Inequality is everywhere in American life. Political movements, social discourse, and economic trends have dramatically increased the salience of issues of inequality over recent decades. These developments have, of course, been paralleled by the creation of enormous literatures about inequality in the social sciences. We now have access to significant debates regarding the effects of economic inequality on political representation, participation in elections and other aspects of politics, economic development, political regime trajectories, and a wide range of policy outcomes, among other literatures. We have learned that most Americans (and most citizens in a wide range of other countries) have a poor quantitative grasp of the state of economic inequality and also that there is broad but somewhat ineffective support for redistributive policy among the citizens of highly unequal democracies.

In this crowded space, it is remarkable to find a newly opened avenue of theorizing and research, but that is what Meghan Condon and Amber Wichowsky achieve in The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination. Where others have shown that Americans have fairly inaccurate ideas about inequality and that the preferences of the wealthy dominate inequality-related policy outputs, Condon and Wichowsky point us toward the exceptionally important questions of why Americans think, feel, and act as they do regarding inequality.

They approach these issues through two major strategies. First, they use qualitative evidence to undertake an ethnographic analysis of what and how Americans think about the people who occupy the highest and lowest levels of the socioeconomic hierarchy. The qualitative data center on people’s written responses when asked to imagine a social interaction with an individual at the top or at the bottom of America’s social hierarchy. A close, interpretively oriented reading of the 1,320 open-ended responses to one or the other of these prompts enables Condon and Wichowsky to discern and describe several critical and, at times, distressing themes in how Americans think about people at the upper and lower bounds of the system of inequality.

With respect to poor Americans, Condon and Wichowsky’s participants express the belief that such people are often lazy (pp. 45–47), entitled (pp. 47–50), and in need of inspiration (pp. 50–52). Participants imagine that they would be uncomfortable in the presence of a poor person (pp. 52–55) and that they would try to exit the interaction. Most strikingly, Condon and Wichowsky find that very few participants (a mere 2%!) express empathy for people at the bottom of the economic hierarchy, and not that many more (just 9%) even express concern about the difficulties and sufferings that poor people experience in America (p. 55).

Rather than seeing disadvantaged Americans as people deserving of solidarity, participants largely moralize their situation. They imagine that many such people are poor simply because they lack the desire to improve themselves, and thus they may not deserve sympathy. Perhaps relatedly, Condon and Wichowsky find through direct survey questions and list experiments that their respondents disproportionately imagine people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder as nonwhite (pp. 62–64).

Turning to Americans at the top of the economic spectrum, respondents experience a range of quite different, although still mostly negative, emotions. They express resentment (pp. 72–77), intimidation, a sense of inferiority (pp. 77–80), and an expectation that they will be condescended to (pp. 82–84). Some also expect to have little shared ground for conversation, in part because they themselves lack education and relevant life/business experience.

Second, in addition to the qualitative analysis, Condon and Wichowsky use political psychological theory and experiments to test a causal explanation for the patterns they have described. They posit that the negative experiences people describe when asked to think about the top and bottom of the economic spectrum lead most people to avoid such comparisons; various features of American life reinforce a strategy of instead mostly comparing themselves to people in a similar socioeconomic position. Experimental intervention shows that inequality is one contributing cause of why people avoid thinking about those in lower economic circumstances (pp. 164–67).

When Americans do think about inequality, the experience of considering those higher on the hierarchy reduces people’s internal political efficacy (pp. 173–82). However, it also increases support for redistributive social policy (pp. 114–18). This combination of effects creates something of a double bind for advocates of redistribution: the very intervention that makes people favor such policies also demobilizes them politically.

The book also deserves attention as an early example in political science of the explicit and extensive use of multimethod research designs involving experiments. The social sciences have, to date, relatively few examples in which qualitative and interpretive methods are used in conjunction with experiments. Yet such combinations are plausible and, in the handful of available examples to date, highly fruitful.

This book stands as a particularly clear example of some of the ways these methods can contribute to each other when deployed within a single research design. Because the qualitative evidence and the central experiment draw on responses from the same individuals, the two components clearly speak to each other. The qualitative evidence provides insight into the way people think as they express the attitudes involved in experimental causal effects, and the experiments provide explanatory insight into some of the causal structure behind the attitudes, emotions, and beliefs discovered in the qualitative analysis.

At the same time, the details of this design’s implementation have certain, perhaps inevitable, disadvantages. Because the qualitative and experimental evidence were collected simultaneously, there is no opportunity for the qualitative analysis to ask in-depth follow-up questions to explore surprising results. Likewise, the experiment cannot be redesigned to work through interesting puzzles revealed by the qualitative evidence. Adding focus groups or another comparable qualitative research activity before and after the experiment might allow future researchers to expand on what is already a compelling example of cutting-edge research design.

As is also perhaps inevitable with such a pathbreaking piece of scholarship, and in part for the reasons of research design just discussed, some questions are raised but not fully answered or, in some cases, even entirely explored. The qualitative evidence in particular raises interesting propositions about some of the causal narratives and pathways behind the political psychology of inequality that go untested in the experimental portion of the book. Scholars of inequality may well find a basis for future research in the qualitative chapters’ insights about potential psychological mechanisms related to social difference between individuals and wealthy and/or poor others, anticipated condescension from wealthy individuals, and differences in information, interests, and moral values across social-class divides. How, if at all, do these psychological factors affect people’s willingness to confront inequality and the consequences for policy preferences that result when they do?

The experimental findings in this book also raise some fascinating but insufficiently explored questions. Perhaps the most important of these involves the repeated finding that white men, in particular, are deeply resistant to changing their thinking based on reflecting about inequality. The experimental analysis carefully and consistently documents this result, but the data do not really reveal what exactly it is about that identity category that makes its members so profoundly disconnected from the otherwise shared dynamics of American inequality. Although most readers can no doubt conjure hypotheses, and the book reasonably gestures toward ideas about economic anxiety among working-class white men (p. 121) and toward more general intuitions about intersectionality (pp. 100–1), these considerations are neither fleshed out nor tested.

These questions offer opportunities for interested readers to extend the wonderful research agenda that Condon and Wichowsky offer us all in The Economic Other. This book offers a wide range of insights and valuable causal inferences, serves as a methodological model that will likely be referenced well into the future, and is sufficiently theoretically overabundant that scholars and students will likely be reading and building on it for many years to come.