Previous article FreeAsk a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Katherine J. Cramer about Listening as a Way of Democratic and Scholarly LifeInterviewer: Alyson ColeInterviewer: Alyson Cole Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAlyson Cole:Your award-winning book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,1 introduced two key concepts—rural consciousness and the politics of resentment—to political scientists and the public that helped provide a frame for the 2016 presidential election. To what extent do you think these two concepts still explain our current political moment? If you were to revise these concepts, what would you amend? Are any other frames needed to understand how Americans make sense of government and the impact of politics on their lives?Katherine Cramer:I do think that “rural consciousness” and the “politics of resentment” are very much still at work in the United States, perhaps more than when I was doing the fieldwork for my book, between 2007 and 2012. We have seen rural areas across the nation lean even more heavily towards the Republican party, and resentment as a political force has stayed in operation, even fomented by elites into anger and hatred. What I now understand so much more clearly is the way these things operate as distractions. Here is what I mean. When my book came out in early 2016, and especially after the presidential election later that year, I received many messages, primarily emails, from readers or people who had heard me speak. I had a hard time keeping up, but wanted to learn from these messages so ended up analyzing them systematically.2 Most of the correspondence I received was from left-leaning people who wanted to share their thoughts on the perspectives of white rural Wisconsinites that they had read about in my book. Some of those notes expressed gratitude, but many of them suggested exasperation. People asked things like, “How can they be so intolerant?” Or, “How can they be so uninformed?” Or, “Where are they getting their news?” The thing that fascinated me, and disturbed me, was that those are the same questions I had heard Republican-leaning people in my fieldwork ask about Democrats.The people of the United States have spent a lot of energy, especially since the 2016 election, talking about how the problem is other people in the population. But all of that energy we are spending on hating each other is distracting us from what I think is a more fundamental problem: the economic and political systems currently in place do not represent or address the concerns of the majority of people in this country. To the extent that we spend time talking about what is wrong with other people in the population we are not spending time talking about how the people in charge are not doing right by the vast majority of people who live here. My focus in the Politics of Resentment was on white, rural, older Wisconsinites. But clearly, they are the not the only ones in the United States not feeling heard.My amendments to rural consciousness and the politics of resentment are primarily about racism. I made two decisions in doing my research and writing for that book that I do not regret, but that resulted in me treating racism too lightly. First, I am not from a rural place. I grew up in Wisconsin in a relatively small place in the broader Milwaukee metro area. It was especially important to me to treat the people I observed with dignity and compassion and not self-righteousness. Doing the work I do, inviting myself into the lives of people and trying to characterize the perspectives in their head, I am an intruder. I am also taking the liberty of speaking on their behalf. There is an arrogance in that I try to acknowledge and keep in check. It is my duty in my role as a listener to listen with respect.The other decision I made was to try to write my book so that readers came away from it with a nuanced understanding of the perspectives of the people I spent time with. I did not want people to read my book and walk away thinking, “See, the problem is that those people in rural Wisconsin are all a bunch of racists.” If you are someone who is committed to racial justice, what good does that conclusion do? Perhaps it motivates you to see rural Wisconsinites as the enemy, to organize and take action so that they have as little voice as possible in our current politics. That is not the strategy for eliminating racial injustice that I seek. Instead, what I am aiming for is a politics in which people in the United States see, with complexity, the humanity of each other. That means recognizing racism and other forms of hate within each other, but understanding peoples’ hopes and concerns, their perceptions of the challenges they face in their everyday lives, that create the conditions for resentment and the potential for leaders to feed that resentment steroids and grow it into hate. I tried to describe in great detail their perspectives and the conditions in which they lived to try to make them understandable. I wanted people to see humanity, not caricatures, so that those of us who want to eliminate racism can identify tools, other than hate, to combat it. Perhaps some readers came away with a nuanced understanding of the way racism is intertwined with economic concerns and perceptions of who is deserving and who works hard, but I did not do enough in that book, or perhaps in the publicity of it, to make that a universal take-away.Another result of my desire to treat the people I spent time with respectfully meant I was resistant to reading too much into what they did not say. I noted in the book on how little the people I spent time with talked about race, and that when the people in rural areas talked about race it was typically with respect to Native Americans. (Native Americans comprise about 1.1% of the population in Wisconsin, with most of our twelve tribal nations and communities located in the northern part of the state.) I should have written more about that absence of a discussion of race. A friend and mentor, Jacquie Boggess, gave me a copy of Toni Morrison’s book Playing in the Dark,3 which has been transformative for my understanding of the way racism shows up in our culture. But the lessons of that book have taken awhile to sink in. I have learned that the deepness with which racism is a part of the American story means that absence of its mention is not evidence of its irrelevance, but of how profoundly it is a part of our culture.I can illustrate by explaining this with respect to religion, which does not operate in an equivalent way to racism in U.S. society, but I hope the analogy is helpful. Sometimes people ask me why religion did not come up in the conversations I observed. Geoff Layman at Notre Dame offered this explanation to me. (My apologies to him if I am not characterizing this rightly): The versions of Protestantism and Catholicism that are common in Wisconsin differ from Bible Belt Christianity in that many people in Wisconsin do not normally have an ongoing dialogue with God as if God is on their shoulder advising them across the course of the day. They do not wear their Christianity on their sleeves, as people of more evangelical denominations might. But Christianity is very much a part of Wisconsin culture. Just because people do not talk about it often does not mean it is not a central part of how people think about themselves, their families and values. I have learned to seriously consider how race and racism are a similar, sometimes silent part of the culture.Another thing I would amend in The Politics of Resentment is to make it clearer that the rural consciousness I observed is not the only place-based identity infused with a perception of distributive injustice. It is one that I learned about, judged it to be politically consequential, and thought it was worth bringing to light. I would also make it clearer that this rural consciousness may not be unique to Wisconsin. The particular version I wrote about is likely unique to the Upper Midwest, where the rural population is predominantly white.I have learned a lot from the feedback I have received about that book, as well as from the experiences we have had in the United States since its publication. My ability to see how profoundly race was intertwined with the story I told has grown a great deal since 2016. I thought I understood how racism ran through white public opinion in the United States. But I admit until the political success of Donald Trump, I did not understand what a reservoir of hate there is in this country, and just how threatened some people are or can be convinced to be, by the demographic changes we are experiencing. I am not so naïve anymore.4I have also learned a great deal about how profoundly racism is intertwined with our economy. The work I have engaged in since 2016 has enabled me to hear how race operates in the understandings people have of the economy.5 I am also now much more aware of the central role that greed plays in our economy. Here is a thought experiment I do often these days: What would this country look like if the economy the founders had created was based on the well-being of all people, rather than on greed? I am not talking about socialism. I am talking about putting systems into place that prioritize physical and mental health, the health of the planet, and the sustainability of our society and political system. If the goal is well-being as opposed to accumulating excess, perhaps then it is not necessary to create and foster racism to divide people so that they do not recognize their common interest in policies that ensure sufficiency among all people.AC:Would you please expand on how other factors, such as race, gender, and religious identities are part of “rural consciousness? You have also published books about race and social identity6 and I wonder how you see those issues being related, if at all.KC:Part of the reason that the rural vs. urban divide has become so powerful in contemporary politics is that it symbolizes so many of our significant social divisions, including race, gender, class, and religion. The urban vs. rural divide maps onto the partisan divide, but more importantly it also maps onto many divides among significant social groups in society: college educated vs. non-college educated; people of color vs. whites; LGBTQ+ awareness vs. binary genders; non-traditional gender roles vs. traditional gender roles; liberalism vs. conservatism, etc. By “maps onto” I am not saying that everyone in urban areas fits the first thing in all of these dichotomies, and everyone in rural areas fits the latter. These are stereotypes. But they are stereotypes that are rampant in the public mind and politicians are exploiting them.Political science is more aware than ever that a variety of social identities are lining up with partisanship,7 but I argue that this is not because people are becoming more political. People in general are disgusted with politics. But our political leaders have found it useful to brand themselves as on the side of a variety of identities that people do care about, which has over time made these divisions crisper in the public mind. There is a fantastic paper by Pat Egan that shows how people have shifted identities like ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and class to line up with their partisanship.8 The way I read this evidence is not that people are strongly identifying with one party or another, then lurching to change their identity accordingly. Instead, right now in U.S. society, there are caricatures of types of people. In popular culture, you are either this type or that type. Partisanship is one aspect of those types. So even though individuals are actually way more complex and nuanced than the outlines of this or that type, our communications environment, so focused on provocation and shouting, may be causing people to align themselves with one or the other camp. People identify with a certain type and over time are bringing their various sub-identities into line. I think the rural vs. urban divide continues to be powerful because identifying with one or the other has become even more symbolic of one of these two types. Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s work on worldviews has been really helpful to me for understanding this.9AC:I am intrigued by what you identified as a fundamental problem of ours: the economic and political systems currently in place do not represent or address the concerns of the majority of people in this country. Are there reforms that might make this better?KC:There are many things that we could do as a country to improve representation. I think of three general areas of potential reforms. One set of reforms pertains to improving the ability of members of the public to communicate their preferences to elected and non-elected policy makers. Those in the business of education should find ways to foster the practical skills of democracy, like writing a letter to an elected official, starting a petition, or getting an advisory or binding referendum on a ballot, as well as the many skills that are currently needed to exercise one’s right to vote. But we should also consider that the problem is not our citizens, but instead our institutions and our leaders. And that leads me to the second and third set of reforms, changes to our institutions and the behavior of our leaders within them. Members of the public are much more likely to participate if they perceive that the people running the show actually care about them and will be responsive. So the second set of reforms this country ought to consider is about changing the shape of our institutions, things like increasing the number of representatives in the House of Representatives, implementing non-partisan redistricting commissions, and passing and implementing serious campaign finance reform. Third, we should also reform the ways elected and non-elected policy makers listen to the public. Campaign finance reform would also help in this respect, by freeing up some of our representatives’ time. If they spent less time on raising money, they could spend more time with constituents, ideally in the places their constituents normally spend time. But we should also create new ways of listening, beyond polling, watching social media, or reading constituency mail. Two examples are the Local Voices Network that a large team of people at the Center for Constructive Communication at the MIT Media Lab, the affiliated nonprofit Cortico, and I have created and implemented; as well as the Portals Project that Vesla Weaver and colleagues have made great use of.10 We would also do well to bring down or minimize the barriers among members of marginalized groups to running for office. Candidate training programs appear to be an effective way to get people to run.11 Those of us in higher education should also consider how we can impart the importance of listening and learning to our students. As long as college-educated people are more likely to run for office, we would all benefit from them carrying into the rest of their lives a vigorous ethic of the need for listening and compassion for others in the population.AC:What do you think the impact of COVID-19 has been and will be on rural consciousness?KC:I do not know if COVID-19 deepened rural consciousness, but it certainly did not lessen it. COVID-19 could have united people across places in the United States, but that is not the frame former President Trump and other opinion leaders chose to use. One of the things I have engaged in since 2016 is a close collaboration with Deb Roy, his Center for Constructive Communication (formerly the Laboratory for Social Machines) at the MIT Media Lab, and their partner nonprofit, Cortico, that I mentioned above. They were ingesting and transcribing content from talk radio stations from across the country during the pandemic. That data, which captured hosts’ as well as callers’ commentaries, became one way I was able to listen to public thoughts during the height of the pandemic. I listened primarily to local shows in the northern United States, which were mainly, but not exclusively, right-leaning. I heard several things that helped me observe how COVID-19 was serving to maintain, if not deepen, rural vs. urban divides. People in smaller communities initially talked about the pandemic as an urban issue, and resented shut-downs that they viewed as addressing a problem affecting places of higher population density. They talked about this halt to the economy as yet another major obstacle to rural communities, which had not recovered from the Great Recession to the extent that urban areas had. I heard that perspective on left-leaning as well as right-leaning shows. Second, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first started to recommend mask-wearing, some hosts on conservative stations supported this, talked about it as common sense and similar to refraining from smoking in bars and restaurants. One host in Duluth, Minnesota, even equated it with the duty he felt while serving in the Marines to protect the lives of his fellow soldiers. He understood that mask-wearing is a simple measure that is useful for protecting other people. But that tune changed quickly as President Trump, and other opinion leaders such as national talk radio hosts, started questioning whether masks were necessary, questioned the authority of the CDC, and framed mask-wearing and other recommendations and mandates as infringements of individual rights. As case counts rose in rural places, the relatively inadequate healthcare in many of our rural communities exacerbated the sense that people making decisions in the cities do not understand the challenges that rural people face, as well as the perception that all the infrastructure and wealth is in the nations’ cities. All of this together fed the view that rural places do not get what they deserve in terms of resources, attention, and respect.AC:Can you share with Polity readers more about your innovative methodologies, I am thinking specifically about your “listening practices.” How might that be taught to other political scientists? Can it be emulate/reproduced?KC:While I was working on that talk radio analysis, Paul Pierson at UC-Berkeley gave me a name for the approach I often use in my work: “analytic listening.” I like that and think it fits. His label is for an approach in which I attempt to listen carefully to the people whose political thought I am trying to understand, and then look for patterns in what they say. I aim to listen to a wide enough array of people so that there is variation with respect to characteristics I expect to be important for their understandings. I have also started to use the term “public thought” rather than “public opinion,” on the suggestion of my colleague Deb Roy. We have gravitated to that term because we are interested in much more than policy preferences, vote choices and political attitudes, like preferences on government spending. We believe that understanding other things, such as peoples’ hopes, concerns, wishes, challenges, and identities is essential for fostering understanding among people in a democracy and for informing public policy choices. Analytic listening is notable because typically scholars use mass sample surveys to study public opinion. Surveys are an important and extremely useful tool. But they are only one tool. As a field, we need to develop additional ways to understand why people hold the perspectives as well as the preferences that they do.I have had the opportunity to explain the method I use in more detail in a forthcoming chapter in a Handbook on Politics and Public Opinion, edited by Tom Rudolph, and in a handbook on Doing Good Qualitative Research, edited by Jennifer Cyr and Sara Wallace Goodman.12 The central thing that interests me is the way people make sense of politics, including their relationship to other people in society and their relationships to their governments. I have found no better way to study that than to listen to conversations among groups of people who know one another, in a place that they normally spend time in. Small group conversations of people who know each other are ideal for me, since those conversations tend to bring out references to their social identities. From my very first years as a political scientist, I have always found social identity to be central to political thought and understanding.13 People are first and foremost social, not political, beings. Politics is just not that important to most people. When they do get around to caring about politics, they use the lenses to make sense of it that they use to talk about many other things. A big part of the perspectives that people use to make sense of the world are their notions of, “What kind of a person am I? What is appropriate for someone like me to think and do?” Generally, I listen to people talk and I try to build in enough variation that patterns—usually, consistencies in understanding among people who share a social identity or objective circumstance—become visible.AC:Might you also discuss the work you have done in coordination with the Center for Constructive Communication at MIT?KC:I was very fortunate to meet Deb Roy shortly after the 2016 presidential election. We quickly realized we had shared concerns about the nature of communication in our democracy. We were both concerned about the lack of opportunities for people in the population to really listen to each other, to reflect, and to understand each other with nuance. Yes, we have more ways than ever to communicate with one another, but the main strategy for social communication these days is social media, and it is toxic. Communication on most social media platforms is about provoking, shouting, and getting attention which often reverts to the basest part of human nature like drawing battle lines of us vs. them, as opposed to fostering compassion and understanding.With Deb and an extraordinary team of people at Cortico and the Center for Constructive Communication, we created the Local Voices Network (LVN). This is a human-centered platform for enabling communication that fosters understanding. It pulls together small groups of community members to talk with one another in discussions facilitated by a community member about their hopes and their concerns and their wishes for what will be different in their lives and communities. The conversations are recorded and transcribed and then uploaded to a platform that enables the participants, participants in other conversations in the network, policy makers, journalists, and other leaders to listen. They can use the platform to easily search through and make sense of the conversations, and to hear any portion of them. LVN has grown from a pilot in Madison, Wisconsin, made possible by dozens of amazing volunteers and talented staff, to over 1,100 conversations in which over 6,000 people have participated. It has been used for purposes like the hiring of a police chief in Madison and in a Boston mayoral election. I have used it with my students at UW-Madison to enable them to listen to each other and in listening sessions for the Commission on Reimagining the Economy (CORE) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Meeting Deb and launching into this collaboration has truly been a gift, because it has enabled me to channel my scholarly and personal concerns about the health of our democracy into a concrete project that is a force for good. It lifts up the voices of people who are not normally heard, through a platform that ensures these voices do not evaporate, and enables those voices to be easily shared to foster better understanding of community members and accountability of leaders.AC:Turnout among young people was surprisingly high in the 2022 midterms. How can we get more of our students to stay engaged politically? What do you think all college students should know about American politics by the time they graduate?KC:Political science tells us that there is nothing more motivating for participation in politics than for a peer to invite you and encourage you to jump in.14 On my campus we use that insight to foster participation in elections through the Badger Vote Coalition. This is a student-led group of students, staff, and faculty from across the university that ensures that our students have everything they need to participate in elections. The creativity and enthusiasm of the students carries it. They encourage other students to vote and teach us older folks what motivates young people and how they communicate.The electoral engagement of young adults is so important for the future of this democracy because of the prevalence of election denialism and because political science teaches us that if people form the habit of voting early on they tend to keep it through their life.15 There are two things I like to emphasize with young adults with respect to voting. One is to remind them of examples of young people making a difference through elections. An important deterrent to participating is the perception that your voice does not matter. I think it is also important to point out to young adults who are college students that by virtue of obtaining a college degree they will be part of an elite group of people in American society. It might be hard to notice when you are a college student, but only 38% of adults over twenty-five in the United States have a college degree. College graduates tend to become professionals, and professionals are often the ones with decision-making power across the sectors of our society. In the democracy that I want to see, if you are a decision-maker, you not only have a duty to participate, you have a duty to listen to people whom your decisions affect. This holds for their professional lives, but it also holds for their lives as democratic citizens. Those of us who have the right to vote, have a duty to vote. We also therefore have a duty to try to understand the lives of the people whom our votes will affect.AC:Can you share what you are working on now and something about your research process, i.e., how you come to study the issues you do and how frame the questions you seek to answer?KC:I am working on three main things these days, that are trying to address the illness of our democracy in various ways. I am trying to, first, build things to overcome the lack of listening, second, work with others to develop policy that will help, and third, research how we got into this state of affairs. The collaboration with the Center for Constructive Communication and Cortico is the “building things” part of my work right now. To do the second (work with others to develop policy), I was honored to accept an invitation to co-chair the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on Reimagining our Economy (CORE) with Ann Fudge and Nicholas Lemann. I have had the privilege to work with the extraordinary staff at the Academy, the other co-chairs, and a commission made up of leaders representing a range of perspectives and sectors, including academia, business, government, the arts, labor, journalism, and civil society since the summer of 2021. We are committed to rethinking the values and principles that underpin our economy, to listen extensively to people whose voices are not normally included in conversations about economic policy, and to propose policies and practices that will enable more people in the United States to thrive. Working on the CORE commission, like working on LVN, has been an enormous boost of hope, because the co-chairs, the staff, and the commissioners are all committed to working together to understand the challenges facing people in the middle- and lower-income tiers, developing solutions, and importantly, promoting them.The third thing I’ve been working on has not been such a boost of hope, but has been enormously enriching, and that is a book collaboration with Larry Bartels. We are using Kent Jennings’s political socialization data to try to understand how white people who were graduates of the high school class of 1965 responded politically to the social and economic changes of the twentieth century. Working on this project with Larry has not only been a way to understand how our democracy had gotten into the difficult spot that it has, as well as a way for me to learn from Larry, a scholar I have admired since I was an undergrad, but it is also a way to honor Kent. I owe a lot to Kent. He made my fantastic life possible, and he has given so much to the discipline of political science in the data he collected and made publicly available, the knowledge he contributed, and in the intensive mentoring and friendship he has given to so many of us.What Larry and I are doing in our project is re-analyzing the survey data, which was collected in 1965, 1973, 1982, and 1997, as well as conducting several dozen in-depth interviews with the original respondents. We are using these two sources of information as complementary glimpses into the study members’ responses to economic and cultural change. Changes in religiosity, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, women’s rights, increasing economic inequality, and decreasing mobility have all shaken up what it means to be a white person in the United States and that has had important political implications.I say that this project has not been a boost of hope for a number of reasons. These results are still somewhat preliminary, but Larry and I have learned from the data that the socioeconomic status of the communities in which these people a