The dramatic rise in inequality in the United States over the past generation has occasioned considerable attention from economists, but strikingly little from students of American politics. This has started to change: in recent years, a small but growing body of political science research on rising inequality has challenged standard economic accounts that emphasize apolitical processes of economic change. For all the sophistication of this new scholarship, however, it too fails to provide a compelling account of the political sources and (...) effects of rising inequality. In particular, these studies share with dominant economic accounts three weaknesses: they downplay the distinctive feature of American inequality —namely, the extreme concentration of income gains at the top of the economic ladder; they miss the profound role of government policy in creating this “winner-take-all” pattern; and they give little attention or weight to the dramatic long-term transformation of the organizational landscape of American politics that lies behind these changes in policy. These weaknesses are interrelated, stemming ultimately from a conception of politics that emphasizes the sway of the “median voter” in electoral politics, rather than the influence of organized interests in the process of policy making. A perspective centered on organizational and policy change —one that identifies the major policy shifts that have bolstered the economic standing of those at the top and then links those shifts to concrete organizational efforts by resourceful private interests —fares much better at explaining why the American political economy has become distinctively winner-take-all. (shrink)

A number of scholars have highlighted the role of employers in shaping the development of the welfare state. Yet the results of this research have often been ambiguous or disputed because of insufficient attention to theoretical, conceptual, and methodological problems in the study of political influence. This article considers three of these problems in turn: the failure to distinguish and investigate multiple mechanisms of exercising influence, the misspecification of preferences, and the inference of influence from ex post correlation between actor (...) preferences and outcomes. We demonstrate the importance of each through a reexamination of the early development of the American welfare state. The striking feature we suggest is neither business dominance nor weakness but marked variation in influence over time and across institutional settings. (shrink)

What are the prospects for meaningful reform of U.S. health care? To answer this question requires understanding why previous reform efforts failed—the combination of deep structural biases against large-scale public provision and the inherited constraints posed by the rise of employment-based insurance. Generally, the context is more favorable today than it was fifteen years ago. But the prospects for change hinge on learning the right lesson of history: Politics comes first. Putting politics first means avoiding the overarching mistake of the (...) Clinton reformers: envisioning a grand policy compromise rather than hammering out a real political compromise. It also means addressing the inevitable fears of those who believe they are well protected by our eroding employment-based framework. And it means premising political strategies on the contemporary realities of hyperpolarized politics, rather than wistfully recalled images of the bipartisan politics of old. (shrink)