The Great Broadening: How the Vast Expansion of the Policymaking Agenda Transformed American Politics. By Bryan D. Jones, Sean M. Theriault, and Michelle Whyman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 328p. $97.50 cloth, $32.50 paper.

Abstract

rity of the ingroup. For instance, taken together, the results Jardina brings to bear on immigration suggest that whites who are more connected to their race than others see immigrants (presumptively from south of the border) and policies that ease immigration as threats to the American way of life. Contrasted with analyses of welfare and affirmative action, where the results suggest that white racial solidarity offers little in the way of explanatory power one way or the other, these findings largely support her claim that it is not racism per se that explains preferences in these domains. Jardina’s findings on Trump and Obama, among others, are also of a piece with her theory. Those scoring high on measures of white solidarity preferred Trump in 2016, while rejecting Obama in 2012. Why? Because Trump promised to safeguard whites from the encroaching threat; Obama, in contrast, was a source of threat. Auxiliary analysis, on data collected more than 50 years ago, demonstrates the continuity of her argument. Using a white feeling thermometer as a proxy for white solidarity, Jardina shows that it (solidarity) militated against support for the civil rights movement. White Identity Politics is an example of careful social science. It confronts an important, timely question while using complementary sources of evidence as a means of sorting through competing claims. In concert, the observational evidence, along with the experiments and openended questions, go a long way toward elaborating a mostly convincing narrative. However, there are a few loose ends about which I am curious. To begin, one wonders how white solidarity represents a departure from status threat. There are many places in the book in which Jardina claims that white solidarity is activated by threats to white dominance and their (whites’) desire to “reassert” or “restore” it (dominance). This suggests something beyond threat: it implies loss of some kind. This sounds very much like status threat, an approach to intergroup relations pioneered by Joseph Gusfield and Richard Hofstadter in the early 1960s. Further, recent work in political science (Diana Mutz) and many works in social psychology draw on this theory to explain the recent angst of many in white America. Yet, this work is never fully engaged. This is important because Jardina acknowledges in an endnote that “status threat ...is an argument very much in keeping with my own,” yet I am not sure where her argument ends and where status threat begins (p. 317). They seem to do the same work. If this is true, I am not sure what white solidarity can tell us beyond what status threat already explains. Another observation related to theory concerns the omission of the social dominance orientation (SDO) from the models of immigration, affirmative action, and welfare dealing explicitly with race. Jardina rightly notes, in chapter 2, a robust correlation with SDO, and this was with data collected in 2013—before the beginning of Trump’s run for president. As far as I know, measures for SDO were included in the 2016 ANES, a data source on which she draws. One wonders, therefore, how much white solidarity is capable of explaining in the presence of SDO, especially after 2015 when Trump announced his candidacy. On the measurement side, for most of the analysis, she uses a single item to measure white identity. Of the six datasets on which the evidence rests, there is only one survey for which multiple items are available. By contrast, there are four surveys on whichmultiple items for white consciousness are available. Further, to the extent that white identity represents a component of white consciousness, one wonders why Jardina did not stick with white consciousness instead of jumping back and forth between the two. Given this and the lack of more robust measures for white identity, one also wonders why she did not simply use white consciousness as the proxy for white solidarity. Having said that,White Identity Politics is a must read for students of American politics, particularly those who study race and racial politics. It is a well-written, mostly careful account of how we arrived at the current political moment. Jardina has mapped a potentially fruitful path for herself and other scholars who wish to explore a more benign alternative to white nationalism and racism. More scholars should follow her path, asking big questions that address emergent contemporary issues in American society.