American Political Economy in Comparative Perspective

MIT | 17.150 | Spring 2025 | Thu 10–12 | E53-485 | Canvas site

Devin Caughey () and Kathleen Thelen ()

Last updated: April 10, 2025

Course information

Scope and purpose

“Political economy” has multiple meanings in the social sciences. For the purposes of this class, the term refers to the study of how economic and political systems are linked, and how the investigation of these linkages can strengthen our understanding of important economic and political phenomena. Described this way, political economy has been a vital part of the subfields of comparative politics and international relations, but has failed to develop as a distinct, sustained focus of research among students of American politics.

This seminar is designed to explore what we know about the American political economy and what we need to find out. We will draw on research in comparative politics and on various research programs in American politics that might be modified to speak to important issues in political economy. A central goal is to identify promising areas of scholarly research in this understudied yet substantively fascinating area of political life.

Students who are unfamiliar with the broad contours of American political-economic development may wish to read Marc Allen Eisner, The American Political Economy: Institutional Evolution of Market and State (2nd ed., Routledge 2014) for background (link to MIT access).

Requirements

This course has three main requirements:

  1. Participation: Everyone is expected to read and reflect on the required reading prior to class, and to come to seminar prepared to discuss the material.

  2. Reading responses: For 6 class meetings of your choice (but including 3 of the first 6 class meetings), you must prepare short reaction papers (no more than 2 pages long, double-spaced, 1 inch margins) that critically review and analyze some aspect of the required readings. Papers should be submitted by email by 4:00 p.m. (your time zone) on the Wednesday before the Thursday class. Late submissions are not permitted.

  3. Term paper: Students will write a term paper on a subject to be negotiated with the instructor.

Materials

All readings and other materials required for this course will be posted on its Canvas site (https://canvas.mit.edu/courses/30264). If you have any problems with the course website, please contact Ning Soong () or Morgan Gillespie ().

Schedule

A detailed schedule for the term is provided below. Under each session is listed about six required readings, along with suggestions for optional further reading. Some sessions also mention subjects or arguments that you are assumed to be already familiar with. If you are not, you should review the suggested texts.

1. Feb. 6: Organizational meeting

Required readings

  • Jacob S. Hacker et al. “Introduction: The American Political Economy: A Framework and an Agenda for Research,” in The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, ed. Jacob S. Hacker et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 1–48.

Total: 48 pages

2. Feb. 13: Varieties of capitalism (Thelen)

Required readings

  • Eric Foner “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop 17, no. 1 (1984): 57–80.
  • Samuel P. Huntington “Political Modernization: America vs. Europe,” World Politics 18, no. 3 (1966): 378–414.
  • Peter A. Hall and David Soskice “An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism,” in Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, ed. Peter A. Hall and David Soskice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1–68.
  • Chris Howell “And Then There Was One? Review of Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, by Peter Hall and David Soskice; The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison, by Wolfgang Streeck and Kozo Yamamura; and Models of Capitalism: Growth and Stagnation in the Modern Era, by David Coates,” Comparative Politics 36, no. 1 (2003): 103–24. Read 103–112 only.
  • Wolfgang Streeck “Educating Capitalists: A Rejoinder to Wright and Tsakalotos,” Socio-Economic Review 2, no. 3 (2004): 425–38.
  • Herman Mark Schwartz “American Hegemony: Intellectual Property Rights, Dollar Centrality, and Infrastructural Power,” Review of International Political Economy 26, no. 3 (2019): 490–519.

Total: 183 pages

Optional resources

  • Wolfgang Streeck “E Pluribus Unum? Varieties and Commonalities of Capitalism,” in The Sociology of Economic LIfe, ed. Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 419–55.
  • Ira Katznelson “Considerations on Social Democracy in the United States,” Comparative Politics 11, no. 1 (1978): 77–99.
  • Robert H. Salisbury “Why No Corporatism in America?” in Trends Towards Corporatist Intermediation, ed. Philippe C. Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979), 213–30.

3. Feb. 20: American political institutions (Caughey)

Required readings

  • William J. Novak “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (2008): 752–72.
  • Juan J. Linz “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Journal of Democracy 1, no. 1 (1990): 51–69.
  • Jonathan Rodden “Keeping Your Enemies Close: Electoral Rules and Partisan Polarization,” in Who Gets What? The New Politics of Insecurity, ed. Frances Rosenbluth and Margaret Weir (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 129–60.
  • Jacob Grumbach Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 18–33 (chap. 2).
  • David R. Mayhew “Congress as a Handler of Challenges: The Historical Record,” Studies in American Political Development 29, no. 2 (2015): 185–212.
  • Lisa L. Miller “Checks and Balances, Veto Points, and Constitutional Folk Wisdom: Race and Class Power in American Politics,” Political Research Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2023): 1604–18.

Total: 131 pages

Optional resources

  • Steven L. Taylor et al. A Different Democracy: American Government in a Thirty-One-Country Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

4. Feb. 27: American political development (Caughey)

Required readings

  • Richard Bensel Sectionalism and American Political Development: 1880–1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 3–59 (chap. 1–2).
  • Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly 108, no. 2 (1993): 283–306.
  • Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston The Political Development of American Debt Relief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024), 1–40 (introduction and chap. 1), 76–92 (chap. 4), and 115–132 (chap. 6).
  • Margaret Weir “States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism,” Studies in American Political Development 19, no. 2 (2005): 157–72.
  • Kirstine Taylor “Sunbelt Capitalism, Civil Rights, and the Development of Carceral Policy in North Carolina, 1954–1970,” Studies in American Political Development 32, no. 2 (2018): 292–322.
  • Timothy P. R. Weaver “Market Privilege: The Place of Neoliberalism in American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development 35, no. 1 (2021): 104–26.

Total: 226 pages

Optional resources

  • Daniel Carpenter “Lesson, Portraiture, Method, Myth: Richard Bensel’s the Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900” (n.d.).
  • Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek “Regimes and Regime Building in American Government: A Review of Literature on the 1940s,” Political Science Quarterly 113, no. 4 (1998): 689–702.
  • Lizabeth Cohen “A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America,” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004): 236–39.
  • Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74, no. Fall (2008): 3–32.
  • Thomas Ferguson “Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal: The Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3–31.

5. Mar. 6: Economic interests: Structure and strategies (Thelen)

Assumed background

We assume a basic familiarity with the distinctive characteristics of U.S. unions and labor law, such as that provided in -Brishen Rogers “Prepared Statement of Brishen Rogers,” Hearing on The Future of Work: Preserving Worker Protections in the Modern Economy (United States House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, October 23, 2019), which can be accessed on the course website.

Required readings

  • Chase Foster and Kathleen Thelen “Coordination Rights, Competition Law and Varieties of Capitalism,” Comparative Political Studies, 2024, 1–39.
  • Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson American Amnesia: Business, Government and the Forgotten Roots of Our Prosperity (New York: Simon; Schuster, 2016), 201–38 (chap. 7).
  • Daniel J. Galvin “Labor’s Legacy: The Construction of Subnational Work Regulation,” ILR Review 74, no. 5 (2021): 1103–31.
  • Alexander Hertel-Fernandez “Who Passes Business’s ‘Model Bills’? Policy Capacity and Corporate Influence in U.S. State Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 582–602.
  • Hye Young You “Ex Post Lobbying,” Journal of Politics 79, no. 4 (2017): 1162–76.
  • Sarah F. Anzia Local Interests: Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2022), excerpts from chapters 1, 2, 4, and 8 (44 pages total).

Total: 186 pages

Optional resources

  • Mark S. Mizruchi and Mikell Hyman “Elite Fragmentation and the Decline of the United States,” Political Power and Social Theory 26 (2014): 147–94.
  • Charles E. Lindblom “The Market As Prison,” Journal of Politics 44, no. 2 (1982): 324–36.
  • David Vogel “The Power of Business in America: A Re-Appraisal,” British Journal of Political Science 13, no. 1 (1983): 19–43.
  • Nelson Lichtenstein “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 122–52.
  • Jake Rosenfeld “US Labor Studies in the Twenty-First Century: Understanding Laborism Without Labor,” Annual Review of Sociology 45 (2019): 1–17.
  • Suresh Naidu “Labor Market Power in the American Political Economy,” in The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, ed. Jacob S. Hacker et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 295–320.

6. Mar. 13: Coalitions and parties (Caughey)

Assumed background

We assume a basic familiarity with the “UCLA School” view of parties as coalition of policy-demanding groups, such as that provided in Kathleen Bawn et al. “A Theory of Political Parties: Groups, Policy Demands and Nominations in American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 3 (2012): 571–97.

Required readings

  • Matt Grossmann, Zuhaib Mahmood, and William Isaac “Political Parties, Interest Groups, and Unequal Class Influence in American Policy,” Journal of Politics 83, no. 4 (2021): 1706–20.
  • Rachel M. Blum How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 1–12 (chap. 1), 26–43 (chap. 3), and 59–77 (chap. 5).
  • Stan Oklobdzija “Dark Parties: Unveiling Nonparty Communities in American Political Campaigns,” American Political Science Review 118, no. 1 (2024): 401–22.
  • Alberto Alesina and Howard Rosenthal Partisan Politics, Divided Government, and the Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–16 (chap. 1) and 161–203 (chap. 7–8).
  • Matto Mildenberger Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics (MIT Press, 2020), 39–64 (chap 2: “The Logic of Double Representation”).
  • Alexander Reisenbichler and Andreas Wiedemann “Credit-Driven and Consumption-Led Growth Models in the United States and United Kingdom,” in Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation, ed. Lucio Baccaro, Mark Blyth, and Jonas Pontusson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 213–37.

Total: 196 pages

Optional resources

  • Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez “The Koch Network and Republican Party Extremism,” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 3 (2016): 681–99.
  • Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld “The Hollow Parties,” in Can America Govern Itself?, ed. Frances E. Lee and Nolan McCarty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 120–52.
  • Jacob S. Hacker et al. “Bridging the Blue Divide: The Democrats’ New Metro Coalition and the Unexpected Prominence of Redistribution,” Perspectives on Politics 22, no. 3 (2024): 609–29.
  • Alexander Hertel-Fernandez “Policy Feedback as Political Weapon: Conservative Advocacy and the Demobilization of the Public Sector Labor Movement,” Perspectives on Politics 16, no. 2 (2018): 364–79.
  • Sarah F. Anzia and Terry M. Moe “Do Politicians Use Policy to Make Politics? The Case of Public-Sector Labor Laws,” American Political Science Review 110, no. 4 (2016): 763–77.
  • Paul Frymer and Jacob M. Grumbach “Labor Unions and White Racial Politics,” American Journal of Political Science 65, no. 1 (2021): 225–40.
  • Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet Marx, and Suresh Naidu “‘Compensate the Losers?’ Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the US,” working paper (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2023), http://www.nber.org/papers/w31794.

7. Mar. 20: Inequality, (p)redistribution, and taxation (Caughey)

Assumed background

We assume a basic familiarity with the content and development of the U.S. tax system, as summarized in chapter 2 of Andrea Louise Campbell’s -Andrea Louise Campbell Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes (Princeton University Press, 2025).

Required readings

  • Torben Iversen and Max Goplerud “Redistribution Without a Median Voter: Models of Multidimensional Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 21 (2018): 1–23.
  • Sven Steinmo “Political Institutions and Tax Policy in the United States, Sweden, and Britain,” World Politics 41, no. 4 (1989): 500–535.
  • Kimberly J. Morgan and Monica Prasad “The Origins of Tax Systems: A French–American Comparison,” American Journal of Sociology 114, no. 5 (2009): 1350–94.
  • Larry M. Bartels “Homer Gets a Tax Cut: Inequality and Public Policy in the American Mind,” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 1 (2005): 15–31.
  • Antoine Bozio et al. “Predistribution Versus Redistribution: Evidence from France and the United States,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 16, no. 2 (2024): 31–65.
  • Jens Beckert “Varieties of Wealth: Toward a Comparative Sociology of Wealth Inequality,” Socio-Economic Review 22, no. 2 (2024): 475–99.

Total: 181 pages

Optional resources

  • Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini Political Economics: Explaining Economic Policy (MIT Press, 2000), 47–52 (sec. 3.0–3.3), 117–122 (sec. 6.0–6.1), and 149–151 (sec. 6.5).
  • Thomas Piketty “Excerpt from Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Political Economy Reader: Contending Perspectives and Contemporary Debates, ed. Naazneen H. Barma and Steven K. Vogel, 2nd ed. (2014; repr., Taylor & Francis, 2022), 543–50.
  • Arthur Lupia et al. “Were Bush Tax Cut Supporters ‘Simply Ignorant?’ A Second Look at Conservatives and Liberals in ‘Homer Gets a Tax Cut’,” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 4 (2007): 773–84.
  • Larry M. Bartels “Homer Gets a Warm Hug: A Note on Ignorance and Extenuation,” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 4 (2007): 785–90.
  • Larry M. Bartels Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1–32 (chap. 1), 136–163 (chap. 5), and 233–268 (chap. 8).
  • Laura C. Bucci “Organized Labor’s Check on Rising Economic Inequality in the U.S. States,” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 18, no. 2 (2018): 148–73.
  • Henry S. Farber et al. “Unions and Inequality over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 3 (2021): 1325–85.
  • Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage “The Conscription of Wealth: Mass Warfare and the Demand for Progressive Taxation,” International Organization 64, no. 4 (2010): 529–61.
  • Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe (Russell Sage Foundation; Princeton University Press, 2016).

Mar. 27: NO CLASS (SPRING BREAK)

8. Apr. 3: Risk, credit, and the welfare state (Thelen)

Assumed background

We assume a basic familiarity with Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s -Gøsta Esping-Andersen The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Polity, 1990). A summary of Esping-Anderson’s argument can be found in John R. Bowman’s -John R. Bowman Capitalisms Compared: Welfare, Work, and Business (Sage, 2014), 8–20.

Required readings

  • Theda Skocpol “State Formation and Social Policy in the United States,” in Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1995), 11–36.
  • Jacob S. Hacker “Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 2 (2004): 243–60.
  • Suzanne Mettler The Submerged State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 8–47 (chap. 1–2).
  • Chloe Thurston “Racial Inequality, Market Inequality, and the American Political Economy,” in The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, ed. Jacob S. Hacker et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 133–57.
  • Ben Ansell “The Political Economy of Ownership: Housing Markets and the Welfare State,” American Political Science Review 108, no. 2 (2014): 383–402.
  • Andreas Wiedemann “A Social Policy Theory of Everyday Borrowing: On the Role of Welfare States and Credit Regimes,” American Journal of Political Science 67, no. 2 (2023): 324–41.

Total: 147 pages

Optional resources

  • David B. Grusky, Peter A. Hall, and Hazel Rose Markus “The Rise of Opportunity Markets: How Did It Happen & What Can We Do?” Daedalus 148, no. 3 (2019): 19–45.

9. Apr. 10: Courts and the administrative state (Thelen)

We assume a basic familiarity with the role of courts as enforcers of property rights and constitutional commitments, such as that summarized in section I of Rafael La Porta et al. “Judicial Checks and Balances,” Journal of Political Economy 112, no. 2 (2004): 445–70.

Required readings

  • Robert A. Kagan Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law, 2nd ed. (Harvard University Press, 2019), 3–40 (chap. 1–2).
  • K. Sabeel Rahman and Kathleen Thelen “The Role of the Law in the American Political Economy,” in The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, ed. Jacob S. Hacker et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 76–102.
  • Thomas F. Burke and Jeb Barnes “The Post-Brown Era in Judicial Policymaking,” The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics 22, no. 1 (2024): 29–45.
  • Kumar Ramanathan and Warren Snead “The Major Questions Doctrine: Judicial Power and the Prevalence of Policy Drift in the United States,” The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, 2025.
  • Sarah Staszak Privatizing Justice: Arbitration and the Decline of Public Governance in the U.S. (Oxford University Press, 2024), 1–22 (chap. 1).
  • Daniel P. Carpenter et al. “Inequality in Agency Rulemaking” (August 16, 2024), https://judgelord.github.io/finreg/participatory-inequality.pdf.

Total: 193 pages

Optional resources

  • John Fabian Witt The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard University Press, 2004), 43–70 (chap. 2).
  • Mathew D. McCubbins, Roger G. Noll, and Barry R. Weingast “Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control,” Journal of Law, Economics & Organization 3, no. 2 (1987): 243–77.
  • Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4 (1989): 803–32.
  • Michael W. McCann Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
  • Sean Farhang “The Political Development of Job Discrimination Litigation, 1963–1976,” Studies in American Political Development 23, no. 1 (2009): 23–60.
  • Paul Baumgardner and Calvin TerBeek “The U.S. Supreme Court Is Not a Dahlian Court,” Studies in American Political Development 36, no. 2 (2022): 148–50.
  • Sarah Staszak “Privatizing Employment Law: The Expansion of Mandatory Arbitration in the Workplace,” Studies in American Political Development 34, no. 2 (2020): 239–68.

10. Apr. 17: Finance and corporate governance (Thelen)

Required readings

  • Gerald F. Davis “Politics and Financial Markets,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance, ed. Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda (Oxford University Press, 2012), 33–51.
  • Dirk Zorn et al. “The New Firm: Power and Sense-Making in the Construction of Shareholder Value,” Nordic Organization Studies 3 (2006): 41–68.
  • Pepper D. Culpepper and Raphael Reinke “Structural Power and Bank Bailouts in the United Kingdom and the United States,” Politics & Society 42, no. 4 (2014): 427–54.
  • Herman Mark Schwartz “Mo’ Patents, Mo’ Problems: Corporate Strategy, Structure, and Profitability in America’s Political Economy,” in The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, ed. Jacob S. Hacker et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 247–69.
  • Benjamin Braun “Asset Manager Capitalism as a Corporate Governance Regime,” in The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, ed. Jacob S. Hacker et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 270–94.
  • Sarah F. Anzia and Mark Spindel “Labor’s Capital: Public Pensions and Private Equity,” The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, 2025.

Total: 144 pages

Optional resources

  • Mark J. Roe “A Political Theory of American Corporate Finance,” Columbia Law Review 91, no. 1 (1991): 10–67.
  • Greta R. Krippner Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1–26 (chap. 1) and 58–85 (chap. 3).

11. Apr. 24: Spatial political economy (Caughey)

We assume a basic familiarity with the argument that intergovernmental competition imposes structural limits on the policy choices of subnational governments, such as that summarized in Paul E. Peterson’s -Paul E. Peterson “Who Should Do What? Divided Responsibility in the Federal System,” The Brookings Review 13, no. 2 (1995): 6–11.

Required readings

  • Eric Chyn and Lawrence F. Katz “Neighborhoods Matter: Assessing the Evidence for Place Effects,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 35, no. 4 (2021): 197–222.
  • Nicola Lacey and David Soskice “Crime, Punishment and Segregation in the United States: The Paradox of Local Democracy,” Punishment & Society 17, no. 4 (2015): 454–81.
  • Jessica Trounstine “The Production of Local Inequality: Race, Class, and Land Use in American Cities,” in The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, ed. Jacob S. Hacker et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 158–80.
  • Ben Ansell and Jane Gingrich “Concentration and Commodification: The Political Economy of Postindustrialism in America and Beyond,” in The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, ed. Jacob S. Hacker et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 375–406.
  • Michael Hankinson and Asya Magazinnik “The Supply-Equity Trade-Off: The Effect of Spatial Representation on the Local Housing Supply,” Journal of Politics 85, no. 3 (2023): 1033–47.
  • Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson, and Sam Zacher “Why So Little Sectionalism in the Contemporary United States? The Underrepresentation of Place-Based Economic Interests,” in Unequal Democracies: Public Policy, Responsiveness, and Redistribution in an Era of Rising Economic Inequality, ed. Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontusson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 98–129.

Total: 156 pages

Optional resources

  • Joe Soss and Vesla Weaver “Police Are Our Government: Politics, Political Science, and the Policing of Race–Class Subjugated Communities,” Annual Review of Political Science 20 (2017): 565–91.
  • Katherine Levine Einstein, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
  • Patrick Le Galès and Paul Pierson “‘Superstar Cities’ & the Generation of Durable Inequality,” Daedalus 148, no. 3 (2019): 46–72.

12. May. 1: Trade and immigration (Caughey)

Required readings

  • Daniel J. Tichenor Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 16–45 (chap. 2: “The Politics of Immigration Control”).
  • David Karol Party Position Change in American Politics: Coalition Management (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 35–56 (chap. 2: “Coalition Maintenance: The Politics of Trade Policy”).
  • Nolan McCarty “The Political Economy of Immigrant Incorporation into the Welfare State,” in Outsiders No More? Models of Immigrant Political Incorporation, ed. Jennifer Hochschild et al. (Oxford University Press, 2013), 209–26.
  • In Song Kim “Political Cleavages Within Industry: Firm-Level Lobbying for Trade Liberalization,” American Political Science Review 111, no. 1 (2017): 1–20.
  • David Autor et al. “Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure,” American Economic Review 110, no. 10 (2020): 3139–83.
  • Alberto Alesina and Marco Tabellini “The Political Effects of Immigration: Culture or Economics?” Journal of Economic Literature 62, no. 1 (2024): 5–46.

Total: 177 pages

Optional resources

  • Claudia Goldin “The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890 to 1921,” in The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy, ed. Claudia Goldin and Gary D. Libecap (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 223–58, http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6577.
  • Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman “The New Interdependence Approach: Theoretical Development and Empirical Demonstration,” Review of International Political Economy 23, no. 5 (2016): 713–36.
  • Dani Rodrik “Populism and the Economics of Globalization,” Journal of International Business Policy 1, no. 1–2 (2018): 12–33.
  • Jens Hainmueller and Daniel J. Hopkins “Public Attitudes Toward Immigration,” Annual Review of Political Science 17 (2014): 225–49.

13. May. 8: Student presentations