Unseen Politics: Hidden Impact of Entertainment Media in Unequal America

Under contract at Princeton Studies in Political Behavior

“And that is a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class Americas basic bargain that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead. [...] The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe.”

– Barack Obama, December 4, 2013.

It employed thousands [...] and changed how America does business [...] Shark Tank has become an American phenomenon. And the support of the president just goes to show you that the American Dream is alive and well. From their humble beginnings, the Sharks are all self-made and understand what it takes to build business empires from nothing.

– The Shark Tank promotional trailer

In this age of intensifying income inequality, the concerns about the fading American Dream from politicians on both sides of the partisan aisle are omnipresent. Nevertheless, many Americans continue to view the United States as the land of opportunity. Recent polls, for instance, show that around 70 percent of American adults hold such beliefs; even in the midst of a pandemic, more than half of Americans remain optimistic. Study after study reveals that Americans substantially overestimate the extent of upward mobility. Why do beliefs in economic mobility persist despite the raft of empirical evidence to the contrary? Why do some Americans retain this belief in upward mobility more than others?

In Unseen Politics, I bring the contemporary media environment to the forefront of the study of American political culture and the national dialogue on economic mobility. The ivory-tower academics and pundits alike have largely turned to news media for an answer, only puzzled to find that sobering media coverage about declining mobility has little effect on public opinion. I lay bare a simple and uncomfortable truth about the nation still recovering from the scars of a reality TV presidency: given the dazzling array of media choices, Americans are not watching news. Instead, what has been attracting millions of viewers in the past two decades are entertainment programs that depict real-life Americans succeeding due to their hard work and talent. Popular shows ranging from America’s Got Talent and Shark Tank—all featuring “rags-to-riches” exemplars—easily attract prime-time audiences seven times larger than those watching Fox News. This narrative from entertainment media that the American Dream is alive and well is directly counter to what news media provides; the former is consumed by the vast majority of Americans every day, while the latter is not. Such an imbalance distorts economic perceptions and carries far-reaching implications for public preferences for redistribution.

Using an eclectic array of original data—ranging from lab-in-the-field experiments in farmers’ markets and to a natural experiment induced by hometown locations of the American Idol contestants and computational text analysis of economic news coverage, Unseen Politics makes it clear that these “rags-to-riches” entertainment programs promote rugged individualism; their meritocratic ideology glorifies the winners in the economic system, increases tolerance for income inequality, and dampens public support for redistributive policies that could help those who are left behind. These distorted beliefs come with the benefits of empowering individuals, but collectively have a conservative influence on our politics. By taking what Americans actually watch seriously, this book sheds light on how the modern-day counterparts of Horatio Alger’s dime novels unexpectedly legitimize this new Gilded Age.

— This book project received APSA’s 2020 Best Dissertation Award in Political Psychology. The shortened paper version of this project received MPSA’s 2024 AJPS Best Paper Award, APSA’s 2020 Paul Lazarsfeld Best Paper Award, Wilson Carey McWilliams Best Paper Award, ISPP's 2020 Roberta Sigel Early Career Scholar Paper Award, the ICA’s 2019 Top Graduate Student Paper Award in Political Communication, and 2018 GAPSA-Provost Fellowship Award for Interdisciplinary Innovation from University of Pennsylvania.

—  Featured in Philadelphia Inquirer