The American Political Economy in Comparative Perspective

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The proposed panel would showcase the work of a two-year project to develop a set of concepts, claims, and contributions within the important yet underdeveloped field of American political economy (APE).

Although the study of political economy has flourished in comparative politics, APE has failed to develop as a distinct, sustained field of study within the subfield of American politics. To begin to fill this void, we have brought together a range of junior and senior scholars to contribute to a high-quality edited volume to make the case for a new field. The proposed theme panel will bring together a selection of these contributors to highlight the exciting possibilities for path-breaking research within APE. In doing so, the panel will also speak directly to the questions posed by the conference theme statement about how the structure of national political institutions shapes the sustainability of politics and economics (and their interplay) within the United States and other advanced democracies.

The case for APE as a subfield is theoretical as well as substantive. Substantively, the United States is pivotal to the world economy, yet largely absent or a foil in the field of comparative political economy. Theoretically, the transition of the United States from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy has been marked by distinctive strains—high and rising inequality, intense partisan and regional polarization, and increased concentration and consolidation of key product markets—that call into question dominant theoretical perspectives that see relative functional congruence between politics and economics within developed democracies. We argue that, more and more, the American political economy is marked by functional incongruence, in which neither the disciplining force of markets nor the sway of median voters pushes consistently toward shared prosperity. Further, we argue that this functional incongruence can be linked to unusual features of American political institutions—particularly the fragmentation of U.S. governing authority and territorial structure of American elections and policymaking—as they have interacted with the changing regional, interfirm, and household distribution of economic rewards.

A hallmark of our effort is its emphasis on attracting the energies of excellent young scholars, and the proposed theme panel would include two scholars who’ve received their PhDs in the last decade (Chloe Thurston and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez). It would also bring together scholars who mainly study comparative political economy (Jane Gingrich, Ben Ansell, and Kathy Thelen) and scholars who specialize in American politics research, focusing on both the national (Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson, Thurston) and subnational levels (Jessica Trounstine).

The panel would begin with a general overview of what APE can offer political science, drawing on the broad introductory chapter to the volume. Then, panelists would illustrate the promise of the approach with pathbreaking papers that look at specific aspects of the American political-economic system: the distinctive reproduction of racial and economic inequality at the local level, the particular way in which the postindustrial revolution has played out in the United States, and the way in which the American welfare state’s heavy reliance on private benefits has intersected with America’s unusually deep race and class divides. Finally, a discussant would comment on strengths and weaknesses of the approach and the specific papers, and we would open up a broader discussion of how and why to encourage the development of APE as a field.

Sub Unit

• Division 55: Class and Inequality

Chair

• Jacob S. Hacker Yale University

Discussant

• Jonathan Rodden Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• In Search of American Political Economy: A Framework and Agenda for Research - Jacob S. Hacker, Yale University; Kathleen Thelen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Alexander Warren Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia University; Paul Pierson, University of California, Berkeley

• Concentration and Commodification: The Political Economy of Postindustrialism - Jane R. Gingrich, University of Oxford; Ben William Ansell, University of Oxford

• The Production of Local Inequality: Race and Land Use in American Cities - Jessica Luce Trounstine, University of California, Merced

• Race, the Knowledge Economy, and the Politics of Welfare State Adaptation - Chloe Thurston, Northwestern University