Gwyneth McClendon’s new book provides a thoughtful exploration of intragroup status dynamics. Drawing on various disciplines including psychology and anthropology, McClendon demonstrates with three empirical investigations the role of intragroup status motivations in shaping political preferences and behavior. As McClendon notes, much of the attention to status motivations has focused on intergroup dynamics, leaving intragroup status motivations largely undertheorized and ignored. Her core argument then is that adding intragroup status dynamics takes what hitherto has been left as “noise” into accountable variance, thus yielding a more fully specified understanding of how status informs the actions and thoughts of people as they navigate their worlds.
McClendon juxtaposes the claims of standard economic models that assert self-interest as the predominant motivation against her investigations to show that in various domains of life, intragroup status motivations cause self-interest to be put aside. Put more bluntly, those lowly placed within a group will choose to defend that hierarchy over prospective individual benefits.
In spite of the title, Envy in Politics, the focus is not on envy in the narrow and strictly scientific sense. Rather, it is steadfastly on status motivations within a coherently formed group. McClendon defines envy as “a feeling of hostility toward the greater success of others—a wish for those with more to have less” (pp. 12–13). Of course this engages a psychological model of emotion that is useful for capturing the spirit of the project. However, McClendon is careful in recognizing the vagaries of using lay terms as if they offer a sound scientific foundation. Here, envy, although it guides the enterprise, is not operationalized, and that is a good thing, because it avoids the problem facing those who wish to use emotion in a scientific enterprise. For example, is envy different from resentment? Some will argue yes, others will argue no; the English lexicon is filled with hundreds of emotion words, and sorting them into which are synonyms for others and which differ, and whether they differ in degree or in kind, remains a daunting challenge. The problems of terminology and sorting out whether public rationales are equivalent to private or personal beliefs that people hold; in addition, whether people have accurate insight into their motivations at all remains fraught.
Status motivations that enact “within” groups are McClendon’s concern. And by selecting two nations, the United States and South Africa, where intergroup hostilities are especially potent as to race, McClendon has chosen a challenging environment to demonstrate that intragroup tensions are not just noise but also are dynamic drivers of preferences and action. McClendon puts the case thusly: “envy and spite involve local social comparisons among neighbors, within groups, and with social strata.... Envy and spite here help explain variations in views among the rich and among the poor.... The findings...suggest that envy and spite can dilute the common material interests of the poor and of the rich as class groups.... [This then plays] an important part of redistributive politics” (p. 77). Others have offered insights into the active rules that maintain status structures. For example, the many works of Erving Goffman and Hugh Dalziel Duncan’s Communication and the Social Order (1962) offer considerably rich examinations. Honor societies such as depicted in the Icelandic sagas, most notably Njals’s Saga, offer a particularly rich premodern domain where status motivations are paramount. McClendon usefully adds to this literature by also considering when factors can suppress such intragroup dynamics, most notably when external threats make national concerns more pressing. This makes it a useful companion to Roger V. Gould’s Collision of Wills: How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict (2003), which documents when intragroup status concerns become fragile.
To establish the value of examining intragroup status motivations, McClendon looks at three empirical puzzles (puzzles only to those who think that economic self-interest is or should be the sovereign desideratum to inform human choice). First, why do people sometimes support redistribution that might harm their material interests? Second, why do politicians sometimes fail to implement funded policies? And third, why do citizens sometimes participate in contentious political events even though it is individually costly to do so? In both the United States and South Africa, McClendon demonstrates with rich data and careful analyses that not only do such behaviors occur, but also that some of those in the lower ranks of a given status hierarchy value defense of their identities as loyalists to the hierarchy. In effect, the dynamics of intrastatus motivations serve to defend the value of that hierarchy. Thus, individual autonomy and self-interest do not serve as sovereign values but rather must contend against other considerations that people value.
McClendon is appropriately cautious in presuming that when people speak of their motivations, those statements are necessarily to be taken at face value (because of social desirability and the inaccessibility of actual motivations). McClendon is also attentive to the conditions when collective identities override status motivations, as occurs when external or critical threats can lead to an overarching identity, such as patriotic identity, overriding the impulses that flow from more particular identities (p. 149).
In sum, the book McClendon has produced is a succinct, lucid, pleasure to read. It offers a potent introduction to a new set of insights that flow from its multifaceted examination of intragroup status motivations. Principally, it powerfully demonstrates that these motivations, by working to uphold preexisting social structures, are often largely conservative in their effects. It is of special value in highlighting the many challenges faced by those seeking to politicize a cause or a group.
McClendon offers this book as a foundation for future work on intrastatus motivations. In that vein I offer at least three paths forward that flow from reading this evocative work. First, what about the reciprocal attitude, the politics of disdain? Those in the top tiers of their status hierarchies also have status motivations. Second, which groups most drive status motivations, given that most individuals are typically members of multiple groups? A white male who is, say, 25 years old holds simultaneously a number of status identities, which engage in various cleavages: male versus female, younger versus older, white versus nonwhite, married versus unmarried, and so on. Finally, status motivations, the oft-examined intergroup relations, and intragroup norms and their influences are of value to humans because they are essential to our capacity as a social and political species. The evidence of that dynamic is well established. Thus, especially worthy of integration into this project is the question of what conditions induce status motivations of all sorts to be set aside, as shown, for example, in Kristen Monroe’s (1996) The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity. In this regard, the deepest contribution that McClendon offers us is the shift from a misdirected singular attention on self-interest to a broader understanding of the human condition. Sometimes people do act as relatively autonomous actors, but each also has and executes the capacity to act as part of a collective.
