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The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Cramer Katherine J. . Chicago, IL : The University of Chicago Press , 2016. 285p. $90.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.
Review Symposium: The Politics of Resentment
The inability to assess the thought processes underlying political and social attitudes is a source of frustration for many public opinion and political behavior scholars. How survey respondents rationalize their thoughts and opinions, respond to countervailing thoughts, and defend their opinions in the face of contradictory information are usually inaccessible. While the incorporation of experimental methodology in the public opinion survey has made it possible to delve below the surface of political attitudes, Katherine Cramer, in The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, offers an interpretative approach capable of capturing the motivations underlying perceptions of government. And, it just so happens that this approach tackles an incredibly important and timely concept; resentment.
Through observations of conversations among thirty-nine groups over a five-year period in twenty-seven different over communities in Wisconsin, Cramer illuminates the way people arrive at preferences for less government. There is no doubt that Cramer's herculean efforts to systematize the selection of groups and the analysis of verbatim responses is now the standard bearer of qualitative public opinion research.
In interacting with small groups of rural residents of Wisconsin, Cramer uncovers a rural consciousness that encompasses a sense of resentment toward people who live in urban society. Cramer needs to be commended for the conceptualization of resentment and not being constrained by the ANES racial resentment battery of questions, which seems to be the norm nowadays. We...