material versus economic scarcity framing becomes less decisive.
Though no longer neatly dividing along socio-material versus economic lines, the objects of
scarcity that are emphasized across publication ideology in the 2021 sample nonetheless reflect
evolving policy agendas on the left and the right, thus reinforcing the agenda-specific uses of
scarcity framing.
The patterns of media commentary demonstrated here represent an advance in further
understanding the origins of the political divides that have animated the COVID-19 era and its
aftermath. By elucidating the discrepant understandings of political reality that emerge via scarcity
framing in media commentary, we can better understand the context in which public priorities may
splinter beyond recognition. Insofar as the WSJ and the NYT are ideologically moderate compared
to outlets like Fox News and MSNBC, my analysis represents a tough case, suggesting that
ideological differences in scarcity framing may be more pronounced across the full spectrum of
media sources. Moreover, the overall prevalence of scarcity framing demonstrated here suggests
the American public is frequently primed to perceive scarcity when assessing political issues and
forming political opinions. Considering the threat salience of scarcity and conflict in American
political culture, and considering the social-psychological effects of scarcity regarding racial
discrimination and orientations of competitiveness, the potential stakes of scarcity framing for

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public opinion and democratic policymaking are considerable. These findings lay the groundwork
for future research on the effects of scarcity framing on potential voters.

169
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Appendix for Paper #2
Appendix A: Descriptive Statistics
Table A1: Descriptive Statistics on Demographic Variables and Personal Background
Note: Political Knowledge has been rescored on a 0-1 scale. For Political Knowledge, 0 indicates the respondent did not answer
any political knowledge questions correctly, while 5 indicates the respondent answered all five political knowledge questions
correctly. The political knowledge questions were drawn from the 2020 ANES. Age is measured on a 7-point scale: 1 = under
18 years old, 2 = 18-24 years old, 3 = 25-34 years old, 4 = 35-44 years old, 5 = 45-54 years old, 6 = 55-64 years old, 7 = 65+
years old. Education is measured on an 8-point scale: 1 = no formal qualifications, 2 = secondary education (e.g. GED/GCSE),
3 = high school diploma/A-levels, 4 = technical/community college, 5 = undergraduate degree (BA/BSc/other), 6 = graduate
degree (MA/MSc/MPhil/other), 7 = Doctorate degree (PhD/other), 8 = don’t know / not applicable. Income is measured on an
18-point scale: 1 = less than $5,000, 2 = $5,000-$9,999, 3 = $10,000-$14,999, 4 = $15,000-$19,999, 5 = $20,000-$24,999, 6 =
$25,000-29,999, 7 = $30,000-$34,999, 8 = $35,000-$39,999, 9 = $40,000-$49,999, 10 = $50,000-$59,999, 11 = $60,000-
$74,999, 12 = $75,000-$84,999, 13 = $85,000 - $99,999, 14 = $100,000-$124,999, 15 = $125,000-$149,999, 16 = $150,000-
$174,999, 17 = $175,000-$199,999, 18 = $200,000 or more. For income, respondents who answered “prefer not to answer” or
“don’t know” are recorded as missing values. “Home state” and “Resides in” the South are both measured as binary variables,
where 1 indicates home state & residence in the South.

181
Table A2: Descriptive Statistics on Ideology, Personality, and Cultural Orientation
Note: Ideology has been rescored on a 0-1 scale. For Ideology, 0 corresponds to “extremely liberal” and 1 corresponds to
“extremely conservative.” Social Dominance Orientation is measured on a 10-point scale where 1 = “extremely oppose” and
10 = “extremely favor,” rated across four statements: (1) “In setting priorities, we must consider all groups” [reverse coded], (2)
“We should not push for group equality,” (3) “Group equality should be our ideal” [reverse coded], and (4) “Superior groups
should dominate inferior groups.” The final SDO score reflects the average across all four statements and is rescored on a 0-1
scale. Both Vertical Individualism (VI) and Horizontal Collectivism (HC) are measured on a 9-point scale where 1 =
“strongly disagree” and 9 = “strongly agree,” rescored on a 0-1 scale. Vertical Individualism reflects the average score across
three statements: (1) “I enjoy working in situations involving competition with others,” (2) “Competition is the law of nature,”
and (3) “Without competition it is not possible to have a good society.” Horizontal Collectivism reflects the average score across
four statements: (1) “My happiness depends very much on the happiness of those around me,” (2) “The well-being of my coworkers is important to me,” (3) “If a co-worker gets a prize, I would feel proud,” and (4) “I feel good when I cooperate with
others.” The VI and HC scales have been rescored on a 0-1 scale.

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Table A3: Descriptive Statistics on Scarcity and Related Constructs
Note: All four variables presented here have been rescored on a 0-1 scale. The statements and questions used to measure all
four variables are described in the main text. Personal Scarcity and Sociotropic Scarcity are measured on a 7-point scale
where 1 = “strongly disagree” and 7 = “strongly agree.” Economic Insecurity is measured on a 5-point scale where 1 = “not
at all worried” and 5 = “extremely worried.” Perceptions of the National Economy is measured on a 5-point scale where 1 =
“gotten much better” and 5 = “gotten much worse.”

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Table A4: Descriptive Statistics on Inequality-Reinforcing Dependent Variables
Note: All five variables presented here have been rescored on a 0-1 scale. The statements and questions used to measure all
five variables are described in the main text. Racialized Competition is measured on a 5-point scale where 1 = “not at all
likely” and 5 = “extremely likely.” Racial Resentment is measured on a 5-point scale where 1 = “strongly disagree” and 5 =
“strongly agree.” Economic System Justification is measured on a 9-point scale where 1 = “strongly disagree” and 9 =
“strongly agree.” Opposition to Welfare is measured on a 5-point scale where 1 = “strongly support” and 5 “strongly
oppose.” Opposition to Redistribution is measured on a 7-point scale where 1 = “favor a great deal” and 7 = “oppose a
great deal.”

184
Appendix B: Regression Tables for Scarcity and Political Attitudes
Table B1: Perceptions of Racialized Job Competition
Dependent variable:
Racialized Job Competition
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
0.023 0.118* 0.104 -0.118*
(0.040) (0.066) (0.077) (0.068)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
0.209*** 0.174** 0.193** 0.235***
(0.042) (0.071) (0.081) (0.069)
Economic Insecurity 0.086*** 0.048 0.013 0.159***
(0.030) (0.050) (0.060) (0.047)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.086***
-0.037 0.193*** 0.080
(0.029) (0.049) (0.058) (0.054)
Household Income -0.001 0.008**
-0.004 -0.007*
(0.002) (0.004) (0.004) (0.004)
Conservative Ideology 0.224*** 0.163*** 0.243*** 0.091
(0.031) (0.062) (0.079) (0.062)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.270*** 0.407*** 0.164** 0.191***
(0.043) (0.082) (0.080) (0.066)
Vertical Individualism 0.160*** 0.125** 0.220*** 0.109*
(0.035) (0.058) (0.067) (0.059)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.128***
-0.070 -0.193**
-0.135*
(0.047) (0.087) (0.084) (0.078)

185
Political Knowledge -0.063*
-0.113*
-0.025 -0.022
(0.036) (0.063) (0.068) (0.061)
Age 0.011** 0.010 0.009 0.012
(0.005) (0.009) (0.010) (0.009)
Education -0.002 -0.019 0.014 0.002
(0.007) (0.013) (0.015) (0.012)
Man 0.011 0.006 0.035 -0.013
(0.017) (0.029) (0.032) (0.027)
South -0.014 -0.007 0.010 -0.056**
(0.016) (0.029) (0.030) (0.025)
Household Size 0.015** 0.009 0.016 0.016*
(0.006) (0.011) (0.011) (0.010)
Constant -0.069 -0.055 -0.172 0.195*
(0.064) (0.114) (0.124) (0.112)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.228 0.184 0.208 0.113
Adjusted R2 0.220 0.160 0.178 0.089
Residual Std. Error 0.296 (df = 1512) 0.293 (df =
517)
0.291 (df =
402)
0.296 (df =
561)
F Statistic 29.724*** (df =
15; 1512)
7.774*** (df =
15; 517)
7.035*** (df =
15; 402)
4.769*** (df =
15; 561)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

186
Table B2: Whites’ Racial Resentment towards African Americans
Dependent variable:
Racial Resentment
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
0.066** 0.109* 0.118* 0.012
(0.034) (0.057) (0.069) (0.051)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
0.239*** 0.268*** 0.164** 0.210***
(0.035) (0.061) (0.072) (0.052)
Economic Insecurity 0.025 0.008 -0.017 0.063*
(0.025) (0.043) (0.053) (0.036)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.064***
-0.047 0.128** 0.083**
(0.025) (0.042) (0.052) (0.041)
Household Income 0.002 0.003 0.001 0.001
(0.002) (0.003) (0.004) (0.003)
Conservative Ideology 0.327*** 0.277*** 0.366*** 0.159***
(0.026) (0.053) (0.071) (0.047)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.395*** 0.607*** 0.394*** 0.219***
(0.036) (0.071) (0.071) (0.050)
Vertical Individualism 0.151*** 0.138*** 0.157*** 0.082*
(0.029) (0.050) (0.059) (0.044)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.064 -0.022 -0.115 -0.029

187
(0.040) (0.075) (0.075) (0.059)
Political Knowledge -0.070**
-0.069 -0.127** 0.012
(0.030) (0.054) (0.060) (0.046)
Age 0.033*** 0.037*** 0.034*** 0.025***
(0.004) (0.008) (0.009) (0.007)
Education -0.014**
-0.026** 0.007 -0.013
(0.006) (0.011) (0.013) (0.009)
Man 0.048*** 0.027 0.048* 0.054***
(0.014) (0.025) (0.028) (0.021)
South 0.011 -0.010 0.016 0.010
(0.013) (0.025) (0.027) (0.019)
Household Size 0.014*** 0.023** 0.014 0.005
(0.005) (0.010) (0.010) (0.007)
Constant -0.181***
-0.217**
-0.240** 0.090
(0.054) (0.098) (0.110) (0.085)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.412 0.385 0.320 0.177
Adjusted R2 0.406 0.367 0.295 0.155
Residual Std. Error 0.247 (df =
1512)
0.252 (df = 517) 0.258 (df = 402) 0.225 (df =
561)
F Statistic 70.639*** (df =
15; 1512)
21.580*** (df =
15; 517)
12.612*** (df =
15; 402)
8.020*** (df =
15; 561)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

188
Table B3: Economic System Justification Attitudes
Dependent variable:
Economic System Justification
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.047**
-0.036 -0.021 -0.049
(0.020) (0.033) (0.039) (0.031)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
-0.007 0.093***
-0.012 -0.117***
(0.021) (0.035) (0.041) (0.032)
Economic Insecurity -0.037**
-0.028 -0.057*
-0.030
(0.015) (0.025) (0.030) (0.022)
Negative Perceptions
of Economy
0.023 -0.029 0.004 0.024
(0.015) (0.024) (0.030) (0.025)
Household Income 0.003*** 0.004** 0.002 0.004**
(0.001) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002)
Conservative Ideology 0.229*** 0.150*** 0.334*** 0.115***
(0.016) (0.031) (0.040) (0.029)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.306*** 0.346*** 0.327*** 0.238***
(0.021) (0.041) (0.040) (0.031)
Vertical Individualism 0.161*** 0.151*** 0.159*** 0.123***
(0.017) (0.029) (0.034) (0.027)
Horizontal
Collectivism
0.040* 0.011 -0.025 0.125***

189
(0.023) (0.043) (0.043) (0.036)
Political Knowledge -0.007 -0.073** 0.020 0.052*
(0.018) (0.031) (0.034) (0.028)
Age 0.012*** 0.013*** 0.006 0.011***
(0.003) (0.004) (0.005) (0.004)
Education -0.003 -0.011* 0.005 0.004
(0.004) (0.006) (0.007) (0.005)
Man 0.005 0.020 -0.017 0.0001
(0.008) (0.014) (0.016) (0.013)
South -0.0003 -0.005 -0.017 0.010
(0.008) (0.014) (0.015) (0.012)
Household Size 0.002 0.009* 0.001 -0.005
(0.003) (0.006) (0.006) (0.004)
Constant 0.090*** 0.112** 0.105* 0.203***
(0.032) (0.057) (0.063) (0.052)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.438 0.376 0.418 0.300
Adjusted R2 0.433 0.358 0.396 0.281
Residual Std. Error 0.146 (df =
1512)
0.145 (df = 517) 0.147 (df = 402) 0.137 (df = 561)
F Statistic 78.629*** (df =
15; 1512)
20.801*** (df =
15; 517)
19.240*** (df =
15; 402)
16.034*** (df =
15; 561)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

190
Table B4: Opposition to Welfare via Personal Tax Hikes
Dependent variable:
Opposition to Welfare
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.039 -0.068*
-0.041 0.005
(0.034) (0.041) (0.063) (0.068)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
-0.006 0.100** 0.059 -0.136**
(0.035) (0.045) (0.066) (0.069)
Economic Insecurity -0.026 -0.061* 0.025 -0.038
(0.025) (0.032) (0.049) (0.047)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.142*** 0.065** 0.052 0.189***
(0.025) (0.031) (0.048) (0.054)
Household Income 0.009*** 0.005* 0.011*** 0.010***
(0.002) (0.002) (0.003) (0.004)
Conservative Ideology 0.242*** 0.105*** 0.263*** 0.159**
(0.026) (0.039) (0.065) (0.062)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.257*** 0.207*** 0.311*** 0.203***
(0.036) (0.052) (0.065) (0.066)
Vertical Individualism 0.076*** 0.004 0.014 0.161***
(0.029) (0.036) (0.055) (0.059)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.247***
-0.107*
-0.311***
-0.294***
(0.040) (0.054) (0.069) (0.078)

191
Political Knowledge 0.048 -0.030 0.020 0.119**
(0.030) (0.039) (0.055) (0.061)
Age 0.003 -0.001 0.003 0.003
(0.004) (0.006) (0.008) (0.009)
Education -0.002 -0.009 0.007 0.010
(0.006) (0.008) (0.012) (0.012)
Man -0.026*
-0.025 -0.004 -0.053**
(0.014) (0.018) (0.026) (0.027)
South 0.013 -0.017 -0.031 0.047*
(0.013) (0.018) (0.025) (0.025)
Household Size -0.006 -0.005 -0.011 -0.004
(0.005) (0.007) (0.009) (0.010)
Constant 0.078 0.179** 0.100 0.100
(0.054) (0.072) (0.102) (0.112)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.258 0.146 0.249 0.161
Adjusted R2 0.251 0.122 0.221 0.138
Residual Std. Error 0.249 (df = 1512) 0.184 (df =
517)
0.238 (df = 402) 0.296 (df = 561)
F Statistic 35.080*** (df =
15; 1512)
5.908*** (df =
15; 517)
8.898*** (df =
15; 402)
7.153*** (df =
15; 561)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

192
Table B5: Opposition to Income Redistribution
Dependent variable:
Opposition to Redistribution
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.088**
-0.088*
-0.082 -0.095
(0.035) (0.050) (0.069) (0.063)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
-0.073** 0.140**
-0.045 -0.245***
(0.037) (0.055) (0.073) (0.064)
Economic Insecurity -0.042 -0.031 -0.052 -0.034
(0.026) (0.039) (0.054) (0.044)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.163*** 0.027 0.163*** 0.171***
(0.026) (0.038) (0.052) (0.051)
Household Income 0.008*** 0.009***
-0.0005 0.012***
(0.002) (0.003) (0.004) (0.003)
Conservative Ideology 0.418*** 0.156*** 0.488*** 0.362***
(0.028) (0.047) (0.071) (0.057)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.302*** 0.224*** 0.160** 0.367***
(0.038) (0.063) (0.072) (0.062)
Vertical Individualism 0.046 -0.032 0.105* 0.047
(0.031) (0.044) (0.060) (0.054)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.062 -0.082 -0.168**
-0.010
(0.042) (0.066) (0.076) (0.072)

193
Political Knowledge 0.005 -0.104** 0.128**
-0.014
(0.032) (0.048) (0.061) (0.056)
Age 0.018*** 0.011 0.014 0.026***
(0.005) (0.007) (0.009) (0.008)
Education 0.006 -0.009 0.018 0.012
(0.007) (0.010) (0.013) (0.011)
Man -0.014 -0.003 -0.053*
-0.010
(0.015) (0.022) (0.029) (0.025)
South 0.009 -0.028 0.017 0.013
(0.014) (0.022) (0.027) (0.023)
Household Size 0.002 0.005 -0.002 0.001
(0.005) (0.009) (0.010) (0.009)
Constant -0.095* 0.104 -0.040 -0.087
(0.057) (0.088) (0.112) (0.104)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R
2 0.347 0.149 0.261 0.279
Adjusted R2 0.341 0.124 0.234 0.260
Residual Std. Error 0.261 (df = 1512) 0.224 (df =
517)
0.261 (df =
402)
0.275 (df = 561)
F Statistic 53.567*** (df =
15; 1512)
6.021*** (df =
15; 517)
9.489*** (df =
15; 402)
14.491*** (df =
15; 561)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

194
Appendix C: Interactions Between Vertical Individualism and Scarcity
Table C1: Racialized Competition w/ VI * Personal Scarcity Interaction
Dependent variable:
Racialized Job Competition
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.050 -0.077 -0.004 -0.037
(0.072) (0.112) (0.140) (0.128)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
0.207*** 0.167** 0.194** 0.238***
(0.042) (0.071) (0.081) (0.069)
Economic Insecurity 0.087*** 0.063 0.013 0.159***
(0.030) (0.051) (0.060) (0.047)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.087***
-0.038 0.201*** 0.079
(0.029) (0.049) (0.059) (0.054)
Household Income -0.001 0.008**
-0.004 -0.007*
(0.002) (0.004) (0.004) (0.004)
Conservative Ideology 0.225*** 0.157** 0.246*** 0.089
(0.031) (0.062) (0.079) (0.062)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.270*** 0.407*** 0.161** 0.190***
(0.043) (0.082) (0.080) (0.066)
Vertical Individualism 0.068 -0.126 0.076 0.208
(0.084) (0.131) (0.169) (0.145)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.126***
-0.057 -0.190**
-0.135*

195
(0.047) (0.087) (0.084) (0.078)
Political Knowledge -0.063*
-0.116*
-0.028 -0.024
(0.036) (0.063) (0.068) (0.061)
Age 0.011** 0.010 0.010 0.012
(0.005) (0.009) (0.010) (0.009)
Education -0.002 -0.020 0.015 0.002
(0.007) (0.013) (0.015) (0.012)
Man 0.012 0.008 0.035 -0.014
(0.017) (0.029) (0.032) (0.027)
South -0.014 -0.007 0.009 -0.056**
(0.016) (0.029) (0.030) (0.025)
Household Size 0.015** 0.009 0.016 0.016*
(0.006) (0.011) (0.011) (0.010)
VI * Personal 0.144 0.399** 0.220 -0.152
(0.118) (0.187) (0.235) (0.204)
Constant -0.025 0.061 -0.111 0.145
(0.074) (0.126) (0.141) (0.130)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.228 0.191 0.210 0.114
Adjusted R2 0.220 0.166 0.178 0.089
Residual Std. Error 0.296 (df = 1511) 0.292 (df =
516)
0.291 (df =
401)
0.296 (df =
560)
F Statistic 27.969*** (df =
16; 1511)
7.624*** (df =
16; 516)
6.648*** (df =
16; 401)
4.501*** (df =
16; 560)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

196
Table C2: Racialized Competition w/ VI * Sociotropic Scarcity Interaction
Dependent variable:
Racialized Job Competition
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
0.022 0.112* 0.118 -0.117*
(0.040) (0.066) (0.077) (0.068)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
0.075 -0.029 -0.101 0.210
(0.079) (0.124) (0.154) (0.149)
Economic Insecurity 0.086*** 0.051 0.003 0.159***
(0.030) (0.050) (0.060) (0.047)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.087***
-0.035 0.196*** 0.080
(0.029) (0.049) (0.058) (0.055)
Household Income -0.001 0.008**
-0.005 -0.007*
(0.002) (0.004) (0.004) (0.004)
Conservative Ideology 0.229*** 0.166*** 0.266*** 0.092
(0.032) (0.062) (0.080) (0.062)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.271*** 0.400*** 0.171** 0.191***
(0.043) (0.082) (0.079) (0.066)
Vertical Individualism 0.002 -0.110 -0.143 0.080
(0.086) (0.130) (0.176) (0.165)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.132***
-0.071 -0.194**
-0.136*
(0.047) (0.087) (0.084) (0.078)

197
Political Knowledge -0.062*
-0.114*
-0.018 -0.022
(0.036) (0.063) (0.067) (0.061)
Age 0.011** 0.011 0.010 0.012
(0.005) (0.009) (0.010) (0.009)
Education -0.002 -0.021* 0.014 0.002
(0.007) (0.013) (0.014) (0.012)
Man 0.011 0.006 0.029 -0.013
(0.017) (0.029) (0.032) (0.027)
South -0.015 -0.008 0.007 -0.056**
(0.016) (0.029) (0.030) (0.025)
Household Size 0.015** 0.009 0.017 0.016*
(0.006) (0.011) (0.011) (0.010)
VI * Sociotropic 0.263** 0.426** 0.608** 0.044
(0.131) (0.212) (0.272) (0.233)
Constant 0.007 0.060 -0.016 0.210
(0.075) (0.127) (0.142) (0.138)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.230 0.190 0.218 0.113
Adjusted R2 0.222 0.165 0.186 0.088
Residual Std. Error 0.296 (df = 1511) 0.292 (df =
516)
0.289 (df =
401)
0.296 (df =
560)
F Statistic 28.173*** (df =
16; 1511)
7.585*** (df =
16; 516)
6.973*** (df =
16; 401)
4.465*** (df =
16; 560)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

198
Table C3: Racial Resentment w/ VI*Personal Scarcity Interaction
Dependent variable:
Racial Resentment
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
0.026 -0.032 0.031 0.132
(0.060) (0.097) (0.124) (0.097)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
0.238*** 0.262*** 0.165** 0.214***
(0.035) (0.061) (0.072) (0.052)
Economic Insecurity 0.026 0.019 -0.018 0.063*
(0.025) (0.044) (0.053) (0.036)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.065***
-0.048 0.134** 0.083**
(0.025) (0.042) (0.052) (0.041)
Household Income 0.002 0.003 0.001 0.001
(0.002) (0.003) (0.004) (0.003)
Conservative Ideology 0.328*** 0.273*** 0.368*** 0.156***
(0.026) (0.053) (0.071) (0.047)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.395*** 0.607*** 0.392*** 0.218***
(0.036) (0.070) (0.071) (0.050)
Vertical Individualism 0.100 -0.044 0.040 0.228**
(0.070) (0.113) (0.150) (0.110)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.063 -0.012 -0.113 -0.029
(0.040) (0.075) (0.075) (0.059)

199
Political Knowledge -0.070**
-0.072 -0.130** 0.010
(0.030) (0.054) (0.060) (0.046)
Age 0.033*** 0.037*** 0.034*** 0.025***
(0.004) (0.008) (0.009) (0.007)
Education -0.014**
-0.027** 0.007 -0.013
(0.006) (0.011) (0.013) (0.009)
Man 0.048*** 0.028 0.048* 0.053**
(0.014) (0.025) (0.028) (0.021)
South 0.011 -0.010 0.016 0.009
(0.013) (0.025) (0.027) (0.019)
Household Size 0.014*** 0.022** 0.014 0.005
(0.005) (0.010) (0.010) (0.007)
VI * Personal 0.079 0.291* 0.177 -0.225
(0.099) (0.161) (0.209) (0.155)
Constant -0.157**
-0.133 -0.191 0.017
(0.061) (0.109) (0.125) (0.099)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.412 0.389 0.321 0.180
Adjusted R2 0.406 0.370 0.294 0.156
Residual Std. Error 0.247 (df =
1511)
0.252 (df = 516) 0.258 (df = 401) 0.224 (df =
560)
F Statistic 66.249*** (df =
16; 1511)
20.524*** (df =
16; 516)
11.860*** (df =
16; 401)
7.666*** (df =
16; 560)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

200
Table C4: Racial Resentment w/ VI * Sociotropic Scarcity Interaction
Dependent variable:
Racial Resentment
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
0.065* 0.105* 0.131* 0.013
(0.033) (0.057) (0.068) (0.051)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
0.124* 0.128 -0.097 0.113
(0.066) (0.106) (0.137) (0.113)
Economic Insecurity 0.026 0.010 -0.027 0.065*
(0.025) (0.043) (0.053) (0.036)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.066***
-0.046 0.131** 0.084**
(0.025) (0.042) (0.052) (0.041)
Household Income 0.002 0.003 0.001 0.001
(0.002) (0.003) (0.004) (0.003)
Conservative Ideology 0.332*** 0.279*** 0.386*** 0.161***
(0.026) (0.053) (0.071) (0.047)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.396*** 0.602*** 0.401*** 0.219***
(0.036) (0.071) (0.071) (0.050)
Vertical Individualism 0.014 -0.023 -0.166 -0.032
(0.072) (0.112) (0.156) (0.125)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.067*
-0.022 -0.116 -0.032
(0.040) (0.075) (0.074) (0.059)

201
Political Knowledge -0.069**
-0.069 -0.122** 0.014
(0.030) (0.054) (0.060) (0.046)
Age 0.033*** 0.038*** 0.035*** 0.025***
(0.004) (0.008) (0.009) (0.007)
Education -0.014**
-0.028** 0.006 -0.012
(0.006) (0.011) (0.013) (0.009)
Man 0.047*** 0.027 0.043 0.055***
(0.014) (0.025) (0.028) (0.021)
South 0.011 -0.010 0.013 0.010
(0.013) (0.025) (0.027) (0.019)
Household Size 0.014*** 0.023** 0.015 0.004
(0.005) (0.010) (0.010) (0.007)
VI * Sociotropic 0.227** 0.293 0.540** 0.172
(0.110) (0.182) (0.242) (0.176)
Constant -0.116*
-0.138 -0.102 0.149
(0.062) (0.110) (0.126) (0.105)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.414 0.388 0.328 0.178
Adjusted R2 0.407 0.369 0.302 0.154
Residual Std. Error 0.247 (df =
1511)
0.252 (df = 516) 0.257 (df = 401) 0.225 (df =
560)
F Statistic 66.637*** (df =
16; 1511)
20.454*** (df =
16; 516)
12.253*** (df =
16; 401)
7.577*** (df =
16; 560)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

202
Table C5: Economic System Justification w/ VI * Personal Scarcity Interaction
Dependent variable:
Economic System Justification
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.088**
-0.090 -0.156**
-0.037
(0.035) (0.056) (0.070) (0.059)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
-0.008 0.091**
-0.011 -0.117***
(0.021) (0.035) (0.041) (0.032)
Economic Insecurity -0.036**
-0.023 -0.058*
-0.030
(0.015) (0.025) (0.030) (0.022)
Negative Perceptions
of Economy
0.024*
-0.029 0.013 0.024
(0.015) (0.024) (0.030) (0.025)
Household Income 0.003*** 0.004** 0.002 0.004**
(0.001) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002)
Conservative Ideology 0.229*** 0.149*** 0.338*** 0.115***
(0.016) (0.031) (0.040) (0.029)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.306*** 0.346*** 0.324*** 0.238***
(0.021) (0.041) (0.040) (0.031)
Vertical Individualism 0.109*** 0.082 -0.020 0.137**
(0.041) (0.065) (0.085) (0.067)
Horizontal
Collectivism
0.041* 0.014 -0.021 0.125***
(0.023) (0.043) (0.042) (0.036)

203
Political Knowledge -0.008 -0.074** 0.016 0.051*
(0.018) (0.031) (0.034) (0.028)
Age 0.012*** 0.013*** 0.007 0.011***
(0.003) (0.004) (0.005) (0.004)
Education -0.003 -0.011* 0.005 0.004
(0.004) (0.006) (0.007) (0.005)
Man 0.005 0.021 -0.016 -0.00003
(0.008) (0.014) (0.016) (0.013)
South -0.0003 -0.005 -0.018 0.010
(0.008) (0.014) (0.015) (0.012)
Household Size 0.002 0.009 0.001 -0.005
(0.003) (0.006) (0.006) (0.004)
VI * Personal 0.081 0.110 0.272**
-0.022
(0.058) (0.093) (0.119) (0.094)
Constant 0.115*** 0.143** 0.181** 0.196***
(0.036) (0.063) (0.071) (0.060)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.439 0.378 0.425 0.300
Adjusted R2 0.433 0.359 0.402 0.280
Residual Std. Error 0.146 (df =
1511)
0.145 (df = 516) 0.147 (df = 401) 0.137 (df = 560)
F Statistic 73.881*** (df =
16; 1511)
19.603*** (df =
16; 516)
18.555*** (df =
16; 401)
15.010*** (df =
16; 560)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

204
Table C6: Economic System Justification w/ VI * Sociotropic Scarcity Interaction
Dependent variable:
Economic System Justification
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.047**
-0.036 -0.019 -0.049
(0.020) (0.033) (0.039) (0.031)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
-0.003 0.099 -0.063 -0.222***
(0.039) (0.061) (0.079) (0.069)
Economic Insecurity -0.037**
-0.028 -0.059*
-0.028
(0.015) (0.025) (0.030) (0.022)
Negative Perceptions
of Economy
0.023 -0.029 0.004 0.026
(0.015) (0.024) (0.030) (0.025)
Household Income 0.003*** 0.004** 0.002 0.004**
(0.001) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002)
Conservative Ideology 0.229*** 0.150*** 0.338*** 0.117***
(0.016) (0.031) (0.041) (0.029)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.306*** 0.347*** 0.328*** 0.238***
(0.021) (0.041) (0.041) (0.031)
Vertical Individualism 0.166*** 0.158** 0.095 -0.0001
(0.043) (0.065) (0.090) (0.076)
Horizontal
Collectivism
0.040* 0.011 -0.025 0.121***
(0.023) (0.043) (0.043) (0.036)

205
Political Knowledge -0.007 -0.073** 0.021 0.054*
(0.018) (0.031) (0.034) (0.028)
Age 0.011*** 0.013*** 0.007 0.011***
(0.003) (0.004) (0.005) (0.004)
Education -0.003 -0.011* 0.005 0.005
(0.004) (0.006) (0.007) (0.005)
Man 0.005 0.020 -0.018 0.001
(0.008) (0.014) (0.016) (0.013)
South -0.0003 -0.005 -0.018 0.010
(0.008) (0.014) (0.015) (0.012)
Household Size 0.002 0.009* 0.002 -0.006
(0.003) (0.006) (0.006) (0.004)
VI * Sociotropic -0.009 -0.013 0.107 0.185*
(0.065) (0.105) (0.139) (0.107)
Constant 0.088** 0.108* 0.132* 0.267***
(0.037) (0.063) (0.072) (0.064)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.438 0.376 0.419 0.304
Adjusted R2 0.432 0.357 0.396 0.284
Residual Std. Error 0.146 (df =
1511)
0.145 (df = 516) 0.147 (df = 401) 0.137 (df = 560)
F Statistic 73.668*** (df =
16; 1511)
19.465*** (df =
16; 516)
18.056*** (df =
16; 401)
15.272*** (df =
16; 560)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

206
Table C7: Opposition to Welfare w/ VI * Personal Scarcity Interaction
Dependent variable:
Opposition to Welfare
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.004 0.024 -0.063 -0.006
(0.060) (0.071) (0.114) (0.128)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
-0.005 0.103** 0.059 -0.136**
(0.035) (0.045) (0.066) (0.069)
Economic Insecurity -0.027 -0.068** 0.025 -0.038
(0.025) (0.032) (0.049) (0.047)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.141*** 0.065** 0.054 0.189***
(0.025) (0.031) (0.048) (0.055)
Household Income 0.009*** 0.005* 0.011*** 0.010***
(0.002) (0.002) (0.003) (0.004)
Conservative Ideology 0.241*** 0.108*** 0.263*** 0.159**
(0.026) (0.039) (0.065) (0.062)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.257*** 0.207*** 0.310*** 0.204***
(0.036) (0.051) (0.065) (0.067)
Vertical Individualism 0.120* 0.123 -0.015 0.148
(0.070) (0.082) (0.138) (0.145)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.248***
-0.113**
-0.310***
-0.294***
(0.040) (0.054) (0.069) (0.078)

207
Political Knowledge 0.048 -0.028 0.020 0.120**
(0.030) (0.039) (0.055) (0.061)
Age 0.003 -0.001 0.003 0.003
(0.004) (0.006) (0.008) (0.009)
Education -0.002 -0.009 0.007 0.010
(0.006) (0.008) (0.012) (0.012)
Man -0.026*
-0.026 -0.004 -0.053**
(0.014) (0.018) (0.026) (0.027)
South 0.013 -0.017 -0.031 0.047*
(0.013) (0.018) (0.025) (0.025)
Household Size -0.006 -0.004 -0.011 -0.004
(0.005) (0.007) (0.009) (0.010)
VI * Personal -0.069 -0.189 0.044 0.020
(0.099) (0.117) (0.193) (0.204)
Constant 0.057 0.125 0.113 0.106
(0.062) (0.079) (0.115) (0.131)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.258 0.151 0.249 0.161
Adjusted R2 0.251 0.124 0.219 0.137
Residual Std. Error 0.249 (df = 1511) 0.184 (df =
516)
0.238 (df = 401) 0.296 (df = 560)
F Statistic 32.906*** (df =
16; 1511)
5.719*** (df =
16; 516)
8.326*** (df =
16; 401)
6.695*** (df =
16; 560)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

208
Table C8: Opposition to Welfare w/ VI * Sociotropic Scarcity Interaction
Dependent variable:
Opposition to Welfare
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.039 -0.066 -0.045 0.006
(0.034) (0.041) (0.063) (0.068)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
0.022 0.162** 0.129 -0.239
(0.066) (0.078) (0.127) (0.149)
Economic Insecurity -0.026 -0.062* 0.028 -0.037
(0.025) (0.032) (0.049) (0.047)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.141*** 0.064** 0.052 0.190***
(0.025) (0.031) (0.048) (0.055)
Household Income 0.009*** 0.005* 0.011*** 0.010***
(0.002) (0.002) (0.003) (0.004)
Conservative Ideology 0.241*** 0.104*** 0.257*** 0.161***
(0.027) (0.039) (0.066) (0.062)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.257*** 0.210*** 0.309*** 0.203***
(0.036) (0.052) (0.065) (0.066)
Vertical Individualism 0.109 0.076 0.101 0.040
(0.073) (0.082) (0.144) (0.165)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.246***
-0.106*
-0.311***
-0.297***
(0.040) (0.054) (0.069) (0.078)

209
Political Knowledge 0.048 -0.030 0.019 0.121**
(0.030) (0.039) (0.055) (0.061)
Age 0.003 -0.001 0.003 0.003
(0.004) (0.006) (0.008) (0.009)
Education -0.001 -0.008 0.007 0.011
(0.006) (0.008) (0.012) (0.012)
Man -0.026*
-0.025 -0.003 -0.052*
(0.014) (0.018) (0.026) (0.027)
South 0.013 -0.017 -0.030 0.047*
(0.013) (0.018) (0.025) (0.025)
Household Size -0.006 -0.005 -0.011 -0.004
(0.005) (0.007) (0.009) (0.010)
VI * Sociotropic -0.055 -0.131 -0.145 0.183
(0.110) (0.133) (0.224) (0.233)
Constant 0.062 0.144* 0.063 0.163
(0.063) (0.080) (0.117) (0.138)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.258 0.148 0.250 0.161
Adjusted R2 0.250 0.122 0.220 0.138
Residual Std. Error 0.249 (df = 1511) 0.184 (df =
516)
0.238 (df = 401) 0.296 (df = 560)
F Statistic 32.887*** (df =
16; 1511)
5.600*** (df =
16; 516)
8.356*** (df =
16; 401)
6.740*** (df =
16; 560)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

210
Table C9: Opposition to Redistribution w/ VI * Personal Scarcity Interaction
Dependent variable:
Opposition to Redistribution
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.082 -0.091 -0.192 -0.078
(0.063) (0.086) (0.126) (0.119)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
-0.073** 0.140**
-0.044 -0.245***
(0.037) (0.055) (0.073) (0.064)
Economic Insecurity -0.042 -0.031 -0.053 -0.034
(0.026) (0.039) (0.054) (0.044)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.163*** 0.027 0.171*** 0.171***
(0.026) (0.038) (0.053) (0.051)
Household Income 0.008*** 0.009***
-0.001 0.012***
(0.002) (0.003) (0.004) (0.003)
Conservative Ideology 0.418*** 0.156*** 0.491*** 0.362***
(0.028) (0.047) (0.071) (0.058)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.302*** 0.224*** 0.157** 0.367***
(0.038) (0.063) (0.072) (0.062)
Vertical Individualism 0.053 -0.037 -0.041 0.067
(0.074) (0.101) (0.152) (0.135)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.063 -0.081 -0.165**
-0.010
(0.042) (0.067) (0.076) (0.072)

211
Political Knowledge 0.005 -0.104** 0.125**
-0.014
(0.032) (0.048) (0.061) (0.056)
Age 0.018*** 0.011 0.014 0.026***
(0.005) (0.007) (0.009) (0.008)
Education 0.006 -0.009 0.018 0.012
(0.007) (0.010) (0.013) (0.011)
Man -0.014 -0.003 -0.052*
-0.010
(0.015) (0.022) (0.029) (0.025)
South 0.009 -0.028 0.016 0.013
(0.014) (0.022) (0.027) (0.023)
Household Size 0.002 0.005 -0.002 0.001
(0.005) (0.009) (0.010) (0.009)
VI * Personal -0.011 0.007 0.222 -0.032
(0.104) (0.144) (0.212) (0.190)
Constant -0.099 0.106 0.022 -0.097
(0.065) (0.097) (0.126) (0.121)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.347 0.149 0.263 0.279
Adjusted R2 0.340 0.122 0.234 0.259
Residual Std. Error 0.261 (df = 1511) 0.225 (df =
516)
0.261 (df =
401)
0.275 (df = 560)
F Statistic 50.187*** (df =
16; 1511)
5.634*** (df =
16; 516)
8.966*** (df =
16; 401)
13.564*** (df =
16; 560)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

212
Table C10: Opposition to Redistribution w/ VI * Sociotropic Scarcity Interaction
Dependent variable:
Opposition to Redistribution
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.087**
-0.085*
-0.077 -0.095
(0.035) (0.050) (0.070) (0.063)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
-0.007 0.231**
-0.155 -0.238*
(0.070) (0.095) (0.140) (0.138)
Economic Insecurity -0.042 -0.032 -0.056 -0.034
(0.026) (0.039) (0.054) (0.044)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.163*** 0.026 0.164*** 0.171***
(0.026) (0.038) (0.052) (0.051)
Household Income 0.008*** 0.009***
-0.001 0.012***
(0.002) (0.003) (0.004) (0.003)
Conservative Ideology 0.415*** 0.155*** 0.497*** 0.362***
(0.028) (0.047) (0.072) (0.057)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.301*** 0.227*** 0.162** 0.367***
(0.038) (0.063) (0.072) (0.062)
Vertical Individualism 0.124 0.072 -0.030 0.055
(0.076) (0.100) (0.159) (0.153)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.061 -0.081 -0.168**
-0.010
(0.042) (0.066) (0.076) (0.072)

213
Political Knowledge 0.004 -0.104** 0.131**
-0.014
(0.032) (0.048) (0.061) (0.056)
Age 0.017*** 0.011 0.014 0.026***
(0.005) (0.007) (0.009) (0.008)
Education 0.006 -0.008 0.018 0.012
(0.007) (0.010) (0.013) (0.011)
Man -0.013 -0.003 -0.055*
-0.010
(0.015) (0.022) (0.029) (0.025)
South 0.009 -0.028 0.016 0.013
(0.014) (0.022) (0.027) (0.023)
Household Size 0.002 0.005 -0.002 0.001
(0.005) (0.009) (0.010) (0.009)
VI * Sociotropic -0.129 -0.189 0.226 -0.012
(0.116) (0.163) (0.246) (0.216)
Constant -0.133** 0.053 0.017 -0.091
(0.066) (0.098) (0.128) (0.128)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.348 0.151 0.263 0.279
Adjusted R2 0.341 0.125 0.234 0.259
Residual Std. Error 0.261 (df = 1511) 0.224 (df =
516)
0.261 (df =
401)
0.275 (df = 560)
F Statistic 50.305*** (df =
16; 1511)
5.733*** (df =
16; 516)
8.945*** (df =
16; 401)
13.562*** (df =
16; 560)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

214
Appendix D: Experimental Treatments on Scarcity Perceptions
Appendix D is focused on the experimental component of the survey. In the survey, after providing
information on all demographic, political knowledge, personality, and political ideology variables, and
before providing answers to my outcome variables, participants were randomly assigned to complete one
of three episodic recall tasks. The personal scarcity recall task asked the participant to recall a time when
they experienced a sense of scarcity. The sociotropic scarcity recall task asked the participant to recall a
time when the United States experienced a sense of scarcity. The control recall task asked the participant
to recall a time when they did laundry. The participant was then instructed to describe the episode. After
the recall task, participants then answered the personal and sociotropic scarcity questions that are analyzed
as explanatory variables in the main text of this paper.
My expectation for the experimental manipulation was that the personal scarcity recall task would
increase perceptions of personal scarcity relative to the control, while the sociotropic scarcity recall task
would increase perceptions of sociotropic scarcity relative to the control. Tables D1-D2 present results for
linear regression models where perceptions of scarcity, both personal and sociotropic, are analyzed as
dependent variables, with the personal and sociotropic treatment assignments included as explanatory
variables (alongside the standard set of variables included in all the foregoing regression analyses). As
illustrated in Table D1, neither the personal scarcity assignment nor the sociotropic scarcity assignment had
a statistically significant effect on the perceptions of personal scarcity DV. However, as illustrated in Table
D2, the sociotropic scarcity assignment did have a statistically significant effect on the sociotropic scarcity
DV, specifically among Democrats. Though statistically significant, the effect of the sociotropic assignment
is negative, suggesting that manipulation ‘backfired,’ in the sense that it actually reduced perceptions of
sociotropic scarcity, as seen in the full sample and further clarified in the party-specific subsets where the
effect is only statistically significant among Democrats. As a robustness check to ensure that the backfiring
of the sociotropic treatment does not meaningfully interfere with the analyses described in the main text,
Appendix E below replicates Appendix Tables B1-B5 while controlling for personal and sociotropic
treatment assignments.

215
Table D1: Perceptions of Personal Scarcity Across Party
Dependent variable:
Perceptions of Personal Scarcity
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Assigned Personal -0.009 0.018 -0.040*
-0.011
(0.012) (0.021) (0.023) (0.019)
Assigned Socio -0.020* 0.004 -0.021 -0.032*
(0.012) (0.021) (0.023) (0.018)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
0.393*** 0.446*** 0.322*** 0.398***
(0.025) (0.044) (0.050) (0.039)
Economic Insecurity 0.325*** 0.351*** 0.363*** 0.274***
(0.017) (0.030) (0.034) (0.027)
Negative Perceptions
of Economy
0.025 0.041 0.031 0.039
(0.019) (0.033) (0.038) (0.034)
Household Income -0.006***
-0.008***
-0.005*
-0.006***
(0.001) (0.003) (0.003) (0.002)
Conservative Ideology -0.036*
-0.028 -0.092* 0.021
(0.020) (0.041) (0.051) (0.038)
Social Dominance
Orientation
-0.057** 0.001 -0.145***
-0.013
(0.027) (0.055) (0.051) (0.041)
Vertical Individualism 0.038*
-0.016 0.076* 0.068*
(0.022) (0.039) (0.043) (0.036)

216
Horizontal
Collectivism
0.084*** 0.178*** 0.059 0.025
(0.030) (0.058) (0.054) (0.048)
Political Knowledge 0.008 0.014 -0.002 -0.003
(0.023) (0.042) (0.044) (0.038)
Age 0.001 0.005 -0.001 0.0001
(0.003) (0.006) (0.007) (0.006)
Education -0.003 0.003 0.0003 -0.010
(0.005) (0.009) (0.009) (0.007)
Man 0.043*** 0.050*** 0.050** 0.028*
(0.011) (0.019) (0.020) (0.017)
South 0.011 0.018 0.032 -0.006
(0.010) (0.019) (0.020) (0.016)
Household Size -0.002 0.006 -0.014* 0.0004
(0.004) (0.007) (0.007) (0.006)
Constant 0.231*** 0.051 0.322*** 0.258***
(0.042) (0.078) (0.080) (0.070)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.416 0.445 0.439 0.407
Adjusted R2 0.410 0.427 0.417 0.390
Residual Std. Error 0.190 (df =
1511)
0.196 (df = 516) 0.188 (df = 401) 0.184 (df = 560)
F Statistic 67.316*** (df =
16; 1511)
25.817*** (df =
16; 516)
19.623*** (df =
16; 401)
24.012*** (df =
16; 560)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

217
Table D2: Perceptions of Sociotropic Scarcity Across Party
Dependent variable:
Perceptions of Sociotropic Scarcity
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Assigned Socio -0.023**
-0.051***
-0.026 0.005
(0.011) (0.019) (0.022) (0.018)
Assigned Personal -0.00004 -0.019 -0.007 0.019
(0.012) (0.019) (0.022) (0.019)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
0.359*** 0.377*** 0.293*** 0.389***
(0.023) (0.037) (0.045) (0.038)
Economic Insecurity -0.019 -0.072** 0.036 -0.004
(0.018) (0.031) (0.037) (0.029)
Negative Perceptions
of Economy
0.069*** 0.085*** 0.074** 0.069**
(0.018) (0.030) (0.036) (0.033)
Household Income 0.001 0.002 0.002 0.0002
(0.001) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002)
Conservative Ideology 0.070*** 0.041 0.106** 0.067*
(0.019) (0.038) (0.049) (0.038)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.084*** 0.131*** 0.130*** 0.019
(0.026) (0.050) (0.049) (0.041)
Vertical Individualism 0.072*** 0.136*** 0.051 0.010
(0.021) (0.035) (0.041) (0.036)

218
Horizontal
Collectivism
0.113*** 0.117** 0.096* 0.147***
(0.029) (0.053) (0.052) (0.047)
Political Knowledge -0.109***
-0.075*
-0.113***
-0.119***
(0.022) (0.038) (0.041) (0.037)
Age -0.005* 0.004 -0.004 -0.018***
(0.003) (0.005) (0.006) (0.005)
Education -0.005 -0.009 -0.009 0.0002
(0.005) (0.008) (0.009) (0.007)
Man -0.016 -0.006 -0.027 -0.016
(0.010) (0.018) (0.020) (0.017)
South 0.005 0.009 -0.002 0.017
(0.010) (0.018) (0.019) (0.015)
Household Size 0.008** 0.013* 0.011 -0.002
(0.004) (0.007) (0.007) (0.006)
Constant 0.211*** 0.128* 0.219*** 0.280***
(0.040) (0.072) (0.077) (0.069)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.296 0.320 0.274 0.289
Adjusted R2 0.289 0.299 0.245 0.269
Residual Std. Error 0.181 (df =
1511)
0.180 (df = 516) 0.179 (df =
401)
0.182 (df = 560)
F Statistic 39.727*** (df =
16; 1511)
15.167*** (df =
16; 516)
9.443*** (df =
16; 401)
14.257*** (df =
16; 560)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

219
Appendix E: Robustness Checks
Appendix E is focused on replicating Appendix Tables B1-B5 as a robustness check to
assess whether the analyses described in the main text hold when controlling for the personal and
sociotropic treatment assignments. The tables presented in Appendix M also include sample-level
controls to account for exogenous political factors. The survey was administered in the summer
leading up to the 2024 presidential election (June 17th - August 4th). During this timeframe, two
major developments occurred. First, Joe Biden faced Donald Trump in a presidential debate that
set off a crisis within the Democratic Party, as Biden’s debate performance raised widespread
concerns regarding his age and capacity for office. Capitulating to public and elite pressure, Biden
withdrew from the race, precipitating the rise of Vice President Kamala Harris onto the Democratic
ticket. Given the tumultuousness of these political developments, I include additional control
variables in Appendix Tables M1a-M5d. The “pre-debate” variable is a dummy variable where 1
means the respondent completed the survey before the presidential debate and 0 means they
completed it after. The “post-withdrawal” variable is a dummy variable where 1 means the
respondent completed the survey after Biden withdrew and 0 means they completed it before.
On the whole, the patterns of personal and sociotropic scarcity overviewed in the main text
persist when controlling for treatment assignment and sample-level factors, with a few notable
exceptions where statistical significance is reduced. These exceptions include (1) the personal
scarcity coefficient for racial resentment in the full sample, (2) the sociotropic scarcity coefficient
for anti-redistribution attitudes in the full sample, and (3) the sociotropic scarcity coefficient for
anti-welfare attitudes in the Democrat subset. In these instances, the coefficient reduces in
statistical significance from the p < .05 level (as presented in the main text) to the p < .10 level.
These reductions in statistical significance could be due to the lower statistical power that comes
with incorporating more variables in the regression models. Aside from these exceptions, all results
overviewed in the main text remain statistically significant when controlling for treatment
assignment and sample-level factors.

220
Table E1: Perceptions of Racialized Competition w/ Sample Level Controls
Dependent variable:
Racialized Job Competition
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
0.025 0.115* 0.110 -0.109
(0.040) (0.066) (0.079) (0.068)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
0.208*** 0.182** 0.187** 0.236***
(0.042) (0.072) (0.081) (0.069)
Economic Insecurity 0.084*** 0.050 0.014 0.147***
(0.030) (0.051) (0.060) (0.047)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.086***
-0.039 0.191*** 0.087
(0.030) (0.049) (0.059) (0.055)
Household Income -0.001 0.009**
-0.004 -0.007*
(0.002) (0.004) (0.004) (0.004)
Conservative Ideology 0.223*** 0.171*** 0.244*** 0.080
(0.032) (0.062) (0.080) (0.062)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.270*** 0.411*** 0.160** 0.188***
(0.043) (0.082) (0.080) (0.066)
Vertical Individualism 0.159*** 0.115** 0.221*** 0.105*
(0.035) (0.058) (0.068) (0.059)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.128***
-0.072 -0.195**
-0.140*
(0.047) (0.087) (0.085) (0.078)

221
Political Knowledge -0.063*
-0.113*
-0.025 -0.024
(0.036) (0.063) (0.068) (0.061)
Age 0.010* 0.010 0.010 0.010
(0.005) (0.009) (0.011) (0.009)
Education -0.002 -0.018 0.013 0.0003
(0.007) (0.013) (0.015) (0.012)
Man 0.012 0.010 0.036 -0.010
(0.017) (0.029) (0.032) (0.027)
South -0.014 -0.008 0.007 -0.058**
(0.016) (0.029) (0.031) (0.025)
Household Size 0.015** 0.008 0.017 0.017*
(0.006) (0.011) (0.011) (0.010)
Assigned Socio 0.003 0.035 -0.029 -0.008
(0.018) (0.031) (0.037) (0.030)
Assigned Personal -0.002 0.037 0.002 -0.049
(0.019) (0.032) (0.036) (0.031)
Pre-Debate -0.041 -0.091 0.011 -0.060
(0.038) (0.074) (0.062) (0.063)
Post-Withdrawal -0.031 -0.095 -0.010 -0.022
(0.038) (0.075) (0.066) (0.062)
Constant -0.031 0.009 -0.167 0.278**
(0.075) (0.141) (0.134) (0.132)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577

222
R2 0.228 0.190 0.211 0.122
Adjusted R2 0.219 0.160 0.173 0.092
Residual Std. Error 0.296 (df = 1508) 0.293 (df =
513)
0.292 (df =
398)
0.295 (df =
557)
F Statistic 23.503*** (df =
19; 1508)
6.315*** (df =
19; 513)
5.594*** (df =
19; 398)
4.055*** (df =
19; 557)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

223
Table E2: Racial Resentment w/ Sample-Level Controls
Dependent variable:
Racial Resentment
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
0.063* 0.111* 0.113 0.008
(0.034) (0.057) (0.070) (0.052)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
0.239*** 0.267*** 0.164** 0.218***
(0.035) (0.062) (0.072) (0.052)
Economic Insecurity 0.024 0.006 -0.021 0.062*
(0.025) (0.044) (0.053) (0.036)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.066***
-0.045 0.130** 0.085**
(0.025) (0.042) (0.052) (0.042)
Household Income 0.002 0.002 0.001 0.001
(0.002) (0.003) (0.004) (0.003)
Conservative Ideology 0.325*** 0.276*** 0.375*** 0.159***
(0.026) (0.053) (0.071) (0.047)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.396*** 0.605*** 0.393*** 0.223***
(0.036) (0.071) (0.071) (0.050)
Vertical Individualism 0.153*** 0.144*** 0.157*** 0.084*
(0.029) (0.050) (0.060) (0.045)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.065 -0.021 -0.115 -0.028
(0.040) (0.075) (0.075) (0.059)

224
Political Knowledge -0.069**
-0.068 -0.129** 0.016
(0.030) (0.054) (0.060) (0.046)
Age 0.032*** 0.036*** 0.034*** 0.025***
(0.004) (0.008) (0.009) (0.007)
Education -0.014**
-0.026** 0.008 -0.012
(0.006) (0.011) (0.013) (0.009)
Man 0.048*** 0.025 0.047* 0.052**
(0.014) (0.025) (0.028) (0.021)
South 0.011 -0.010 0.015 0.009
(0.013) (0.025) (0.027) (0.019)
Household Size 0.014*** 0.023** 0.015 0.005
(0.005) (0.010) (0.010) (0.007)
Assigned Socio -0.003 -0.001 -0.012 -0.003
(0.015) (0.027) (0.032) (0.023)
Assigned Personal 0.007 -0.002 0.022 -0.001
(0.016) (0.027) (0.032) (0.024)
Pre-Debate 0.031 0.057 -0.056 0.086*
(0.031) (0.064) (0.055) (0.048)
Post-Withdrawal 0.054* 0.078 -0.003 0.094**
(0.032) (0.064) (0.059) (0.047)
Constant -0.214***
-0.274**
-0.211*
-0.003
(0.063) (0.121) (0.119) (0.100)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577

225
R2 0.414 0.387 0.329 0.182
Adjusted R2 0.407 0.365 0.297 0.154
Residual Std. Error 0.247 (df =
1508)
0.253 (df = 513) 0.258 (df = 398) 0.225 (df =
557)
F Statistic 56.099*** (df =
19; 1508)
17.068*** (df =
19; 513)
10.264*** (df =
19; 398)
6.539*** (df =
19; 557)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

226
Table E3: Economic System Justification Attitudes w/ Sample-Level Controls
Dependent variable:
Economic System Justification
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.047**
-0.037 -0.019 -0.050
(0.020) (0.033) (0.040) (0.032)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
-0.007 0.093***
-0.010 -0.117***
(0.021) (0.036) (0.041) (0.032)
Economic Insecurity -0.037**
-0.027 -0.057*
-0.028
(0.015) (0.025) (0.030) (0.022)
Negative Perceptions
of Economy
0.023 -0.029 0.002 0.023
(0.015) (0.024) (0.030) (0.025)
Household Income 0.003*** 0.004** 0.002 0.004**
(0.001) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002)
Conservative Ideology 0.229*** 0.151*** 0.336*** 0.114***
(0.016) (0.031) (0.041) (0.029)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.306*** 0.347*** 0.325*** 0.240***
(0.021) (0.041) (0.041) (0.031)
Vertical Individualism 0.162*** 0.151*** 0.155*** 0.122***
(0.017) (0.029) (0.034) (0.027)
Horizontal
Collectivism
0.040* 0.011 -0.025 0.127***
(0.023) (0.043) (0.043) (0.036)

227
Political Knowledge -0.007 -0.073** 0.019 0.054*
(0.018) (0.031) (0.034) (0.028)
Age 0.011*** 0.013*** 0.006 0.011***
(0.003) (0.004) (0.005) (0.004)
Education -0.002 -0.011* 0.005 0.005
(0.004) (0.006) (0.007) (0.006)
Man 0.005 0.020 -0.017 0.001
(0.008) (0.014) (0.016) (0.013)
South -0.0005 -0.005 -0.019 0.010
(0.008) (0.014) (0.016) (0.012)
Household Size 0.002 0.009 0.001 -0.005
(0.003) (0.006) (0.006) (0.004)
Assigned Socio 0.001 0.002 0.017 -0.010
(0.009) (0.015) (0.019) (0.014)
Assigned Personal 0.005 0.007 0.016 0.006
(0.009) (0.016) (0.018) (0.014)
Pre-Debate 0.006 0.005 -0.001 0.007
(0.019) (0.037) (0.032) (0.029)
Post-Withdrawal 0.012 0.007 0.001 0.017
(0.019) (0.037) (0.034) (0.029)
Constant 0.081** 0.104 0.094 0.189***
(0.037) (0.070) (0.068) (0.061)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577

228
R2 0.439 0.377 0.419 0.303
Adjusted R2 0.432 0.354 0.392 0.279
Residual Std. Error 0.147 (df =
1508)
0.146 (df = 513) 0.148 (df = 398) 0.137 (df = 557)
F Statistic 62.014*** (df =
19; 1508)
16.318*** (df =
19; 513)
15.134*** (df =
19; 398)
12.734*** (df =
19; 557)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

229
Table E4: Opposition to Welfare via Personal Tax Hikes w/ Sample-Level Controls
Dependent variable:
Opposition to Welfare
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.039 -0.068*
-0.039 0.002
(0.034) (0.041) (0.064) (0.068)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
-0.007 0.086* 0.062 -0.140**
(0.035) (0.045) (0.067) (0.069)
Economic Insecurity -0.025 -0.061* 0.027 -0.033
(0.025) (0.031) (0.049) (0.047)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.141*** 0.063** 0.050 0.186***
(0.025) (0.031) (0.048) (0.055)
Household Income 0.009*** 0.005* 0.011*** 0.010***
(0.002) (0.002) (0.003) (0.004)
Conservative Ideology 0.243*** 0.096** 0.264*** 0.166***
(0.027) (0.039) (0.065) (0.062)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.258*** 0.208*** 0.308*** 0.202***
(0.036) (0.051) (0.066) (0.067)
Vertical Individualism 0.076*** 0.009 0.010 0.162***
(0.029) (0.036) (0.055) (0.059)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.246***
-0.104*
-0.314***
-0.293***
(0.040) (0.054) (0.069) (0.078)

230
Political Knowledge 0.047 -0.032 0.019 0.116*
(0.030) (0.039) (0.056) (0.061)
Age 0.004 0.001 0.003 0.004
(0.004) (0.006) (0.009) (0.009)
Education -0.002 -0.010 0.007 0.010
(0.006) (0.008) (0.012) (0.012)
Man -0.026*
-0.026 -0.004 -0.054**
(0.014) (0.018) (0.026) (0.027)
South 0.013 -0.016 -0.032 0.048*
(0.013) (0.018) (0.025) (0.025)
Household Size -0.006 -0.003 -0.012 -0.004
(0.005) (0.007) (0.009) (0.010)
Assigned Socio -0.013 -0.059*** 0.022 0.004
(0.016) (0.019) (0.030) (0.030)
Assigned Personal -0.011 -0.042** 0.022 0.010
(0.016) (0.020) (0.029) (0.031)
Pre-Debate -0.002 0.003 0.022 -0.024
(0.032) (0.046) (0.051) (0.063)
Post-Withdrawal -0.020 -0.020 0.019 -0.059
(0.032) (0.046) (0.054) (0.063)
Constant 0.090 0.222** 0.069 0.131
(0.063) (0.088) (0.110) (0.132)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577

231
R2 0.260 0.166 0.251 0.164
Adjusted R2 0.250 0.135 0.215 0.136
Residual Std. Error 0.249 (df = 1508) 0.182 (df =
513)
0.239 (df =
398)
0.296 (df =
557)
F Statistic 27.822*** (df =
19; 1508)
5.361*** (df =
19; 513)
7.017*** (df =
19; 398)
5.757*** (df =
19; 557)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

232
Table E5: Opposition to Income Redistribution w/ Sample-Level Controls
Dependent variable:
Opposition to Redistribution
(Full) (Democrats) (Independents) (Republicans)
Perceptions of Personal
Scarcity
-0.086**
-0.089*
-0.079 -0.098
(0.035) (0.051) (0.071) (0.063)
Perceptions of
Sociotropic Scarcity
-0.070* 0.137**
-0.038 -0.243***
(0.037) (0.055) (0.073) (0.064)
Economic Insecurity -0.042 -0.031 -0.051 -0.035
(0.026) (0.039) (0.054) (0.044)
Negative Perceptions of
Economy
0.162*** 0.026 0.160*** 0.175***
(0.026) (0.038) (0.053) (0.051)
Household Income 0.008*** 0.009***
-0.0001 0.012***
(0.002) (0.003) (0.004) (0.003)
Conservative Ideology 0.419*** 0.156*** 0.491*** 0.370***
(0.028) (0.048) (0.072) (0.058)
Social Dominance
Orientation
0.300*** 0.225*** 0.157** 0.364***
(0.038) (0.063) (0.072) (0.062)
Vertical Individualism 0.045 -0.030 0.096 0.049
(0.031) (0.045) (0.061) (0.054)
Horizontal Collectivism -0.064 -0.078 -0.169**
-0.014
(0.042) (0.067) (0.076) (0.072)

233
Political Knowledge 0.005 -0.105** 0.126**
-0.020
(0.032) (0.048) (0.061) (0.056)
Age 0.018*** 0.011 0.013 0.026***
(0.005) (0.007) (0.009) (0.008)
Education 0.006 -0.009 0.020 0.011
(0.007) (0.010) (0.013) (0.011)
Man -0.014 -0.004 -0.053*
-0.014
(0.015) (0.022) (0.029) (0.025)
South 0.009 -0.027 0.016 0.014
(0.014) (0.022) (0.028) (0.023)
Household Size 0.002 0.005 -0.004 0.001
(0.005) (0.009) (0.010) (0.009)
Assigned Socio 0.021 -0.009 0.056* 0.014
(0.016) (0.024) (0.033) (0.028)
Assigned Personal 0.005 0.010 0.040 -0.020
(0.017) (0.024) (0.032) (0.029)
Pre-Debate 0.007 0.038 -0.002 0.005
(0.033) (0.057) (0.056) (0.058)
Post-Withdrawal -0.003 0.042 0.011 -0.038
(0.034) (0.057) (0.060) (0.058)
Constant -0.111* 0.067 -0.076 -0.067
(0.066) (0.108) (0.120) (0.122)
Observations 1,528 533 418 577
R2 0.348 0.150 0.268 0.286

234
Adjusted R2 0.340 0.119 0.233 0.261
Residual Std. Error 0.261 (df = 1508) 0.225 (df =
513)
0.261 (df =
398)
0.275 (df = 557)
F Statistic 42.363*** (df =
19; 1508)
4.783*** (df =
19; 513)
7.654*** (df =
19; 398)
11.720*** (df =
19; 557)
Note: *p
<0.1; >**p
<0.05; >***p<0.01

235
Appendix for Paper #3
Appendix F: Search Criteria for Opinion Pieces
Table F1: Overview of Search Criteria using Proquest Central Database for 2020 Sample
Logic Command New York Times Wall Street Journal
-- Publication PUB(new york times (online)) PUB(wall street journal (online)
AND Section SEC(opinion) SEC(opinion)
AND Subject SU(covid-19 OR coronavirus) SU(covid-19 OR coronavirus)
AND Document Type DTYPE(commentary OR opinions) DTYPE(commentary OR opinions)
NOT Document Type DTYPE(editorial OR letter to the
editor)
DTYPE(editorial OR letter to the
editor)
AND Date of Publication January 1, 2020 - May 31, 2020 January 1, 2020 - May 31, 2020
AND Full Text — —
AND Exclude Duplicates — —
Date of Collection June 12, 2020 June 11, 2020
Total articles 164 329

236
Table F2: Overview of Search Criteria using Proquest Central Database for 2021 Sample
Logic Command New York Times Wall Street Journal
-- Publication PUB(new york times (online)) PUB(wall street journal (online)
AND Section SEC(opinion) SEC(opinion)
AND Subject SU(covid-19 OR coronavirus) SU(covid-19 OR coronavirus)
AND Document Type DTYPE(commentary OR opinions) DTYPE(commentary OR opinions)
NOT Document Type DTYPE(editorial OR letter to the
editor)
DTYPE(editorial OR letter to the
editor)
AND Date of Publication January 1, 2020 - May 31, 2021 January 1, 2020 - May 31, 2021
AND Full Text — —
AND Exclude Duplicates — —
Date of Collection July 14, 2021 July 14, 2021
Total articles 351 177

237
Appendix G: Coding Scarcity Mentions
The content analysis presented in this paper relied upon an initial process of inductively
identifying the twelve objects of scarcity framing that were prominent in my sample, followed by
a process of hand-coding each article for whether it mentioned each scarcity object. The method
of hand-coding, as opposed to automated approaches, is valuable insofar as it leverages the human
coder's ability to interpret meaning from a text and evaluate that meaning in terms of coding
categories (Benoit et al. 2016). The interpretation of meaning from a text in relation to a coding
category reflects the kind of natural language processing that comes second nature to human
coders who are linguistically and culturally fluent in the social context surrounding the content at
hand. However, human coding inevitably involves a degree of subjectivity, particularly when the
analysis is conducted by a single human coder, as is the case in this paper. To give the reader a
better sense of the kind of judgment calls that were made while coding, I provide examples from
my content that were coded as scarcity mentions as well as examples that were not coded as such.
The intention here is to illustrate my coding decisions for purposes of clarity. In the
following tables, I present examples that were and were not coded as scarcity mentions alongside
one another. The tables are organized by each scarcity object. The examples presented that were
not coded as a scarcity mention represent content that touched on the topic areas of the relevant
object but did not send a strong enough scarcity signal. The question at hand throughout coding
was as follows: does a given text unit convey a strong enough signal such that the text unit is likely
to activate perceptions of scarcity for a general reader? While coding, I took a cautious approach.
If a given passage seemed on the border in terms of signal strength, I opted to not code it as a
scarcity mention. Note that objects differed in terms of how many ‘border-line’ examples were
documented throughout my coding process. This difference stems from some objects being more
uniform than others in terms of how they appear in the content. Some objects – such as fiscal
scarcity, subsistence scarcity, and labor scarcity – were more consistent in signal strength, resulting
in less borderline examples, while other objects were more varied in signal strength, resulting in
more borderline examples.

238
Table G1: Macroeconomic Scarcity Examples
Coded as Scarcity Mention Not Coded as Scarcity Mention
“With the economy in shambles and the
pandemic ravaging the country, making the
election a referendum on China is perhaps Mr.
Trump's only chance to extend his White House
tenure past January 2021.”
“ The Federal Reserve did what it could Tuesday
to offset the growing economic impact of the
coronavirus by announcing a supersize reduction
in its bench-mark interest rate -- the first time the
Fed has acted between its regularly scheduled
meetings since the financial crisis in 2008”
"The scope and speed of this downturn are
without modern precedent, significantly worse
than any recession since World War II," Mr.
Powell said in a speech delivered online
Wednesday that revealed growing alarm with the
path facing the economy and the potential for an
insufficient policy response...
“Should things go wrong, outbreaks will begin
anew. That will mean we will need to re-engage in
extreme social distancing to stop them, with a
repeat of the same economic shock we’re
experiencing now”
“At the beginning of the pandemic-induced
recession, it was imperative that Congress act
swiftly and massively to prevent financial market
collapse and provide help to individuals and
businesses harmed by shutdowns. Initially, a
figure of $750 billion was floated.”
“If the federal government fails to contain the
spread of the coronavirus, and the economic
outlook darkens, such a broad-based stimulus
may well become necessary”
Lockdowns can destroy the economy, but it's
starting to look as if they have minimal effect on
the spread of Covid-19.
"The response to the virus may be creating more
than a massive economic cost, which on its own
threatens public health"

239
Table G2: Commercial Scarcity Examples
Coded as Scarcity Mention Not Coded as Scarcity Mention
“Unless you have been to New York City, it's hard
to imagine what a hollowed-out shell it has
become. Midtown Manhattan, once the heart of
the city's commercial life, remains a ghost
town.”
“Down south in New York City the idea of
allowing the economic activity that sustains our
health is not entirely absent.”
“This is especially dangerous given mounting
evidence in the economics literature that monetary
and financial excess saps Main Street
productivity rather than bolstering it.”
“To restrict the spread of the coronavirus, the
government needs to put limits on commerce.
The best way to protect people, and the economy,
is to limit economic activity. That is an
unfortunate but inescapable truth. Public health
officials will need to impose quarantines,
businesses will need to cancel meetings”
“It becomes harder to make payments when a
global health crisis is killing sales and your
company is bleeding red ink.”
“At the beginning of the pandemic-induced
recession, it was imperative that Congress act
swiftly and massively to prevent financial market
collapse and provide help to individuals and
businesses harmed by shutdowns”
“The Covid-19 pandemic threatens companies as
well as people. Inevitably it will do further
damage to the global economy as supply lines are
disrupted by quarantines and businesses that
depend on people being out and about—
restaurants, hotels, entertainment providers,
airlines—run short on customers.”
“Nonessential retail, beer gardens and gyms
won’t reopen until next week, restaurants not
until May, and no one can say when draconian
restrictions on international travel will be
eased”

240
Table G3: Job Scarcity Examples
Coded as Scarcity Mention Not Coded as Scarcity Mention
The unemployment rate, which just three months
ago sat near a 50-year low, jumped in April to its
highest level since the Great Depression of the
1930s, wiping out a decade of job gains in a
single month.
“The pandemic has put everything on pause, and
almost every ‘nonessential’ worker, employed or
unemployed, is now enrolled in a de facto home
economics course. Cooking is at the top of the
curriculum. The course will be months or years
long. Even if ‘stay-at-home’ orders are lifted,
cooking will be the most cost-effective way to eat
during a deep recession”
The hellish thing is that when things open up on
some coming Monday in May or June and people
start to move around and interact with each other
again, there will be an increase in new infections,
followed by increases in hospital and ICU
admissions. There seems no way to avoid this. On
the other hand each day America is closed down
more people will be out of work and lose a sense
of hope.
“Democrats insist that the so-called stimulus is
necessary to help the unemployed find work,
but what working parents most need are schools to
reopen, and what’s holding businesses back are
lockdown rules that keep away potential
customers”
Twenty-two million have applied for
unemployment since the pandemic began, and
it's going to get worse.
“Adding increased taxes and regulations to the
mix, as occurred during the Obama era and as Mr.
Biden has promised, further discourages job
growth”
A second wave of job loss is hitting those who
thought they were safe.
“The country will once more be able to plan for
the future, get back to work safely and avoid an
economic depression”

241
Table G4: Fiscal Scarcity Examples
Coded as Scarcity Mention Not Coded as Scarcity Mention
“Several hundred cities struggled on the brink
of default, shrinking their public payrolls, cutting
services and selling public land. Since 2007, more
than 70 American municipalities have entered
bankruptcy, a deluge in comparison to the
three cities that chose that route between 1970
and 2007.”
“Congress also needs to fund the nationwide
network of hospitals and treatment facilities
established after the 2014 Ebola epidemic, which
enables prompt testing and isolation of
patients...that funding is set to expire in four
months”
“What Democrats won't accept responsibility for
is the harmful effects of growing dependency,
long-term reduction in opportunity, and a future
debt crisis.”
“The ECB has been engaged in a concerted
rearguard action since President Christine Lagarde
upset investors and fellow policymakers on
Thursday by saying it was not the bank’s job to
help virus-stricken countries such as Italy on
the debt market”
“The most profligate aren't corporate chiefs but
members of the House, those supposed stewards
of the federal budget who even in these good
times are running a trillion-plus budget
deficit.”
“We know what happened next. Instead of
focusing on economic growth, the Obama
administration advanced an expensive but
ineffective stimulus package and then went all in
on a partisan transformation of the U.S. healthcare
system.”
“Unfortunately, while the enacted aid may be
adequate to cover states’ direct costs of
responding to Covid-19, it is neither generous
enough nor flexible enough to address the
broader fiscal pressures states face from falling
revenues and rising demands on safety net
programs.”
-

242
Table G5: Pocketbook Scarcity Examples
Coded as Scarcity Mention Not Coded as Scarcity Mention
“The United States has long had one of the
highest rates of child poverty in the advanced
world —and then the coronavirus pandemic
aggravated the suffering.”
Even if ‘stay-at-home’ orders are lifted, cooking
will be the most cost-effective way to eat during
a deep recession”
“Since everyone hasn't been vaccinated, many
wouldn't yet be living normally even without
restrictions. But government mandates can make
things worse by taking away people's ability to
socialize and make a living.”
“Easing financial strains and burnout for
caregivers can mean better, more compassionate
treatment, which in turn can improve quality of
life and outcomes for our most vulnerable
citizens”
“Already struggling to make a living in
construction, he fears the loss of his livelihood,
his house and his ability to afford food.”
“Here’s the stone-cold truth: There are only
different hellish ways to adapt to a pandemic and
save both lives and livelihoods.”
“They cannot afford housing and will soon face
homelessness. Their children do not have access
to remote learning and are falling behind. They
are incurring crushing debt.”
“Business leaders should expand paid sick leave to
all employees for the duration of a Covid-19
illness. Nobody should have to fear losing
income for doing the right thing of staying at
home to reduce the spread”

243
Table G6: Resource Scarcity Examples
Coded as Scarcity Mention Not Coded as Scarcity Mention
“Testing has proved the persistent Achilles’ heel
in the U.S. response. Even in ‘hot zones,’ because
of a shortage of tests, they were often rationed
to the very ill or essential workers.”
“These plans must be based on the reality that
there will be upticks or resurgences in infection
until a vaccine is developed, even after we
succeed in flattening the curve”
“Of all the coronavirus nightmares, the one most
haunting doctors, governors and hospital
administrators is finding themselves without
enough ventilators to go around…in a shortage,
who lives and who dies could become a coin
toss.”
“At a time like this, when so many sacrifices are
being made for the sake of the health of the
overall community, surely we don’t want to force
companies to hoard their capital, any more than
we want people to hoard toilet paper”
“The rush for widespread testing has also created
unprecedented global demand for essential test
components, like the reagents needed to process
RNA and the swabs used to collect samples for
RT-PCR tests. Major shortages could persist for
months in the United States and elsewhere:
Demand is likely to outstrip even increased
production, as more and more countries try to test
an ever-larger share of their populations.”
“Then we need to take the steps nearly every
single plan recommends going forward: We need
to ramp up the testing infrastructure to
acceptable levels. We need to create the public
health workforce to conduct contact tracing and
isolation”
“The scramble for medical equipment was a
telling moment for the American economy
because it revealed something alarming: The
United States can no longer produce what it
needs in a time of crisis, even if those things
were invented here.”
“The coronavirus crisis and government response
will yield other important lessons and policy
improvements, such as stockpiling essential
equipment and repatriating the manufacture of
pharmaceuticals and other critical goods”

244
Table G7: Provisional Scarcity Examples
Coded as Scarcity Mention Not Coded as Scarcity Mention
“... after half a century of underinvestment in
the United States, many 20th-percentile
American workers haven’t graduated from high
school, can’t read well, aren’t very numerate,
struggle with drugs or alcohol, or have
impairments that reduce productivity.”
“We cannot be competitive in the global economy
or be a strong democracy unless we guarantee
quality education -- from child care through
graduate school -- to all Americans”
“Much of the danger we face now grows out of
America’s tattered social safety net —the biting
cost and outright lack of health care and child
care and elder care…As the virus gains a
foothold on our shores, many Americans are only
now waking up to the ways these flaws in the
safety net cascade into one another.”
“This is an aspect of vaccination delivery that
would be impossible to replicate in the U.S., with
its hodgepodge of unconnected medical
providers and insurers”
At a time when the pandemic has hit the disabled
and elderly the hardest, they also face the erosion
of a critical income lifeline, Supplemental
Security Income (S.S.I.). The program has
collapsed during the pandemic…At this rate,
more than 230,000 low-income disabled and
elderly Americans will miss out on vital cash
benefits and access to health care (via
Medicaid, which S.S.I. recipients generally
qualify for) in one year.
“But plenty of people are in far worse shape. I
feel both guilty about the people in essential jobs
who are still out there working, and worried about
what will happen to them if they don’t have jobs
in a country that does so little to help them.”
Baltimore began defunding law enforcement and
turning a blind eye to criminal behavior a decade
ago, and since then nearly 3,000 of its residents
have been murdered.
“As in New York, Pennsylvania officials failed to
protect nursing-home residents from the ravages
of the virus”

245
Table G8: Subsistence Scarcity Examples
Coded as Scarcity Mention Not Coded as Scarcity Mention
“Many political and opinion leaders say
minimizing Covid-19 deaths should be the sole
focus of policy. It shouldn't take millions starving
for them to acknowledge that we should also think
about the economic impact of different options for
reducing Covid-19 deaths.”
“The night before his discharge, unable to sleep, I
felt so trapped and terrified that I called a suicide
hotline…”
“During the bankruptcy episode, the water
department turned off water at 900 houses a
day, threatening a public health crisis.”
-
“While the United States has poured $3 trillion
into relief from the effects of Covid-19 —money
that will run out soon and that hasn’t prevented
young children in one in six households from
not having enough to eat”
-
“Families are at deeper risk of becoming unstable
and losing their housing. We’ve had to extend
rental assistance to prevent them from falling into
homelessness again.”
-

246
Table G9: Information Scarcity Examples
Coded as Scarcity Mention Not Coded as Scarcity Mention
“Though good data is lacking, variant viruses
with evasion potential may also have a role in
‘breakthrough’ infections in vaccinated people.”
“On television they flood us with information,
more, it sometimes seems, than we can handle.
They talk about models, curves, numbers,
percentages. They tell us everything except what
we want to know: how the coronavirus began,
where it is headed, and when it will end.”
“Much more could be known and, in all
likelihood, some scientists out there have good, if
not definitive, answers. And yet, the lack of
consistent, reliable and regularly updated
information on the key measures of this outbreak
is startling”
“In the beginning, with little information about
the virus and covid deaths surging in New York
and Washington state, the response of the publichealth authorities, led by epidemiologists, was
understandable.”
“While the United States has poured $3 trillion
into relief from the effects of covid-19 – money
that will run out soon and that hasn’t prevented
young children in one in six households from not
having enough to eat – the nation hasn’t invested
nearly enough in science and in the scientific
tools, like testing, vaccines, therapies, and
research, to combat it.”
“In a startling statement, the WHO’s Michael
Ryan claimed in a Monday briefing: ‘here we
have a disease for which we have no vaccine, no
treatment, we don’t fully understand
transmission, we don’t fully understand case
mortality, but what we have been genuinely
heartened by is that unlike influenza, where
countries have fought back, where they’ve put in
place strong measures, we’ve remarkably seen that
the virus is suppressed.’”
“Some overburdened public information sites
have buckled.”
“With significant uncertainty remaining, we
should be throwing everything we have at this
highly infectious disease”

247
Table G10: Leadership Scarcity Examples
Coded as Scarcity Mention Not Coded as Scarcity Mention
“Combine that with an administration unwilling
to intervene to force businesses to act en masse to
resolve a public health crisis like this, and you get
what we got: a messy, uncoordinated underresponse, defined by shortages and fingerpointing.”
“The fact that I am almost enjoying this period of
isolation -- except for bouts of paranoia about
imminent death and rage at the incompetence of
our nation’s leadership -- makes me sharply
aware of my privilege”
“So far, Donald Trump’s response to the
coronavirus combines the worst features of
autocracy and of democracy, mixing opacity and
propaganda with leaderless inefficiency”
“The federal government’s lack of integrity has
been destructive. No opening of America will be
sustained until it’s got right.”
“A lack of decisive action from the federal
government has already cost thousands of
American lives. It is the widespread actions of the
concerned public that have made the worst case
scenario less horrific”
“‘The failure of leadership here cannot be
understated,’ said Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, a
writer and the wife of an Orthodox rabbi, about
those who encouraged the funeral”
“And at a time when expertise is paramount,
Trump has hallowed out the government
agencies responsible for the tasks at hand”
“The City has offered resources, logistical help,
and public health expertise. Unfortunately, the
leadership of the school district and the
educators’ union can’t seem to get their act
together...so far they have earned an F”

248
Table G11: Temporal Scarcity Examples
Coded as Scarcity Mention Not Coded as Scarcity Mention
"We honestly don't know how much longer we're
going to have to wait," said Audrey Schaefer of
the National Independent Venue Association
(NIVA), a group created during the pandemic to
lobby for federal aid. "Thousands of live venues
need the money fast, and for many others it's
now too late."
“There is one way to keep this from happening:
The federal government can step in and offer aid
to state governments. But it must act quickly –
and at sufficient scale”
“In hot spots, my colleagues are dealing with
unimaginable pressure. It’s understandable that
physicians and nurses feel they cannot spare the
extra minutes needed to calm a frightened older
adult”
“The longer it takes to get the virus under
control, the harder it may become.”
“That leaves the average small business, which
has less than a month of cash on hand, in a pinch.
Congress’s latest economic rescue package
included a $350 billion small-business loan
program. Unfortunately, the system in place to
distribute relief money is already overwhelmed.
The money may not arrive in time.”
“At the beginning of the pandemic-induced
recession, it was imperative that Congress act
swiftly and massively to prevent financial market
collapse and provide help to individuals and
businesses harmed by shutdowns”
“Doctors caring for Covid-19 patients are about
to be overwhelmed. They won’t have time to
deal with the administrative burdens of enrolling
in a clinical trial”
“Designing the conditions for such targeting isn’t
easy, since every requirement will slow the
money’s deployment and speed is of the essence”

249
Table G12: Labor Scarcity Examples
Coded as Scarcity Mention Not Coded as Scarcity Mention
As new Covid-19 cases surged, shortages of
trained personnel emerged, impeding the
vaccination effort.
“The rumors about Israel’s hospitals were
ominous: There was no more room. The medical
staff was exhausted.”
“In addition to the power of holding a hand,
family members coordinate care and serve as a
valuable safety net, a partnership that was badly
needed when many hospitals had staffing
shortages”
“...said Daniel Philbin, a cardiologist at the New
England Heart and Vascular Institute in
Manchester, N.H. ‘The hospital systems really
are facing an incredible crunch because of this –
the longer the curve gets pushed out, the more
they face difficult decisions about employment.”
“But the Biden stimulus calls for checks of $400 a
week in addition to state checks through
September. At that level, the majority of the
unemployed would make more by not working.
Employers already complain that they can’t
find employees”
-
“As Myra Taylor, a nurse in Pittsburgh who has
been at the bedside for 20 years, told me: “Going
into the pandemic, we were not prepared. We
never had enough nurses and support staff.”
-

250
Appendix H: Analysis of Overall Scarcity Framing Measured as a Binary Variable
Table H1: Frequencies and Chi-Squared Tests for Articles Mentioning Scarcity
The frequency counts represent the total number of articles in each publication that mention scarcity at
least once.
Time Frame NYT frequency WSJ frequency Chi-squared and P-value
Full sample 114 111 Χ² (1, N=300) = 0.07, p = .790
2020 sample 62 60 Χ² (1, N=150) = 0.04, p = .834
2021 sample 52 51 Χ² (1, N=150) = 0, p = 1.00

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Why is inequality so pronounced in the United States? My dissertation offers one in-road to this multifaceted question by unpacking the psychology of scarcity in American political life. In the United States, the construct of scarcity is often casually understood in essentialist terms -- that is, as a straightforward characteristic of the natural world that is typically a source of social conflict. In Paper 1, I challenge this understanding of scarcity by analyzing the influence of culture through an historical lens. Towards this end, I conduct a narrative analysis of primary source texts that embody the worldview of settler-colonial America, including John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and Thomas Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population. Using this approach, I examine the cultural schemas by which scarcity psychology has shaped American political development. This analysis culminates in a study of welfare policy, where I examine how cultural schemas linking scarcity with competition and hierarchy have shaped welfare contraction throughout American history. Building on this analysis, Paper 2 leverages original survey data and demonstrates the nuanced patterns by which perceived scarcity reinforces inequality via racial, economic, and distributive attitudes among white Americans. In addition, Paper 3 leverages a content analysis of U.S. media commentary to develop a theory of scarcity framing in which narratives of scarcity serve as a rhetorical tool by which political actors advance their ideological prerogatives. Altogether, my dissertation demonstrates the socially constructed nature of scarcity psychology and points to the possibility for more cooperative political responses.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Brisbane, Laura (author)

Core Title The political psychology of scarcity in American society: a study of culture, discourse, and public opinion

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Political Science and International Relations

Degree Conferral Date 2025-05

Publication Date 02/03/2025

Defense Date 01/16/2025

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American political culture,American political development,Inequality,media framing,OAI-PMH Harvest,public opinion,Public Policy,scarcity psychology

Format theses (aat)

Language English

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Advisor Crigler, Ann (committee chair), Barnes, Jeb (committee member), Goodnight, Gerald Thomas (committee member), Junn, Jane (committee member)

Creator Email laurabrisbane77@gmail.com,lbrisban@usc.edu

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