Estimating the Income of the January 6, 2021 Insurrectionists

John Komlos

No 10231, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The income of those who attacked the U.S. Congress on January 6, 2021 and were subsequently arrested is estimated using the income in the neighborhood of their residence as a proxy measure. Contrary to common wisdom, we find that the income of the arrestees deviated markedly from that of the population at large. Two groups were conspicuously underrepresented from this subset of the insurrectionists: the poor (whose estimated annual per capita income was below $20K), and those who earned more than $50K per annum. Fully 83% of the arrestees resided in areas with an average annual per capita income between $20K and $50K. This finding dovetails with the argument that the right-wing populist movement is driven largely by the struggling lower-middle class who have been left behind by the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy.

Keywords: populism; capitol insurrection of January 6; 2021; Capitol attack (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10231.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10231

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().