Engagement, emotions, and explanation: public orientations towards the economy
The study of public opinion over economic policy has been dominated by three types of theoretical approach: understanding the role of material interests and (partisan) ideology in structuring attitudes, and understanding the role of factual information and cause-and-effect beliefs. These approaches have in common that they proceed deductively from theories that make sense to disciplinary experts (in economics and political science) in trying to account for variation across people’s opinions.However, much recent qualitative work has documented that these theoretical orientations are often quite removed from the features of public views about the economy that are most salient to the public themselves, unprompted. More interpretive and inductive treatments emphasise some causal beliefs, but also the role of affective and emotional orientation to the economy, the perception of human agency in generating economic outcomes, and the relevance of national economic policy to personal well-being in the first place as important dimensions of variation.In this project I present a quantitative operationalisation of these hitherto primarily qualitatively dominated economic orientations: (1) levels and modes of engagement with the economy; (2) emotional reactions to it; (3) explanations grounded in different accounts of human control (and the social and political groups who enjoy it). These orientations are systematically structured across groups of people, as well as being associated with policy preferences, highlighting the importance of differences in the way different (types of) people relate to the politics of economic policy-making.
Meet our speaker
Lucy Barnes (@lucy-barnes.bsky.social) is Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Political Science at University College London. Her research focuses on the politics of economic policy-making, and how different political actors understand various aspects of the economy. Her most recent work has appeared in Ecological Economics, the British Journal of Political Science, and Socius.
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