Estimating the Socio-Economic Status of the U.S. Capitol Insurrectionists

John Komlos

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2024, vol. 24, issue 1, 285-300

Abstract: The income of those who attacked the U.S. Congress on January 6, 2021 and were subsequently arrested is estimated for the first time using the annual per-capita income in the neighborhood of their residence as a proxy measure. Contrary to common wisdom, we find that two groups were conspicuously underrepresented from this subset of the insurrectionists (N = 933): the utterly poor (whose estimated per- capita income was below $15 K), as well as those whose estimated annual per-capita income was above $50 K per annum. Fully 83.3 % of the arrestees resided in areas with a (five-year average) annual per capita income between $20 K and $50 K (in 2020 prices). This finding dovetails with the argument that the right-wing populist movement in the U.S. is driven largely by the struggling lower-middle class who have been left behind by the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy. The public policy implications point to the amelioration of this distributional deficit.

Keywords: populism; capitol insurrection; Trump coup (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1515/bejeap-2023-0255

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