Written in 1599 and first performed at London’s Globe Theatre, Julius Caesar reflects the shaky nature of English society in the later years of Queen Elizabeth I’s rule as she increasingly relied upon spies and propaganda to maintain a semblance of stability. The Earl of Essex and Robert Cecil vied for political power.  Like the United States now, Shakespeare’s Rome was in a moment of great transition.

In Elia Kazan’s 1957 film A Face In the Crowd, Andy Griffith stars as Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a singer and drifter who is discovered by a radio journalist (Patricia Neal) while reporting on a rural county jail. Rhodes’s folksy charm is a hit with radio audiences, and he soon auditions for a television show.  Bristling at all the advertising copy he’s expected to read, Griffith turns his back on the studio audience, only to make sure that viewers at home can see him as he prefers—in front of a crowd.

While we, as a discipline, have long been attentive to how economic concerns and anxieties affect voters’ choices (and firms’ lobbying on trade policies), we were less focused on how these concerns interacted with anti-other attitudes. That is, we tended to assume that voters’ material considerations – about their own households or about the broader economy – were more important drivers of vote choices than their cultural attitudes.