After 2014, the Tea Party began reverting back to its elite origins, as grassroots activism mostly disappeared and politicians aligned with the insurgency left office. This chapter describes the major synthetic conclusions of our book, and the current state of the Tea Party insurgency. Overall, we argue the Tea Party followed a top-down, bottom-up, and then top-down trajectory. Our research underscores the importance of understanding how economic threats motivate conservative activism, as well as the enduring importance of the choices that activists make about mobilizing structures to sustain their activism. The diffuse, decentralized mobilizing structures built by Tea Party activists were similarly selected by progressive movements, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. As a result, the lessons drawn from the Tea Party may apply to other recent waves of mobilization.

Research exploring public opinion dynamics in the domain of immigration has exploded in recent decades, and for obvious reasons. Policy debates in developed democracies have intensified as barriers to movement fell in Europe and the USA and as populist leaders began to capitalise on, if not stoke, public anxieties about the influx of newcomers. A central question is why some individuals are so much more willing than others to allow immigrants into their country, and the debate has centred primarily around real economic consequences versus deep-rooted group identities and animosities. Given all the welcome attention to this fundamental question, we can only review a small slice of this burgeoning literature. To these ends, we provide a broad overview of the impact of real immigration contexts, economic versus symbolic group attachments, and the role of the media and elites may play in triggering either or both forces by triggering powerful emotions. Since these explanations are so difficult to causally untangle, and since the literature has focused so much on the USA and a few other countries, we pay special attention to recent, comparative research that goes beyond simple observational designs.

Chapter 9 extends our examination of Group Empathy Theory outside the United States using data from the British Election Study (BES) in May 2018. The BES included our short version of the Group Empathy Index (GEI). It also included a ten-item individual-level empathy scale, which allowed us to compare the predictive power of intergroup empathy versus interpersonal empathy. Group empathy significantly predicts the British public’s opinion across a myriad of policy issues, including opposition to Brexit, favorable perceptions of immigration, support for equal opportunity policies, social welfare, and foreign aid. By comparison, individual empathy has very little effect on most of these policy views. In line with our theory and consistent with the findings from the United States, nonwhite minorities in the United Kingdom score higher on the GEI than whites do, while no significant intergroup differences are observed when it comes to individual-level empathy. The data indicates large gaps in policy opinions between whites and nonwhites, and group empathy once again helps explain these differences.