Whose Recovery?: Power & Inequality After the Great Recession in the US States

• In Event: Intersectional Research on Class and Inequality

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing recession have revealed the deep economic insecurity experienced by large swaths of Americans. In the roughly ten years between the global financial crisis and the pandemic, the U.S. experienced the longest economic expansion in its recorded history. Yet that recovery was inequitable across place, class, race, and gender. Centering these concerns, we raise a series of pressing but under-examined questions: Who shaped the trajectory and nature of the recovery across the American states? To what extent, if at all, did state policymakers, political and economic organizations, and those hit hardest by the recession—low-income people and people of color—exercise influence over the recovery? To answer these questions, we marshal time-series and cross-sectional data at the state level to examine how lawmakers and organizations who reflect and/or amplify the power of economically and racially marginalized groups shape recovery outcomes including, the growth and quality of employment, and economic inequality. The key actors we consider include lawmakers of color and labor unions, class- and racial justice-based interest groups, and grassroots advocacy organizations.

In investigating these questions, we make a number of contributions to the growing American political-economy and inequality literatures. First, beyond traditional labor unions and Democrats, we expand the universe of groups and lawmakers under examination to better theoretically and empirically understand the “power resources” available to economically and racially marginalized groups within and across the American states. We see this as especially pressing amid a growing body of research applying Power Resource Theory (PRT) to the U.S. context alongside the decline of organized labor and the growing power of people of color within the Democratic Party. Second, we bring sectors key to the “new” economy—such as finance—into our analysis to probe their relationship to inequality, economic growth, and political power at the sub-national level. Third, we help lay the theoretical and empirical groundwork for future research that examines the politics of recoveries. Once the pandemic recedes and the economy begins to grow at a sustained pace again, questions of who gets what, when, and how should remain at the top of the agenda for students of American politics. Recessions and recoveries are not solely economic; they are also fundamentally shaped by political processes. Studying these forces surfaces crucial insights about power, inequality, and the quality of American democracy.

Authors

• Trevor Brown, Cornell University

• Jamila D. Michener, Cornell University