Status reversal and its discontents Michael Hechter, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University

The recent rise of reactionary politics in modern democracies across the globe has been attributed to a variety of causes, including deindustrialisation, economic inequality, immigration, and the rising fortunes of ethnic, racial, religious, and gender and sexual minorities. These explanations for rising support for parties of the radical right and left posit a common underlying dynamic: namely, a reaction among relatively privileged individuals and groups to the fear — or the reality — of downward status reversal.

Michael Hechter, Foundation Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University, has sought to identify the causal impact of actual status loss on in-group bias, outgroup discrimination, and potential downstream political attitudes. His experiments isolate the effect of status reversal from that of pre-existing beliefs about lower status outgroups that may confound the relationship, and the results suggest that status reversal can affect a range of group-based attitudes but caution against attributing effects on outgroup discrimination and downstream political consequences to the loss of status alone.

Join Professor Hechter to hear more about his research.

Professor Hechter, an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has also taught at the Universities of Washington, Arizona, Oxford and Copenhagen. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and the Russell Sage Foundation, and was a visiting professor at the Universities of Bergen and Llubljana.

He is the author of numerous books, including Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (1975; 1999); Principles of Group Solidarity (1987); Containing Nationalism (2000); Alien Rule (2013); Rational Choice Sociology (2019); and The Genesis of Rebellion, with Steven Pfaff (2020).

He is editor or co-editor of The Microfoundations of Macrosociology(1983); Social Institutions: Their Emergence, Maintenance and Effects (1990); The Origin of Values (1993); Social Norms (2001, 2005); and Theories of Social Order, with Christine Horne (2003; 2008). His articles have appeared in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Demography, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Rationality and Society, Sociological Theory, European Sociological Review, and many more. His writings have been translated into many languages.