Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

In explaining why the United States has much less in the way of redistributive social and economic policy, many political scientists and economists point to the ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of the US. The theory is that people don’t mind paying high taxes that go to poor people, so long as the poor people look like them. In Sweden, for example, there’s a pretty good chance that the tax revenues are going to Swedes that look like Swedish taxpayers. And very smart social scientists think this effect is actually incredibly important. Ed Glaeser says that “As a result of American racial heterogeneity and as a result of the stability of American institutions, America is far less generous in welfare spending than other developed countries.”

Now, this argument has caused some internal angst among left-wingers. We want more social welfare funding and redistribution, but we’re not huge fans of the hemogeniety that seems to be a prerequistite. Sherri Berman, who wrote an excellent history of social democracy in Europe, tells leftists “that if you want an order based on social solidarity and the priority of social goods over individual interests, some basic sense of fellow feeling is required to get that order into place and keep it politically sustainable.”

But since doing this racially is problematic, many lefties have tried to conjure some form of acceptable, liberal nationalism that could provide a common point around which Americans would advocate for redistribution. For Richard Rorty, it was the developed, contingent moral sense that suffering and cruelty are wrong. For Barack Obama, in his race speech, it was the specter of corporations shifting jobs overseas that people of all races could unite against in pursuit of more left-wing economic policies. David Miller, a leftie political theorist in good standing, wrote an entire book justifying nationalism, including recongizing special bonds to ones countrymen, as a legitimate political and even moral stance.

In case you’re  still reading, here’s what I’ve leading up to. Over at the Monkey Cage, Henry Farrell highlighted a paper written by Moses Shayo which makes predictions that are “starkly counter-intuitive about the relationship between national identity and preferences over redistribution.” The key finding is that “in most economically advanced democracies, national identification reduces support for redistribution.” And, it’s true, the negative correlation between national identification (measured by some scale) and the amount of income that the lowest quintile gains through redistribution is “indeed striking.”

But I’m not so sure that the finding makes Shoyo’s paper ” one of the most important articles in political science over the last several years.” That’s because I don’t think anyone every really argued that it was pure, ideological nationalism or identification as a member of a nation that drove redistribution. If that were the argument Sherman or Glaeser were making, they would soon realize that the United States disproved that thesis. The United States, despite supposedly low levels of solidarity that are the reason for a paucity of redistribution among industrialized democracies, is in many ways the most nationalistic of all. Politicians deploy our symbols endlessly, we have a messianic self conception, our president refers to us as the “last, best hope of earth” and so on and so forth. And, if stereotypes about entire regions mean anything, it’s supposedly social democratic Europe where national distinctions and nationalism are falling away the quickest.

But then how do we explain Shoyo’s results? While his ingenious model (and it is quite clever) explains the correlation between his measure of nationalism and redistribution, the old Berman/Glaeser model still holds up when it comes to ethnic and social homogeniety. I don’t think very many people ever claimed that high levels of redistribution where dependent on some abstract feeling of national identity, but instead on ethnic and social commonality.

You see this distinction most readily in American politics, where the recipients of government assistance are assumed to be or depicted as lazy and undeserving. And more importantly — black (or latino), but not not-American. Now, one can argue that this type of ethnic preference is just a form of ethinc-nationalism, but that strikes me as bit too abstract. Also, the ethnic/racial thesis can explain “cross-country evidence where measures of racial diversity strongly predict lower levels of redistribution…It’s also true across U.S. states. Holding income constant, the states with the highest percentages of African Americans are the least generous to the poor.”

I think by identifying the relevant groups as “class” and “nation,” Soyo ignores the more powerful ethnic and cultural identities. Now, Shoyo’s argument may cause trouble to those theorists who have tried to craft a tolerant, solidaristic nationalism as a basis for common identity, but I don’t think many thought that nationalism or national identity were ever the explanatory factor.