John Konicki is a fourth-year political science PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, where he specializes in American Politics, Political Behavior, and Methods. His research focuses primarily on developing a theory of ideological resentment to explain rising partisan animosity and political dysfunction. He also studies over-time changes in demographic and attitudinal sorting in the US electorate, the incentives of media elites, and the political socialization of young voters. John holds a BA in Political Science from Vanderbilt University. Before joining Berkeley’s program, he worked as an economic policy research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, where he worked on projects examining the relationship between public policy, technological innovation, and economic growth.
Dissertation Title: Ideological Resentment: The Role of Asymmetric Grievances in Conservative Politics
Many scholars and observers explain right-wing polarization as a consequence of racial animus, nativism, hostile sexism, Christian nationalism, and other demographic resentments. However, conservatives often express their grievances in ideological rather than demographic terms, pointing to long-standing frustrations with perceived liberal bias in institutions such as journalism, higher education, and popular culture. Thus, conservatives may be more strongly motivated by negative ideological polarization against what they view as liberals’ outsized influence in American culture than by demographic anxieties or prejudices. This is especially plausible given both racial depolarization and declining institutional trust — and increasingly relevant in the wake of Republican attacks on both the media and higher education.
Thus, my dissertation develops and tests a theory of ideological resentment, which I define as 1) the belief that one’s political opponents have dominant cultural power and 2) a sense of marginalization stemming from that belief. Through original data collection and at least two survey experiments, I aim to provide a psychometrically robust measure of ideological resentment, gauge its prevalence among both conservatives and liberals, and assess its role in driving important phenomena such as affective polarization, support for democratic norm violations, and belief in misinformation. In doing so, I also hope to expand our discipline’s understanding of symbolic ideology, showing how a negative political identity has helped keep the Republican coalition together despite its heterogeneity on operational ideology. Ultimately, I believe this project can illuminate an unstudied grievance that has increasingly roiled American politics.