Economic theory suggests that the federal government plays a marginal role in causing some regions to become technological leaders while historical scholarship suggests the opposite. We test the validity of the historical perspective using an instrumental variables approach that leverages fine-grained defense procurement data from 1966-2000.

Segregation is the separation of racial, ethnic, and income groups from one another. Integration is a more nebulous concept. Although widely understood to encompass the cohabitation of multiracial and ethnic individuals in one area, there is no consensus on what the racial and cultural composition qualifies as a “truly” integrated neighborhood. This paper conceptually maps the varied definitions of integration, in an attempt to glean commonalities amongst disparate views of the practice.

Wage-earner bankruptcy is one small part of the American political economy, but it is an excellent vantage point from which to see the necessity of a theory of political racialization. How else can we explain how an institution that appears race-neutral on the surface has such divergent outcomes for filers of different races? How else can we explain the prominence of racialized narratives in the ways white Americans understand their debt-based insecurity and eventual bankruptcy filings? In this (working) paper, I propose a theory of racialization in the political economy that allows us to answer a big question in the field of American political economy: How is racism constitutive of the American political economy?

Significant bodies of literature have examined the political links between gender and technology, technological change and unions, and unions and gender relations. But fewer studies close this circle and examine how gender, technological change, and union organizing interact simultaneously to shape each other's politics. The few that do rightly identify unions, particularly craft unions, as both outcomes and reproducers of patriarchal power structures. However, the broad persistence of patriarchal attitudes limits their ability to explain patterns of variation in women's workforce inclusion. To address this gap I develop a theory that identifies different union strategies of labor force control as central to understanding their responses to new technologies and women workers. I test this theory through case comparisons of typographical unions in the United States and Britain from the 1830s to the 1980s. I show that, where the closed shop was obtained through a strategy of incorporation, unions were more receptive to women workers and new technologies. But where the closed shop was maintained through a system of strict apprenticeship, unions were more obstructive towards new technologies and more exclusionary towards women.

A large body of scholarship has documented how presidents and parties "politicize” bureaucracies by placing individuals in government positions that share their ideological persuasions. The present research, however, investigates a more extreme measure of politicization—“counter-staffing,” a term coined by historian James Gross (1974), refers to the strategy of appointing officials to agencies to which they are fundamentally opposed in an effort to undermine government operations. In this paper, I bring together several lines of scholarship on labor and corporate power in American politics, along with original archival data, to show how the changes in the kinds of individuals who serve in top posts at labor and employment agencies have altered the development of the state’s relationship to the free market. My evidence reveals that these agencies have undergone transformational shifts in staffing that have taken what used to be cutting-edge policymakers and enforcers and relegated them to being mere appendages of the bureaucratic state, forever frozen in circa-1938 labor and employment law. (This session will be a joint session with Adam Parker)

I analyze the long period of regulatory stability from the New Deal to the 1970s. Why did the U.S. Congress radically intervene in the pre-market American economy in ways that were exceptional compared to other Western democracies? Why did congressional Democrats remain steadfast in their support for the New Deal regulatory regime despite Wall Street’s persistent attack and attempts at circumvention? I argue that the decentralizing institutions in the House made Democrats more parochially focused on small banks, adjacent industries and organized laborers in their districts. As a result, House Democrats vigorously maintained the New Deal regulatory regime from the New Deal to the 1970s.

After experimenting with fiat money during the Civil War and Reconstruction, why did the United States return to the gold standard in 1879? What complicated monetary policy in this era was the presence of three ideologically distinct policy agendas--institutionalization of the federal greenbacks, national bank notes, or a return to the gold standard--which split existing coalitions and interest groups awkwardly. Through a combination of Logit analyses of roll call votes, process tracing, and archival research, this paper argues that ideas about the nature of money and the government’s role in managing the economy played a central role in the reinstitutionalization of the gold standard in postbellum America.These findings contribute to a growing literature on the creation of the U.S. hybrid, public-private monetary regime. (This session will be a joint session with Richard Barton)

In this session, junior faculty working in American Political Economy and related areas will discuss their experiences and provide practical guidance, including tips about crafting their APE research agenda, research methods, and how to turn a dissertation into a first book.

Despite being written primarily as a pension law, the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974 has come to apply to the majority of employer-sponsored health plans in the United States. However, despite its health care salience in self-insured plans, it has a key statutory design feature that limits patients’ ability to access their prescribed care: it precludes damages recovery for those who have been denied health coverage, an insurance practice that is pervasive and increasing. What’s more, the law does not even necessarily guarantee the awarding of attorney’s fees if successful. A consequence is that patients from marginalized groups will be less willing to incur the costs of litigating to secure coverage for their prescribed care. The absence of litigation incentives creates perverse incentives for insurers because it makes it all the more unlikely that patients will be able to obtain legal representation, such that insurers may deny with impunity. Drawing on extant literature on path dependence and on ERISA’s history and implementation, legislative history of Congress's health care reform efforts, original data on ERISA-related litigation and bill introductions, and interviews with key legislative and executive staffers, this paper evaluates this statutory design’s persistence across moments of health care reform including the 1993-1994 health care reform efforts, the Patients’ Bill of Rights, and the Affordable Care Act, and the ways in which this can not only limit patients’ rights upon a coverage denial but reduces health insurer accountability in a manner that can perpetuate the denials themselves. (Note: This session will be joint with Alex Garlick.)

In a chapter from my book project: “Pre-Existing Conditions: How Lobbying Makes Health Care More Expensive”, I show how state legislation aimed at bringing transparency to the pharmaceutical supply chain is systematically opposed and defeated by lobbyists representing the health care industry, specifically pharmaceutical manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers. Although, reform is possible, and I investigate the diffusion of legislation aimed at setting out-of-pocket caps on insulin as a template for advocates looking to lower the price of prescription drugs for Americans. (Note: This session will be joint with Miranda Yaver.)

The intensifying housing crisis in America is disproportionately impacting the nation's biggest metropolitan areas. At the same time, the Democratic voting coalition has increasingly dominated these metros, as Democratic politicians have won more support from affluent, educated urban and suburban homeowners. These interacting dynamics have produced a wide gulf of housing wealth and economic precarity between Democratic renters and homeowners. Given the power of shared partisanship in American politics, does this economic divide translate into preference differences in the coalition? We argue that, indeed, Democratic renters are far more likely than homeowners to favor more aggressive state intervention to mitigate American inequality. Specifically, we show that Democratic renters are consistently more likely than homeowners to support the most left-leaning presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, and redistributive housing policies. Democratic renters are only mildly more supportive of non-housing redistribution but are more likely to intensely demand more public housing. To support these claims, we analyze an array of survey data, including data on a real-world ballot proposition and original data measuring preference intensity. These findings carry implications for the contemporary politics of metro-area housing, the Democratic Party politics of redistribution, and the interaction of economic interests and political identities. (Note: This session will be joint with Marco M. Aviña and Marcelo Roman).

With rising income and wealth inequality, demand for redistribution might be expected to increase. However, public opinion on these issues has remained relatively stable in recent years. Concomitantly, the ethno-racial composition of the country has rapidly changed. Theories on ethnic diversity and racial threat predict such dynamics may reduce support for redistribution despite rising inequality, which would explain why support for redistribution remains stagnant in the U.S. We test these theories by pairing local demographic data with national public opinion surveys of nearly a million Americans, including 3 panels of individuals who were interviewed multiple times between 2010 and 2022. Changes in neighborhood demographics do not significantly influence fiscal and social policy preferences. We rule out several sources of heterogeneity, conduct various sensitivity analyses, and replicate our findings using survey experiments and perceived measures of demographic change. These null results clash with established findings on diversity, intergroup conflict, and public finance. (Note: This session will be joint with Sam Zacher and Amelia Malpas.)

Through President Obama’s Computer Science For All and other vocationalized educational policy efforts aimed at “21st Century Skills” and "career readiness," proponents of schooling for work suggest various national crises and social, political, or economic problems related to inequality may be resolved or avoided. Increasingly, career readiness at the K-12 level involves the advancement of STEM and CS curriculum. These policy efforts often target districts serving poor and racially minoritized students to develop technical skills for future work, while aiming to minimize persistent poverty (Greene, 2021). This paper asks how a mainstream emphasis on developing “skills for the 21st century” through computer science (CS) curriculum was developed as a mechanism for achieving “career readiness.” Relatedly, it investigates the political actors and coalitions are that are responsible for advancing the parallel objectives of career readiness and expanded CS education, working to understand how they discursively articulate and advance their aims. I investigate the relationships between NGO, corporate, and philanthropic actors in relation to the state as a persistant alliance devoted to education toward economic ends. I examine public and private advocacy efforts for expanding CS education across all levels of elementary and secondary education, particularly those originating at the federal level during and following President Obama’s administration. I consider these efforts alongside human capital education reforms, analyzing the role of private actors in advancing expanded CS education. I theorize the ways these efforts undermine political equality and democratic institutions and conclude with mechanisms to mitigate these risks.

My book 'Owning the Green Grid' offers a new account of why U.S. state-level climate and renewable energy policy is so variable in its environmental strength, and so similar in its distributive qualities: namely, in all cases, costs are shifted from utilities to ratepayers. While the political science literature generally highlights the importance of partisanship and energy economy in explaining policy variation, my book centers a new, political economy explanation of variation in policy design. I argue that a key, underappreciated factor is the structure of the electric utility sector because it informs the policy preferences of investor-owned utilities, which are the single most influential interest group actor when it comes to shaping policy design. Drawing on seven state-level case studies of states that vary in partisanship, energy economy and electric sector structure -- and that together house one third of the U.S. population -- I analyze legislative and regulatory texts, more than 16,000 pages of archival material, and transcripts from more than 200 policy-focused interviews to argue that, while partisanship and energy economy may be the primary factors leading to a state’s decision to adopt these policies, it is the structure of the electric utility sector that is the most important factor in how they are ultimately designed.

Americans received three stimulus checks of an unprecedented size between April of 2020 and March of 2021. These checks were designed to incentivize citizens’ consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic and, as a result, to mediate the effects of the economic downturn. Concurrently, multiple states increased their regulation of subprime credit products and payday loans in particular. This suggests the following question: what are the implications of credit (in)access for other policy interventions? I hypothesized that access to subprime credit would decrease the stimulus checks’ impact on indebtedness (i.e., with access to payday lending you see a larger jump in indebtedness, despite the stimulus checks). As an initial test of this argument, I use various models, including a fuzzy regression discontinuity in time design (RDiT), to assess the impact of the stimulus checks on debt-to-income ratios across distinct credit regulatory environments. I find that states where payday lending was legal during the pandemic saw a smaller jump in their debt-to-income ratios than states where payday lending was illegal, though this pattern is reversed when I use a larger threshold around the cutpoint. These results suggest that credit mediates existing policy interventions. (Note: This session will be joint with Angie Jo.)

Welfare regimes differ significantly in their design and generosity in normal times, but systematic differences in their response to large crises remain understudied. This paper examines a puzzling relationship between baseline social spending and discretionary fiscal response to COVID-19: countries empirically cluster by welfare regime (Esping-Andersen 1990), rather than welfare state size, government partisanship, or fiscal capacity. In particular, Liberal states vastly overspent on the crisis, relative to their own baselines and other low-spenders, while Social Democratic states underspent. I theorize three supply-side factors to explain the outsized Liberal response: i) Liberal governments inherit weak institutional infrastructure for aid transmission, which inflates volume through inefficiency; ii) Liberal governments must bargain with conservatives to deliver temporary relief policies that are designed to disappear; and iii) Liberal market economies rely on credit and consumption-based growth. These factors favour broad-based cash transfers over alternative policies, causing a short-term “spike” in fiscal spending in Liberal countries, whereas Social Democratic states “smooth” their spending across normal times and crisis times. I use regression, principal components analysis, and case studies of the United States, Germany, and Denmark to illustrate how their everyday welfare states come to constrain and complement their menu of options in crisis. (Note: This session will be joint with Grace Beals.)

In this panel, Patricia Posey, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and Margaret Perez Brower will provide guidance and answer questions about their experiences in the discipline as scholars of American political economy. Topics covered will include how to do critical work in political science, handling the first year on the tenure track, planning and preparing for publication, working at the intersection of public policy and political science, and finding and making the most of a post-doc.

Amidst rising polarization and partisan sorting by geography and within social life, the workplace remains one context with the potential to foster cross-partisan interactions. We estimate the extent of workplace partisan sorting by merging voter registration data with over 16 million online employee profiles covering 14 million unique workers. We find significant evidence of partisan sorting: compared to out-partisans, partisan workers are employed in workplaces where the share of co-partisan colleagues is, on average, 12 percentage points higher. Accounting for other factors correlated with partisanship—geography, occupation, and industry—reduces but does not eliminate the estimated magnitude of sorting. After accounting for these factors, our estimate of workplace partisan sorting is similar in magnitude to workplace sorting by gender and race. We also find partisan asymmetry. Among Republicans, the partisan imbalance among coworkers is only slight—the mean Republican is exposed to 1.1 Republican coworkers for every Democrat. By contrast, the mean Democrat is exposed to over 1.8 Democrats for every Republican. (This will be a joint session with Jack Garigliano.)

Research on political participation in the United States has long pointed to the workplace as an important site for developing skills and confidence that facilitate engagement in civic and political affairs. Yet the United States is noteworthy for the proportion of its workforce that has no formal channels for participating in workplace governance. Even more, there is evidence that the public-private nature of the US welfare state discourages those dissatisfied with their working conditions from searching for a better job. How, then, does a person’s lack of control over their working conditions inform their confidence in themselves as a political actor, and how does this impact their political participation? To explore this understudied question, I study the shock to working conditions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Using both difference-in-difference and cross-sectional designs, I examine how personal efficacy and political behavior responded to the pandemic differently depending on how one’s working conditions were affected. Further, I show how welfare policies mediated this relationship by demonstrating the effect of state-level policy differences on changes either to people’s working conditions or to their ability to leave for a different job. Based on this study, I point to the importance of worker power in the labor market in informing patterns of political participation. (This will be a joint session with Max Kagan.)

The U.S. federal estate tax affects a tiny and declining fraction of the nation’s richest individuals. However, even in an era of increasing wealth inequality, attitudes towards policy reforms such as lowering the exemption amount remain mixed. While self-interest considerations have been investigated as one avenue that influences support, another may be found in the increasingly political debate surrounding implications and potential reform measures of the tax. Advocacy groups and politicians, for instance, have cultivated numerous frames and arguments painting the estate tax as an unfair form of double taxation, a threat to small farms and family businesses, and a policy that infringes on family rights. In this paper, we examine the relative role of these competing frames to disentangle the information that shapes individual policy support and opposition. Using a randomized survey experiment, we deploy a battery of experimental treatments to examine the impact of providing information about individual tax liability, harm (and no-harm) to families, farms, and business, and the case of double-taxation to measure post-treatment policy preferences. With these randomized information provisions, we aim to highlight the importance of misperceptions about socially-oriented considerations, that likely alongside self-interest, determine who and under what conditions Americans support or oppose reforming the federal estate tax. (This will be a joint session with Eric Scheuch.)

Over the last decade, both municipal action on climate change and research on climate public opinion has exploded, but there has been little survey research on the intersection of the two. This paper contains the first large survey focused entirely on public opinion towards municipal climate action. I find that voters prioritize keeping costs low over any type of benefit. Among climate benefits, they prioritize air quality and heat mitigation the highest. They are most willing to pay for reforestation and waste management. Dividing lines include income, age, and partisanship, but not education, race, or gender. Notably, both willingness to pay and prioritization is consistent across community size and population density, suggesting consistency in voter opinion across community types. I close with a discussion of key takeaways for local policymakers and suggested next steps for research on this topic." (This will be a joint session with Patrick Sullivan.)

This is a chapter from my book manuscript, entitled Architects of the Divided States, which draws on ethnographic case studies and brings the tools of political, organizational, and historical sociology to bear on the politics of American states. The book argues that state politics is fundamentally not federal politics in miniature, because it frequently concerns implementation and interpretation of federal programs and laws, a field of action populated by actors who seldom figure in the public imagination and are generally sympathetic to the policy priorities of the Democratic Party, even in red states. The chapter illustrates a gap between Missouri’s election laws on the books and in action, as personified by the Secretary of State, who advocated for restrictive voting laws and worked with advocacy organizations to blunt their draconian effects. I show this to be business as usual and the path of least resistance for Republican officials, who defer to the county clerk’s association on administrative matters. (This will be a joint session with Sarah James)

This paper is the introductory chapter to my current book project. In the chapter I introduce the key questions motivating the book: When do state elected officials recognize that a policy experiment has failed? And what do they do about it? When are public officials willing to recognize policy failure when it contradicts their a priori expectations or partisan preferences? I use literature on policy learning, state politics, and the American political economy to explain why understanding policy failure and the political dynamics of data is essential for understanding and addressing inequality in the American federal system. The chapter concludes with a preview of the argument that I develop in the book, namely that patterns of acknowledgement and revision will vary as a function of a state’s data collection and analytical capacity. The timing of when a state invests in capacity and the features of a policy’s original design mediate these effects. Strong data collection and analysis have the potential to disrupt stakeholder dynamics in ways that empower a policy’s opponents over its beneficiaries. (This will be a joint session with Josh Pacewicz)

This paper explores the consequences of structural corporate power for local democracy in the United States, particularly as mediated by jurisdictional fragmentation and policy devolution to under-resourced local governments. By qualitatively examining the various forms of local governance in several historical “company towns,” I suggest that spatially-concentrated property ownership has facilitated the private domination over public life within non-diverse regional economies. Classic labor histories have documented the oppressive employment relationship in these planned communities—including payment in scrip, regular threats of eviction, obstacles to unionization, and employer surveillance of private affairs. But few accounts have examined company towns as local governments: a legal means of achieving an effective merger between the public functions of local governance and private domination of the workplace. This paper aspires to (1) identify the sources and contours of this form of power, developed in part through brief historical case studies; (2) highlight the relationship between this form of power and jurisdictional boundaries, through the interactions between economic geography and jurisdictional fragmentation; (3) discuss the consequences for theories of local democracy, including by developing a set of normative recommendations for fiscal/regulatory federalism design. (This will be a joint session with Rebekah Jones)

It has become common knowledge that the United States incarcerates more of its population than any other nation in the world. However, deeply intertwined with this empirical reality lies the fact that the U.S. also leads the Western world in rates of lethal violence. Dominant explanations of this paradox have centralized the unique character of American federalism, theorizing that such institutional dynamics have ensured that critical functions of the state (i.e., maintaining the monopoly of violence) have been foisted on underequipped local governments. As a consequence, localities may be incentivized to overly-rely on state-funded incarceration. Still, empirical evidence testing the prevalence of this tradeoff in public safety has yet to surface. In this proposal, I use FBI administrative and crime data for roughly 1200 U.S. counties from 2005-2008, finding evidence for the severity-certainty tradeoff, conditional on the financial constraint of the county. (This will be a joint session with Brian Highsmith)

In this professionalization panel, Thea Riofrancos (Providence), Jake Grumbach (UC Berkeley), and Aaron Rosenthal (North Star Policy Action) will discuss and answer questions about their experiences in research about American political economy in and out of the academy. Topics covered will include public-facing work, practical data planning and research design, teaching-intensive faculty jobs, and non-academic and applied research careers.

This paper addresses how to disentangle demand factors (voters) from supply factors (politicians) in shaping political outcomes, focusing on the recent realignment of blue-collar voters away from left-wing parties. I develop a multidimensional political equilibrium model to evaluate the roles of demand- and supply-side factors in the U.S. educational realignment between 2000 and 2020. On the supply side, I estimate candidate positioning using a multimodal text-and-survey model from campaign websites, finding that candidate polarization on cultural issues has been twice as large as on economic issues. On the demand side, I build a new panel of precinct-level election results and identify voter preferences from congressional district border discontinuities. Using a model of political competition where candidates balance electability against compliance with the party line, I show that House candidates’ ability to adapt their positions to their constituents has been divided by three. The paper shows that realign- ment is driven mainly by changes in party positioning — particularly parties’ stronger polarization on cultural than economic issues — rather than by shifts in voter preferences. Finally, I simulate support for counterfactual environmental positions, revealing that progressive environmental policies involving economic rather than cultural measures would attract more support from less-educated voters. (This will be a joint session with Daniel Goldstein.)

Political executives often adhere to informal traditions established by their predecessors. Without the backing of formal laws, elites have incentives to violate norms, particularly if doing so yields a political advantage. When do constraining executive norms carry weight and when do they falter? We examine an infinite horizon principal-agent model to analyze the maintenance of executive norms. We first consider a model which is played only between the executive and their party. This model demonstrates the importance of intra-party accountability in the maintenance of norms, as well as the role that differences in patience can play in willingness to violate norms. Next, we consider an expanded model with two parties and two executives. This shows how expectations over the actions of other political parties shape the willingness to violate norms when in-office. The insights from the models are used to categorize types of executive norms and their relative fragility. We also chart the trajectory of one executive norm in-depth: the two term tradition of the American presidency. Overall, the study holds implications for how informal institutions regulate executive behavior and for understanding the interplay between informal and formal institutions. (This will be a joint session with Nicolas Longuet-Marx.)

Building on Michener, SoRelle, and Thurston’s (2020) call to broaden our understanding of the “American welfare state,” we explore how collective crisis events expose new vulnerabilities and generate new resources. We examine emergency housing policies created during the 2007 Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that emergency relief policies from both federal and state levels are 1) substantial in volume, 2) enduring, and 3) set critical precedents for future social policy. These policies, crucial for the most vulnerable, often operate in overlooked areas of traditional welfare research. We identify three dimensions of crisis resources: state-level capacity in administering federal discretionary funds, state generosity in enacting state-level relief policies, and private credit regulations. By examining the full range of welfare resources that are made available in hard times, we identify new forms of assistance that complement or substitute traditional welfare programs. At the same time, we highlight their significant variability across states, often in ways that are not easily predicted by baseline generosity, partisanship, or the severity of the crisis. (This will be a joint session with Isabella Cuervo-Lorens.)

How do business interests shape politicians’ preferences on free trade? Past studies either focus on how the labor shock brought by globalization made politicians anti-trade, or how “Corporate America” pushed back against politicians’ protectionist turn. Business interests are absent in the first case, too unified in the second. I argue that firms have different types of business concerns depending on their specific position in the market and interaction with the host state. They transmit their business concerns to politicians to shape the trade policy. Empirically, I focus on the U.S.-China trade relationship from 2017 to 2023. Adopting a text as data approach, I measure S&P 500 companies’ various business assessments on China from their financial (10-K) reports and Congress Members’ specific criticisms of China using Twitter data. I link firms’ interests to politicians’ preferences via lobbying expenses data. Results show that politicians who are lobbied by firms that discussed intellectual property rights violations in their reports are more likely to criticize China on trade and technology issues. (This will be a joint session with Quinn Bornstein.)

This paper examines the Farm Workforce Modernization Act (FWMA) as a case study in how and why legislators advocate for the needs of non-citizen guest agricultural workers, who are primarily Latinos living in rural parts of the United States. This paper employs qualitative network analysis to examine the reasons why a bipartisan group of lawmakers, as well as the Department of Agriculture (USDA), farm worker interest groups like the United Farm Workers (UFW), and agricultural interest groups representing growers of hand-picked crops, support and oppose the bill in the 116th through 118th Congresses. The bill was first introduced in 2019 to update the H2-A program and clarify guest worker legal status. Examining the FWMA is crucial for understanding how political elites view and advocate for vulnerable rural migrant worker populations, as well as the policy interests of non-farmworker constituents who care about immigration reform, the food industry, and rural economies. (This will be a joint session with Brian Leung.)