Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class, and Political Response - Softcover

Mr. Reagan's economic policy suggests that the new Administration will try to cut the social programs that provide support for the unemployed and underemployed...because he believes that there are so many unemployed in the United States because life is too easy and people do not take work seriously. This book will help him correct this misconception. It will tell him something about the experience of unemployment and the hardship, self-doubt, and anxiety of those who are without work in the United States today. -- Francis Fox Piven New York Times Book Review A guide to understanding the political consequences of being economically deprived, in general, and being unemployed, in particular. Schlozman and Verba have drawn their map with such care and skill that we will all profit from studying their results and the process of exploration as well...The data for the study are drawn from two parallel telephone surveys of the metropolitan work force which yielded 1,370 respondents of whom 571 were jobless...In the compass of this brief review I cannot adequately reflect the scope of the analyses undertaken...This book is an important sign of progress in the study of political behavior. -- Richard A. Brody American Political Science Review A wide-ranging book about the relationship between class and politics in the United States...In exemplary fashion, the authors bring empirical data to bear on several controversial theoretical questions that have implications for a general understanding of the nature of American politics. -- Harold M. Waller Canadian Journal of Political Science

It is commonplace in contemporary American politics for those who experience economic strain to join together and ask the government for help. The unemployed, by and large, have not done so. In their study, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Sidney Verba look closely at the unemployed and ask why not. Using the results of a large-scale survey supplemented by intensive interviews, the authors consider the political attitudes and behavior of the unemployed: how much hardship they feel, how they interpret their joblessness, what they do about it, how they view the American social order, and how they vote or otherwise take part in politics. The analysis is placed in the context of several larger concerns: the relationship between stress in private life and conduct in public life, the circumstances under which the disadvantaged are mobilized for politics, the changing role of social class in America, and the links between politics and macroeconomic conditions.