Narratives of Justice: Legislators' Beliefs about Distributive Fairness

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 Epigraph from a press conference, 1983; quoted in Hochschild 1988, 168. Epigraph from a speech delivered at Howard University, June 4, 1965, in Johnson 1971,166. 1. There are varying interpretations of the trends in these conditions since the 1970s, depending on which sets of statistics are employed, how these statistics are gathered, and which years are used as bases. This is particularly true regarding the issue of economic progress among minorities. For persuasive accounts of inequality, see among others Levy 1988; Phillips 1990; and Congressional Budget Office 1991. 2. These and subsequent figures are from the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Internal Revenue Service, as reported in The New York TImes. See Uchitelle I990a; Nasar 1992a, 1992c, 1992d; and Passell 1992. 3. For these figures, see, respectively, Pear 1991; Johnson 1989; and DeParle 1992a. For more general treatments ofracial inequality, see among many others Schiller 1989; Harris and Wilkins 1988; Ezorsky 1991; and Hacker 1992. 4. On the other hand, it should also be noted that the number ofblack families with annual incomes of$50,000 or more quadrupled from 1967 to 1989, while the number of white families with similar incomes only doubled. And in terms of household income, between 1979 and 1989, black income increased from 62 to 63 percent ofwhite income. See "Study Finds Gains for Black Middle Class" 1991; and Barringer 1992. 5. Among many others, see Hochschild 1981; Lamb 1982; McClosky and Zaller 1984; and Verba and Orren 1985. 6. As an example ofsuch American exceptionalism, consider the fact that the most egalitarian ofthe various "challenging" U.S. groups surveyed by Sidney Verba et al. was still found to favor more income inequality than the least egalitarian group in Sweden (1987,263). 7. To what degree such goods are actually social (or which ones are social) rather than purely private is itself a contentious issue within distributive justice. 8. See McClosky and Zaller 1984, 12-13, 97-100, 246-63. See also McClosky and Brill 1983 and Eulau 1976. Note that the McClosky/Zaller model assumes Conversian notions ofconstraint concerning beliefsystems, a subject I will take up in chapter 2, herein. 9. Regarding the two authors' views on the rich cited here, see F. Scott Fitzgerald, 291 292 Notes to Pages 6~8 "The Rich Boy," and Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Irving Kristol invokes the same phrases to describe politicians, though he leaves out the reference to Fitzgerald and seems to endorse the Hemingway response (1978, 103). 10. Almost all students ofstate government have made this observation, but for brief summaries ofthe trend, see Rosenthal 1988, 1989. Concerning the Connecticut legislature more specifically, see Ogle 1990. 11. Malcolm Jewell argues, for example, that as state legislatures become more professional and modem, findings on Congress should become more applicable to state legislatures (1982, 183). Conversely, we might argue that as state legislatures become more professional, research findings regarding them become more relevant to understanding Congress, though this is a weaker claim. 12. In 1971 the General Assembly, reacting to a budget crisis, passed an income tax, only to repeal it six weeks later amidst a hail of protest. For more on the problems leading up to the 1990 budget crisis, see appendix A. 13. But in the 1992 elections, the state's voters appeared not to punish legislators for supporting an income tax; while a few prominent tax supporters were defeated or retired, overall the legislature was left intact. 14. I am greatly tempted to add an in-depth study of the income tax debate to my consideration ofthe relations between beliefs and behavior in chapters 6 and 7, herein, but I have decided against it in order to better protect the anonymity of the individual respondents. IS. Note that John Kingdon makes a similar access-based choice of subjects in choosing to focus on the U.S. House ofRepresentatives instead ofthe Senate (1989, IS). 16. Rosenthal makes this point well in reviewing John Straaver's book on the Colorado state legislature: "Some students of state legislatures aspire to build theory or explain structure, behavior, process, and even outputs. They tend to extract specific variables from the rich variety of legislative life, subjecting them to comparative and statistical scrutiny. Other students ofstate legislatures propose to add to our understanding ofone political institution within the context of a single state. They tend to be more descriptive, less quantitative, and intent upon...