Josh Pacewicz
Biographic Data
| ID | 255680 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Josh Pacewicz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Josh |
| FAMILY NAME | Pacewicz |
| SIGNATURE | PACEWICZ J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1438-1786 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 133 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Bonds of Inequality
Theorizing Subdisciplinary Exchange
What happens at the point of interchange between scholarly communities? We examine this question by investigating the case of growing ties between historical sociology and ethnography, two social scientific methods that once seemed to have little in common. Drawing on methodological writings by ethnographers and original interviews with practicing historical sociologists, we argue that these ties have been shaped by structural and methodological …
When Is Populism Good for Liberal Democracy
Debates over populism pit those who see it as dangerous for liberal democracy against those who view it as necessary for mobilizing the marginalized. This article flips the question and asks whether and how populist rhetoric supports liberal democracy. I synthesize accounts of voting behavior, poststructural Marxism, and pragmatism to develop a cognitive theory of populist resonance focused on how people use rhetoric to solve conceptual problems …
What Can You Do With a Single Case? How to Think About Ethnographic Case Selection Like a Historical Sociologist
Most social scientists agree that case studies are useful for 'theory building,' but ethnographic methods papers often look to survey research for case selection strategies. This is due to a common but untenable distinction between theoretical and empirical generalization, which obscures how theoretically inclined ethnographers make implicit external validity claims. I analyze several exemplary ethnographies to show that (a) the distinction betwe…
The Great Interstate Divergence
Among American states, differences in welfare programs and civil rights protections are growing. Conventional explanations point to conservative organizations that score flashy legislative victories. We draw on case studies of Medicaid and election administration in Rhode Island and Kansas to show that much policy divergence is due to a banal and ideologically symmetric process of partisan administration. Most federal policies rely on state gover…
Pocketbook policing
This article investigates a trend in the Chicago region that defies conventional accounts of municipal politics and revenue-motivated policing: since the Great Recession, higher-income black suburbs have sharply increased collection of legal fines and fees. To explain this, we draw on a study of municipal officials to develop a racialization of municipal opportunity perspective, which highlights how racial segregation in the suburbs intersects wi…
Unequal and Unrepresented
Boom, Bust, Exodus
The Regulatory Road to Reform
American policymakers delegate the administration of many welfare programs to states, where officials implement them in increasingly diverse ways. Welfare state scholarship has little to say about this subnational policy divergence, and it portrays the complexity of delegated governance as a barrier to nonelite legislative influence. Drawing on an ethnographic study of one state's Medicaid program, this article shows that delegated governance off…
Partisans and Partners
One
This chapter shows how pre-1980s federal policies allowed local business owning families, or “the old families,” to maintain their position of public prominence in Prairieville. Using archival records and oral histories, the chapter shows that the old families were central to a social system similar to Marcel Mauss’s account of a total gift exchange: they accumulated resources and rose in prominence by giving gifts, either to concrete individuals…
Two
This chapter uses archival records and oral histories to show how union leaders historically maintained their position of public prominence in River City. Much like Prairieville’s business owners, traditional union leaders saw public leadership through the framework of a gift exchange or as synonymous with an ability to give benefits to “their side” of the public: local blue-collar and working-class residents. Keynesian-era policies encouraged th…
Three: Politics Embedded in Community Governance
This chapter shows how traditional community leaders’ political engagement resulted in politics embedded in community governance: organizational and ideological overlap between community institutions and grassroots parties. Political historians argue that American political parties’ lack of sub-national infrastructure has historically made political elites dependent on community activists, which political scientists characterize as party bosses d…
Four
This chapter shows how neoliberal reforms changed community leaders’ public culture. The chapter first engages with urban growth machine theory, regime theory, and various field theories of action, employing game play as an analogy to clarify the relationship between federal policies and community leaders’ status competition. Much as actual game players experience rules as constitutive of a game’s organic flow, community leaders are chiefly focus…
Nine
This chapter analyzes how voters behaved during the 2008 and 2012 election cycle, focusing especially on Barack Obama’s successful caucus and general election campaigns. Traditional voters remained steadfast in their support throughout and relatively moderate, supporting or opposing Obama based on their identification with their city’s business or working class. Partisans also remained consistent in political support, but were politically extreme…
Eight
Six: The Ben Denison Campaign
This chapter tracks the ascendance of partners within River City’s post-1980s public sphere and focuses additionally on constitutive exceptions to partners’ avoidance of politics: cases in which partners take political positions that ultimately aggravate tensions between those engaged in community governance and grassroots parties. The chapter first employs archival documents and oral histories to show how partners sidelined traditional leaders: …
Five
This chapter traces the post-1980s history of Prairieville’s business community, showing how partners sidelined traditional business leaders and explaining why they avoid politics. Drawing on archival records and oral histories, the chapter first lends additional support to the book’s arguments about the connection between corporate consolidation and partnership by analyzing a brief period during the 1990s when Prairieville became the headquarter…
Seven
This chapter shows how community leaders’ avoidance of partisan politics transforms grassroots parties, resulting in a new ideal typical form of grassroots organization: the activist party. The chapter first engages with accounts that point to changes in campaign finance as a cause of partisan polarization, arguing that political spending has risen but not sufficiently to alter political elites’ organizational reliance on grassroots activists. Th…
Conclusion
The conclusion summarizes the book’s main finding—that neoliberal reforms caused community leaders to withdrawal from grassroots parties, thus polarizing American politics—explores caveats, and discusses normative implications. Caveats include the extent to which periodization into Keynesian and Neoliberal periods is justified and the similarity between the historical trajectory of River City, Prairieville, and other American cities. Engaging wit…
The City as a Fiscal Derivative
Contemporary urban leaders use exotic fiscal and financial schemes to fund development, which scholars theorize as tools for creating public goods or critically as growth entrepreneurs’ speculative self–enrichment schemes. Neither approach accounts for financing schemes’ reactivity, or their tendency to shape development patterns. This paper facilitates analysis of the latter by developing a new theory of growth coalitions: the politics of earmar…
Partisans and Partners
Citizenship and Governance in a Changing City
Playing the Neoliberal Game
Community leaders increasingly avoid grassroots parties, a tendency that polarizes politics by leaving ideological activists in control. This article synthesizes urban and civil society theory to develop possible explanations, evaluating them via a mixed-methods community study, and concludes that leaders avoid politics because it stigmatizes them within their politically structured competition, or game, for community esteem. Postwar federalism e…
Regulatory Rescaling in Neoliberal Markets
Neoliberal reforms substitute “self-regulating” markets for political coordination, but are often accompanied by an expansion of the state. Scholars argue that this is because market-facilitating regulations increase. Through a mixed-methods study of two urban production economies, I show that political actors also make markets through regulatory rescaling—intervention that suppresses market coordination in one arena to enable it in another. Loca…
Tax increment financing, economic development professionals and the financialization of urban politics
Scholars argue that the state has facilitated the expansion of the financial sector, but focus largely on how politics transforms financial markets. I explore a new political mechanism of financialization, by drawing upon an ethnographic study of economic development in two Rust Belt cities and analyzing usage of tax increment financing (TIF), a practice that allows cities to securitize projected increases in property tax receipts and create bond…
Pocketbook policing
This article investigates a trend in the Chicago region that defies conventional accounts of municipal politics and revenue-motivated policing: since the Great Recession, higher-income black suburbs have sharply increased collection of legal fines and fees. To explain this, we draw on a study of municipal officials to develop a racialization of municipal opportunity perspective, which highlights how racial segregation in the suburbs intersects wi…
What Can You Do With a Single Case? How to Think About Ethnographic Case Selection Like a Historical Sociologist
Most social scientists agree that case studies are useful for 'theory building,' but ethnographic methods papers often look to survey research for case selection strategies. This is due to a common but untenable distinction between theoretical and empirical generalization, which obscures how theoretically inclined ethnographers make implicit external validity claims. I analyze several exemplary ethnographies to show that (a) the distinction betwe…
Playing the Neoliberal Game
Community leaders increasingly avoid grassroots parties, a tendency that polarizes politics by leaving ideological activists in control. This article synthesizes urban and civil society theory to develop possible explanations, evaluating them via a mixed-methods community study, and concludes that leaders avoid politics because it stigmatizes them within their politically structured competition, or game, for community esteem. Postwar federalism e…
The City as a Fiscal Derivative
Contemporary urban leaders use exotic fiscal and financial schemes to fund development, which scholars theorize as tools for creating public goods or critically as growth entrepreneurs’ speculative self–enrichment schemes. Neither approach accounts for financing schemes’ reactivity, or their tendency to shape development patterns. This paper facilitates analysis of the latter by developing a new theory of growth coalitions: the politics of earmar…
Who governs? Delegations and delegates in global trade lawmaking
Who governs in the international organizations (IOs) that promulgate global norms on trade and commercial law? Using a new analytic approach, this paper focuses on previously invisible attributes of a global legislature – the state and non‐state delegations and delegates that create universal norms for international trade and commercial law through the most prominent trade law legislature, the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). …
The Great Interstate Divergence
Among American states, differences in welfare programs and civil rights protections are growing. Conventional explanations point to conservative organizations that score flashy legislative victories. We draw on case studies of Medicaid and election administration in Rhode Island and Kansas to show that much policy divergence is due to a banal and ideologically symmetric process of partisan administration. Most federal policies rely on state gover…
Theorizing Subdisciplinary Exchange
What happens at the point of interchange between scholarly communities? We examine this question by investigating the case of growing ties between historical sociology and ethnography, two social scientific methods that once seemed to have little in common. Drawing on methodological writings by ethnographers and original interviews with practicing historical sociologists, we argue that these ties have been shaped by structural and methodological …
When Is Populism Good for Liberal Democracy
Debates over populism pit those who see it as dangerous for liberal democracy against those who view it as necessary for mobilizing the marginalized. This article flips the question and asks whether and how populist rhetoric supports liberal democracy. I synthesize accounts of voting behavior, poststructural Marxism, and pragmatism to develop a cognitive theory of populist resonance focused on how people use rhetoric to solve conceptual problems …
The Regulatory Road to Reform
American policymakers delegate the administration of many welfare programs to states, where officials implement them in increasingly diverse ways. Welfare state scholarship has little to say about this subnational policy divergence, and it portrays the complexity of delegated governance as a barrier to nonelite legislative influence. Drawing on an ethnographic study of one state's Medicaid program, this article shows that delegated governance off…
Unequal and Unrepresented
Regulatory Rescaling in Neoliberal Markets
Neoliberal reforms substitute “self-regulating” markets for political coordination, but are often accompanied by an expansion of the state. Scholars argue that this is because market-facilitating regulations increase. Through a mixed-methods study of two urban production economies, I show that political actors also make markets through regulatory rescaling—intervention that suppresses market coordination in one arena to enable it in another. Loca…
Et Obama conquit l'Amérique. Le triomphe démocrate de 2008 revisité
Pronostiquée par les sondages, l'élection de Barack Obama apparaît rétrospectivement comme une victoire annoncée et acquise facilement. L'idée d'un raz-de-marée est reprise par les médias, comme si les États-Unis se réveillaient subitement démocrates pour tourner la page de l'ère Bush. Josh Pacewicz et Etienne Ollion reviennent sur les conditions du succès en montrant qu'il a été obtenu grâce à des méthodes de campagne innovantes qui feront date.…
Regulatory Rescaling in Neoliberal Markets
Neoliberal reforms substitute “self-regulating” markets for political coordination, but are often accompanied by an expansion of the state. Scholars argue that this is because market-facilitating regulations increase. Through a mixed-methods study of two urban production economies, I show that political actors also make markets through regulatory rescaling—intervention that suppresses market coordination in one arena to enable it in another. Loca…
Who governs? Delegations and delegates in global trade lawmaking
Who governs in the international organizations (IOs) that promulgate global norms on trade and commercial law? Using a new analytic approach, this paper focuses on previously invisible attributes of a global legislature – the state and non‐state delegations and delegates that create universal norms for international trade and commercial law through the most prominent trade law legislature, the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). …
Tax increment financing, economic development professionals and the financialization of urban politics
Scholars argue that the state has facilitated the expansion of the financial sector, but focus largely on how politics transforms financial markets. I explore a new political mechanism of financialization, by drawing upon an ethnographic study of economic development in two Rust Belt cities and analyzing usage of tax increment financing (TIF), a practice that allows cities to securitize projected increases in property tax receipts and create bond…
Citizenship and Governance in a Changing City
Playing the Neoliberal Game
Community leaders increasingly avoid grassroots parties, a tendency that polarizes politics by leaving ideological activists in control. This article synthesizes urban and civil society theory to develop possible explanations, evaluating them via a mixed-methods community study, and concludes that leaders avoid politics because it stigmatizes them within their politically structured competition, or game, for community esteem. Postwar federalism e…
Partisans and Partners
One
This chapter shows how pre-1980s federal policies allowed local business owning families, or “the old families,” to maintain their position of public prominence in Prairieville. Using archival records and oral histories, the chapter shows that the old families were central to a social system similar to Marcel Mauss’s account of a total gift exchange: they accumulated resources and rose in prominence by giving gifts, either to concrete individuals…
Two
This chapter uses archival records and oral histories to show how union leaders historically maintained their position of public prominence in River City. Much like Prairieville’s business owners, traditional union leaders saw public leadership through the framework of a gift exchange or as synonymous with an ability to give benefits to “their side” of the public: local blue-collar and working-class residents. Keynesian-era policies encouraged th…
Three: Politics Embedded in Community Governance
This chapter shows how traditional community leaders’ political engagement resulted in politics embedded in community governance: organizational and ideological overlap between community institutions and grassroots parties. Political historians argue that American political parties’ lack of sub-national infrastructure has historically made political elites dependent on community activists, which political scientists characterize as party bosses d…
Four
This chapter shows how neoliberal reforms changed community leaders’ public culture. The chapter first engages with urban growth machine theory, regime theory, and various field theories of action, employing game play as an analogy to clarify the relationship between federal policies and community leaders’ status competition. Much as actual game players experience rules as constitutive of a game’s organic flow, community leaders are chiefly focus…
Nine
This chapter analyzes how voters behaved during the 2008 and 2012 election cycle, focusing especially on Barack Obama’s successful caucus and general election campaigns. Traditional voters remained steadfast in their support throughout and relatively moderate, supporting or opposing Obama based on their identification with their city’s business or working class. Partisans also remained consistent in political support, but were politically extreme…
Eight
Six: The Ben Denison Campaign
This chapter tracks the ascendance of partners within River City’s post-1980s public sphere and focuses additionally on constitutive exceptions to partners’ avoidance of politics: cases in which partners take political positions that ultimately aggravate tensions between those engaged in community governance and grassroots parties. The chapter first employs archival documents and oral histories to show how partners sidelined traditional leaders: …
Five
This chapter traces the post-1980s history of Prairieville’s business community, showing how partners sidelined traditional business leaders and explaining why they avoid politics. Drawing on archival records and oral histories, the chapter first lends additional support to the book’s arguments about the connection between corporate consolidation and partnership by analyzing a brief period during the 1990s when Prairieville became the headquarter…
Seven
This chapter shows how community leaders’ avoidance of partisan politics transforms grassroots parties, resulting in a new ideal typical form of grassroots organization: the activist party. The chapter first engages with accounts that point to changes in campaign finance as a cause of partisan polarization, arguing that political spending has risen but not sufficiently to alter political elites’ organizational reliance on grassroots activists. Th…
Conclusion
The conclusion summarizes the book’s main finding—that neoliberal reforms caused community leaders to withdrawal from grassroots parties, thus polarizing American politics—explores caveats, and discusses normative implications. Caveats include the extent to which periodization into Keynesian and Neoliberal periods is justified and the similarity between the historical trajectory of River City, Prairieville, and other American cities. Engaging wit…
The City as a Fiscal Derivative
Contemporary urban leaders use exotic fiscal and financial schemes to fund development, which scholars theorize as tools for creating public goods or critically as growth entrepreneurs’ speculative self–enrichment schemes. Neither approach accounts for financing schemes’ reactivity, or their tendency to shape development patterns. This paper facilitates analysis of the latter by developing a new theory of growth coalitions: the politics of earmar…
Partisans and Partners
Boom, Bust, Exodus
The Regulatory Road to Reform
American policymakers delegate the administration of many welfare programs to states, where officials implement them in increasingly diverse ways. Welfare state scholarship has little to say about this subnational policy divergence, and it portrays the complexity of delegated governance as a barrier to nonelite legislative influence. Drawing on an ethnographic study of one state's Medicaid program, this article shows that delegated governance off…
Unequal and Unrepresented
Pocketbook policing
This article investigates a trend in the Chicago region that defies conventional accounts of municipal politics and revenue-motivated policing: since the Great Recession, higher-income black suburbs have sharply increased collection of legal fines and fees. To explain this, we draw on a study of municipal officials to develop a racialization of municipal opportunity perspective, which highlights how racial segregation in the suburbs intersects wi…
What Can You Do With a Single Case? How to Think About Ethnographic Case Selection Like a Historical Sociologist
Most social scientists agree that case studies are useful for 'theory building,' but ethnographic methods papers often look to survey research for case selection strategies. This is due to a common but untenable distinction between theoretical and empirical generalization, which obscures how theoretically inclined ethnographers make implicit external validity claims. I analyze several exemplary ethnographies to show that (a) the distinction betwe…
The Great Interstate Divergence
Among American states, differences in welfare programs and civil rights protections are growing. Conventional explanations point to conservative organizations that score flashy legislative victories. We draw on case studies of Medicaid and election administration in Rhode Island and Kansas to show that much policy divergence is due to a banal and ideologically symmetric process of partisan administration. Most federal policies rely on state gover…
Political science (24 works) · Politics (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Public Administration (13 works) · Economics (10 works) · Political and Economic history of UK and US (10 works) · Political economy (8 works) · Business (6 works) · Finance (6 works)