Cramer develops a new theory and uses it to show how identity-based rural resentments animate much public opinion in Wisconsin. Governor Scott Walker's success in cutting government and weakening unions makes Cramer's study of Badger state politics especially important. This is pathbreaking work.
John Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles If you're wondering about the widening fissure between red ... Read moreand blue America, why politics these days have become so fraught and so emotional, Kathy Cramer is one of the best people to ask.
Jeff Guo Washington Post Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, got in her car and drove around rural Wisconsin to learn how voters there actually discuss politics when they talk to each other over coffee and in discussion groups.... These conversations
many of which she quotes verbatim
infuse The Politics of Resentment with a complex humanity that is rare in books about public opinion. The payoff is a narrative with both nuance and depth.
Lee Drutman Washington Monthly One wishes more scholars followed Cramer's lead. . . . this is a well-written and theoretically rich book. Given recent events, it provides a much-needed corrective to the more journalistic accounts of white working-class voters, ones bereft of the rigor Cramer deploys. The Politics of Resentment, to my mind, is required reading to understand rural support for Scott Walker in Wisconsin; and also what might motivate Trump supporters more generally. Cramer's book deserves all of the attention it's received thus far.
Public Opinion Quarterly The Politics of Resentment is an important contribution to the literature on contemporary American politics. Both methodologically and substantively, it breaks new ground.
Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare Helps answer a question that has been plaguing political commentators since last November: Why did Donald Trump win in Wisconsin? Everyone has a theory
Hillary Clinton's campaign strategies, Trump's appeal to protectionism, GOP voter suppression
and most of them have some truth. But one must also understand Wisconsin, a so-called purple state with a stark urban/rural divide, if one is to understand the national rage that swept Trump into the White House. . . . [Politics of Resentment] illuminate[s] the state's Republican shift and chart[s] a way forward for reversing it.
(07/20/2017) Cramer spent years carefully listening to 'ordinary' people talking about politics and power, then used their words to produce an indelible portrait of the mind and heart of contemporary populism. The Politics of Resentment is the smartest, richest, and most humane work of political science I have read in a very long time.
Larry M. Bartels, Vanderbilt University Show Less