Job market paper
This land was ‘our’ land: Governance nostalgia in the American west
Finn, Elliott. (2023)
Abstract:
From Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s “Let America be America Again,” elites commonly and effectively use nostalgic appeals for a ‘better’ past to manipulate political behavior. Yet little is known about the conditions that create an electorate responsive to appeals to nostalgia. This paper uses the election of Constitutional Sheriffs, who run on platforms emphasizing a return to ‘local control’ and federal land management change to identify the institutional antecedents of successful elite appeals to nostalgia in the western United States. Specifically, federal land policy historically privileged locally powerful economic and cultural interests because those interests aligned with powerful organized interests and national preferences. However, federal land management institutions became increasingly visible beginning in the late 1970s– as distributive and ideological conflict over land use intensified at the local level – fomenting grievances against the federal government within the same communities federal land management privileged historically. As a result, these communities formed preferences for political candidates campaigning to reverse their perceived loss of institutional control. Leveraging exogenous variation in terrain ruggedness and aridity, I demonstrate that historic restrictions on federal land use are associated with Tea Party support and have persistent effects on the contemporary election of constitutional sheriffs. I supplement these statistical results by process-tracing historical federal land management policy changes in the West and conducting a set of elite interviews in Southern Utah. Together, these analyses demonstrate that policy changes create governance nostalgia -a longing to restore a locality’s perceived ability to influence government processes and outcomes- within historically privileged groups and this shapes political attitudes and behaviors.
Paper
SI, Available upon Request
Dissertation Book Project
This land was ‘our’ land: Governance nostalgia in the American west
Finn, Elliott. (2023)
My book manuscript develops and tests a theory of governance nostalgia. In the first chapter, I introduce governance nostalgia – an identity group’s longing to restore its perceived ability to influence government processes and outcomes – which centers historical interactions between policy makers, interest groups, and identity groups. Then, I groundtruth this theory with a historical institutional analysis of indigenous dispossession, natural resource extraction, and local land use conflicts in the American west, before and after the rise of the contemporary American environmental movement. This chapter concludes with a broader discussion of how governance nostalgia expands upon existing explanations of not only environmental politics but electoral politics and political violence. For example, it helps us to understand the institutional antecedents of January 6th and support for anti-establishment candidates such as former President Trump.
My dissertation’s second chapter uses an original survey to generate measures of governance nostalgia that generalize outside of the environmental context. Data from the survey – piloted in August 2023 – show that governance nostalgia is associated with greater political mobilization. The full rollout, planned for January 2024, will test whether perceptions of current and historical group positionality are associated with anti-establishment political behavior across politically relevant characteristics.
In its final chapter, my dissertation uses an instrumental variable to estimate the effect of historical policy changes on contemporary political behavior. Leveraging exogenous variation in terrain ruggedness and aridity that is correlated with changes in land policy, I demonstrate that historical increases in federal land use protections have enduring effects on the contemporary election of constitutional sheriffs who appeal to nostalgia. Additionally, I show that these policy changes predict local support for the Tea Party and Republican Party candidates – another measure of anti-establishment behavior. Altogether, my analyses illustrate how policy feedbacks make historically privileged identity groups and places prone to nostalgic appeals and anti-establishment candidates.
Working papers
Static or dynamic? Evidence that we update our climate change beliefs
Finn, Elliott, Smith, Eric R.A.N. (2023)
Publications
Review: George Melendez Wright: The Fight for Wildlife and Wilderness in the National Parks. By Jerry Emory
Finn, Elliott. 2023.
Montana: the Magazine of Western History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. 254. ISBN 9780226824949.) (Forthcoming)[Review]
Novel Data
County Level Tea Party Support: Multi-Level Regression with Post-stratification
Finn, Elliott. (2023)
Estimated Tea Party Support, 2011-2013 Map
New Measures of Federal Land Managment Change
Finn, Elliott. (2023)
Changes in Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, and National Park Service federal land management Map of the U.S.
Changes in Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, and National Park Service federal land management Map of the West
Environmental Decades
