Jacob S Hacker
Biographic Data
| ID | 262241 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jacob S Hacker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jacob S |
| FAMILY NAME | Hacker |
| SIGNATURE | HACKER J S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3686-2513 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1,712 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 49 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Race, Responsiveness, and Representation in U.S. Lawmaking
Is national policy more responsive to the preferences of white Americans than to those of people of color? To answer this fundamental question, we examine how well federal lawmaking reflects the preferences of 520,000 Black, Latino, Asian American, and white citizens from 2006 to 2022. Average racial gaps in responsiveness are small regardless of issue area. However, white voters are significantly advantaged when Republicans control the governmen…
Bridging the Blue Divide
The electoral base of the Democratic Party has been transformed over the past generation. Democrats have lost ground in rural America while adding strength in cities and, more recently, suburbs. A major consequence of this shift has been the creation of a “U-shaped” Democratic voting base, with both poorer metro voters and affluent suburbanites siding with the party. This spatial alliance overlays a multi-racial one, as Democrats rely more heavil…
Unequal Democracies
While economic inequality has risen in every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe, the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to distribute top-income shares to citizens with low- and middle-income? Unequal Democracies offers answers to this question, bringing together contributions that fo…
For a Dollar and a Dream
Do you feel lucky? When Clint Eastwood asked this question on the big screen, a string of cash-strapped states were asking it of their residents, establishing the first publicly run lotteries in the United States in more than a century. Deindustrializing Northeastern states were under budgetary siege, caught between tax-resistant electorates and their own declining fortunes. They were fighting the mob and wanted to corner its winnings as well as …
The American Political Economy
This article provides an overview of the emerging field of American political economy (APE). Methodologically eclectic, this field seeks to understand the interaction of markets and government in America's unequal and polarized polity. Though situated within American politics research, APE draws from comparative political economy to develop a broad approach that departs from the American politics mainstream in two main ways. First, APE focuses on…
Reducing Risk as well as Inequality
Leading accounts of the politics of the welfare state focus on societal demands for risk-spreading policies. Yet current measures of the welfare state focus not on risk, but on inequality. To address this gap, this letter describes the development of two new measures,risk incidenceandrisk reduction, which correspond to the prevalence of large income losses and the degree to which welfare states reduce that prevalence, respectively. Unlike existin…
The Political Economies of Red States
A striking feature of the American political economy is its fragmentation. The constitutionally protected role of the states and the localized quality of many crucial policies foster a political economy that is at once national – the rich world's most extensive nation-spanning market – and sectional, with states or groups of states constituting distinct political economies that often have enormous scope of their own.
The American Political Economy
This volume brings together leading political scientists to explore the distinctive features of the American political economy. The introductory chapter provides a comparatively informed framework for analyzing the interplay of markets and politics in the United States, focusing on three key factors: uniquely fragmented and decentralized political institutions; an interest group landscape characterized by weak labor organizations and powerful, pa…
The Political Effects of Policy Drift
In recent years, scholars have made major progress in understanding the dynamics of “policy drift”—the transformation of a policy's outcomes due to the failure to update its rules or structures to reflect changing circumstances. Drift is a ubiquitous mode of policy change in America's gridlock-prone polity, and its causes are now well understood. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the political consequences of drift—to the ways in…
Medicare Expansion as a Path as well as a Destination
Growing interest in “Medicare for All” has revived hopes for universal health insurance. Yet serious disagreements remain over how to expand Medicare and how far to move toward a universal Medicare system. In this article, I consider these disagreements in light of what we know about “policy feedback”—the ways in which policies, once enacted, reshape public opinion, governing institutions, and political organizations. Rather than focusing on the …
Policy Feedback in an Age of Polarization
A large body of research has explored how policies, once enacted, reshape public opinion, governing institutions, and political organizations-a process known as "policy feedback." Yet this productive research agenda has yet to be translated into practical recommendations of the sort regularly provided by other social science research. This volume of The ANNALS presents the findings of a major collective effort to do just this. The Policy Feedback…
The Resistance
Even before the 2016 presidential election took place, groups and individuals angry at Donald Trump, and frightened about what a Trump presidency could mean, were taking to the streets. After the election, and particularly after the Inaugural, the protests continued. Over time, the Resistance was joined by a broad variety of groups and embraced an increasing diversity of tactics. The Resistance details the emergence of a volatile and diverse move…
The Dog That Almost Barked
The 2017 GOP drive to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA) arguably constituted the most ambitious effort to dismantle a social program in American history. Certainly it was the most ambitious to come so close to enactment, falling just three votes short in the Senate. According to an extensive body of scholarship, this near miss should have been nearly impossible. The political fallout associated with dismantling social programs, a…
America’s Welfare Parastate
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Drift and conversion
Author: Hacker, Jacob S. et al.; Genre: Contribution to Collected Edition ; Issued: 2015; Keywords: Comparative politics; Political sociology; Title: Drift and Conversion: Hidden Faces of Institutional Change
Advances in Comparative-Historical Analysis
Against the backdrop of an explosion of interest in new techniques for data collection and theory testing, this volume provides a fresh programmatic statement about comparative-historical analysis. It examines the advances and distinctive contributions that CHA has made to theory generation and the explanation of large-scale outcomes that newer approaches often regard as empirically intractable. An introductory essay locates the sources of CHA's …
Solutions to Political Polarization in America
Political polarization dominates discussions of contemporary American politics. Despite widespread agreement that the dysfunction in the political system can be attributed to political polarization, commentators cannot come to a consensus on what that means. The coarseness of our political discourse, the ideological distance between opposing partisans, and, most of all, an inability to pass much-needed and widely supported policies all stem from …
After the “Master Theory
Drawing on the pioneering work of Anthony Downs, political scientists have tended to characterize American politics as a game among undifferentiated competitors, played out largely through elections, with outcomes reflecting how formal rules translate election results into legislative votes. In this perspective, voters, campaigns, elections, and the ideological distribution of legislators merit extensive scrutiny. Other features of the political …
Detaining Democracy? Criminal Justice and American Civic Life
criminal justice; civic life; prison; citizenship; mass incarceration; crime
The Insecure American
Even before the sharp downturn that began in 2007, many Americans were concerned about economic risks. Yet this widespread public concern has not been matched by attention from political scientists regarding how citizens experience and understand the economic risks they face or how those experiences and understandings shape their views of public policy. We develop here an argument about the role of personal economic experiences in the formation o…
Presidents and the Political Economy
Presidents shape the economy; the economy shapes presidencies. Yet analyses of presidential influence over the economy usually examine this interplay through an excessively narrow focus: the ability of presidents to shape short‐term economic outcomes, particularly as these affect their own reelection prospects. Here, drawing on work in comparative political economy, we ask about the capacity of presidents to influence long‐term economic developme…
Insecure Alliances
Popular support for the welfare state varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue that these variations-vital to understanding the politics of the welfare state-reflect in part the degree to which economic disadvantage (low income) and economic insecurity (high risk) are correlated. When the disadvantaged and insecure are mostly one and the same, the base of popular support for the welfare state is narrow. When the disadvantaged an…
“You Might Be a Public Intellectual If…”
Amitai Etzioni has written something of a pocket guide for public intellectuals, proffering hard-won lessons from his own time in the trenches. I wish that I had read his primer before I tried to break into the club. And I hope that PS readers seeking to be PI players read his guide with the right mix of humor, curiosity, and skepticism about the rules of success that Etzioni evinces
Healing the Rift between Political Science and Practical Politics
Policy what government does, why it does it, and what difference it makes deserves a more central position in political science, especially in the study of American politics. This paper outlines the advantages of such a "policy-focused" political science not just for the engagement of the discipline (and those within it) with pressing real-world problems, but also for the quality of research. My argument is not simply that a focus on policy will …
Winner-Take-All Politics and Political Science
inequality; American politics; business; power; public policy; political organization
Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State
Over the last decade, students of the welfare state have produced an impressive body of research on retrenchment, the dominant thrust of which is that remarkably few welfare states have experienced fundamental shifts. This article questions this now-conventional wisdom by reconsidering the post-1970s trajectory of the American welfare state, long considered the quintessential case of social policy stability. I demonstrate that although most progr…
Winner-Take-All Politics
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 s…
Insecure Alliances
Popular support for the welfare state varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue that these variations-vital to understanding the politics of the welfare state-reflect in part the degree to which economic disadvantage (low income) and economic insecurity (high risk) are correlated. When the disadvantaged and insecure are mostly one and the same, the base of popular support for the welfare state is narrow. When the disadvantaged an…
After the “Master Theory
Drawing on the pioneering work of Anthony Downs, political scientists have tended to characterize American politics as a game among undifferentiated competitors, played out largely through elections, with outcomes reflecting how formal rules translate election results into legislative votes. In this perspective, voters, campaigns, elections, and the ideological distribution of legislators merit extensive scrutiny. Other features of the political …
Business Power and Social Policy
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 Insecure American
Even before the sharp downturn that began in 2007, many Americans were concerned about economic risks. Yet this widespread public concern has not been matched by attention from political scientists regarding how citizens experience and understand the economic risks they face or how those experiences and understandings shape their views of public policy. We develop here an argument about the role of personal economic experiences in the formation o…
The Historical Logic of National Health Insurance
Government-sponsored health insurance is a central pillar of the modern welfare state. In advanced industrial democracies, public spending on medical care accounts for an average of 6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), making it the largest category of social spending after public pensions.Computed from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, The Reform of Health Care Systems: A Review of Seventeen OECD Countries (Paris: Orga…
Abandoning the Middle
The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts represent dramatic legislative breakthroughs. Taken together, they have fundamentally reshaped the nation's fiscal landscape. In view of the voluminous and largely sanguine literature on American democratic responsiveness, one might assume that this policy turnaround was broadly consistent with voters' priorities. In this article, we show that—in contradiction to this prevailing view, as well as the claims of Larry Bart…
Ideas, private institutions and American welfare state ‘exceptionalism’
Traditional theories of welfare state development divide into two camps: societal accounts and institutional accounts. The aim of the present article is to amend and enrich the institutional approach to US social policy by reconsidering key aspects of the genesis of the American welfare state: 1) showing that concepts such as ‘policy feedback’ and ‘path dependence’ need to be extended to encompass the effect of private social policies; and 2) tak…
The Policy Scientist of Democracy
The "policy scientist of democracy" was a model for engaged scholarship invented and embodied by Harold D. Lasswell. This disciplinary persona emerged in Lasswell's writings and wartime consultancies during the 1940s, well before he announced in his APSA presidential address, printed in the Review precisely 50 years ago, that political science was "the policy science par excellence." The policy scientist of democracy knew all about the process of…
The Road to Somewhere
Why did comprehensive health care reform pass in 2010? Why did it take the form it did—a form that, while undeniably ambitious, was also more limited than many advocates wanted, than health policy precedents set abroad, and than the scale of the problems it tackled? And why was this legislation, despite its limits, the subject of such vigorous and sometimes vicious attacks? These are the questions I tackle in this essay, drawing not just on recen…
The Political Effects of Policy Drift
In recent years, scholars have made major progress in understanding the dynamics of “policy drift”—the transformation of a policy's outcomes due to the failure to update its rules or structures to reflect changing circumstances. Drift is a ubiquitous mode of policy change in America's gridlock-prone polity, and its causes are now well understood. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the political consequences of drift—to the ways in…
The American Political Economy
This article provides an overview of the emerging field of American political economy (APE). Methodologically eclectic, this field seeks to understand the interaction of markets and government in America's unequal and polarized polity. Though situated within American politics research, APE draws from comparative political economy to develop a broad approach that departs from the American politics mainstream in two main ways. First, APE focuses on…
Policy Feedback in an Age of Polarization
A large body of research has explored how policies, once enacted, reshape public opinion, governing institutions, and political organizations-a process known as "policy feedback." Yet this productive research agenda has yet to be translated into practical recommendations of the sort regularly provided by other social science research. This volume of The ANNALS presents the findings of a major collective effort to do just this. The Policy Feedback…
Reducing Risk as well as Inequality
Leading accounts of the politics of the welfare state focus on societal demands for risk-spreading policies. Yet current measures of the welfare state focus not on risk, but on inequality. To address this gap, this letter describes the development of two new measures,risk incidenceandrisk reduction, which correspond to the prevalence of large income losses and the degree to which welfare states reduce that prevalence, respectively. Unlike existin…
Detaining Democracy? Criminal Justice and American Civic Life
criminal justice; civic life; prison; citizenship; mass incarceration; crime
Revisiting Lasswell
Yes We Can? The New Push for American Health Security
What are the prospects for meaningful reform of U.S. health care? To answer this question requires understanding why previous reform efforts (and in particular the 1993 Clinton health plan) 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…
Presidents and the Political Economy
Presidents shape the economy; the economy shapes presidencies. Yet analyses of presidential influence over the economy usually examine this interplay through an excessively narrow focus: the ability of presidents to shape short‐term economic outcomes, particularly as these affect their own reelection prospects. Here, drawing on work in comparative political economy, we ask about the capacity of presidents to influence long‐term economic developme…
Bringing the Welfare State Back In
The welfare state—the complex of policies that, in one form or another, all rich democracies have adopted to ameliorate destitution and provide valued social goods and services—is an increasingly central subject in the study of American history and politics. The past decade has unleashed a veritable tidal wave of books on the topic, including, from historians, Alice Kessler-Harris's In Pursuit of Equity and Michael Katz's The Price of Citizenship…
Winner-Take-All Politics and Political Science
inequality; American politics; business; power; public policy; political organization
Dead on Arrival
Bridging the Blue Divide
The electoral base of the Democratic Party has been transformed over the past generation. Democrats have lost ground in rural America while adding strength in cities and, more recently, suburbs. A major consequence of this shift has been the creation of a “U-shaped” Democratic voting base, with both poorer metro voters and affluent suburbanites siding with the party. This spatial alliance overlays a multi-racial one, as Democrats rely more heavil…
Learning from Defeat? Political Analysis and the Failure of Health Care Reform in the United States
The demise of President Clinton's 1993 health care reform plan provides a revealing window into the difficulties and hazards of drawing lessons from complex political events. In an effort to identify the causes and implications of the Clinton plan's failure, students of American health policy have offered a blizzard of alleged historical lessons that purport to explain why the plan, along with its leading alternatives, went down to such a crushin…
America’s Welfare Parastate
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The New Politics of U.s. Health Policy
Following the demise of comprehensive health care reform in 1994, some reformers are seekingcomfort in the successful “incremental” strategy for enacting Medicare that emerged out of President Harry Truman’s failed campaign for national health insurance in 1948–50. But despite similarities between the Truman and Clinton health security efforts, overall contexts of government and politics are much less hospitable to governmentally funded reformsto…
Medicaid and the limits of state health reform; and governing health
The Historical Logic of National Health Insurance
Government-sponsored health insurance is a central pillar of the modern welfare state. In advanced industrial democracies, public spending on medical care accounts for an average of 6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), making it the largest category of social spending after public pensions.Computed from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, The Reform of Health Care Systems: A Review of Seventeen OECD Countries (Paris: Orga…
Learning from Defeat? Political Analysis and the Failure of Health Care Reform in the United States
The demise of President Clinton's 1993 health care reform plan provides a revealing window into the difficulties and hazards of drawing lessons from complex political events. In an effort to identify the causes and implications of the Clinton plan's failure, students of American health policy have offered a blizzard of alleged historical lessons that purport to explain why the plan, along with its leading alternatives, went down to such a crushin…
The Divided Welfare State
The Divided Welfare State is the first comprehensive political analysis of America's system of public and private social benefits. Everyone knows that the American welfare state is less expensive and extensive, later to develop and slower to grow, than comparable programs abroad. American social spending is as high as spending in many European nations. What is distinctive is that so many social welfare duties are handled by the private sector wit…
Business Power and Social Policy
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,…
Dead on Arrival
Ideas, private institutions and American welfare state ‘exceptionalism’
Traditional theories of welfare state development divide into two camps: societal accounts and institutional accounts. The aim of the present article is to amend and enrich the institutional approach to US social policy by reconsidering key aspects of the genesis of the American welfare state: 1) showing that concepts such as ‘policy feedback’ and ‘path dependence’ need to be extended to encompass the effect of private social policies; and 2) tak…
Varieties of Capitalist Interests and Capitalist Power
Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State
Over the last decade, students of the welfare state have produced an impressive body of research on retrenchment, the dominant thrust of which is that remarkably few welfare states have experienced fundamental shifts. This article questions this now-conventional wisdom by reconsidering the post-1970s trajectory of the American welfare state, long considered the quintessential case of social policy stability. I demonstrate that although most progr…
Policy Drift
For over two decades, the social policies of advanced democracies have faced major strains.1 Yet only recently have analysts devoted themselves in earnest to exploring the changes that these pressures have wrought. These inquiries have produced a large, growing, and increasingly sophisticated body of research, the overwhelming verdict of which is that remarkably few systems of social protection have experienced fundamental shifts (e.g. Pierson 19…
Bringing the Welfare State Back In
The welfare state—the complex of policies that, in one form or another, all rich democracies have adopted to ameliorate destitution and provide valued social goods and services—is an increasingly central subject in the study of American history and politics. The past decade has unleashed a veritable tidal wave of books on the topic, including, from historians, Alice Kessler-Harris's In Pursuit of Equity and Michael Katz's The Price of Citizenship…
Abandoning the Middle
The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts represent dramatic legislative breakthroughs. Taken together, they have fundamentally reshaped the nation's fiscal landscape. In view of the voluminous and largely sanguine literature on American democratic responsiveness, one might assume that this policy turnaround was broadly consistent with voters' priorities. In this article, we show that—in contradiction to this prevailing view, as well as the claims of Larry Bart…
Off Topic
Still Off Topic
Inequality, American Democracy, and American Political Science
The members of the Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy were not of one mind about any of the subjects they took up—and this is one reason, among many, that it was the most vibrant and stimulating professional collaboration I have had the privilege to be part of. It would be presumptuous of me to speak for anyone but myself in explaining and justifying the Task Force's work. And yet, there does seem to me at least one note of common ex…
The Policy Scientist of Democracy
The "policy scientist of democracy" was a model for engaged scholarship invented and embodied by Harold D. Lasswell. This disciplinary persona emerged in Lasswell's writings and wartime consultancies during the 1940s, well before he announced in his APSA presidential address, printed in the Review precisely 50 years ago, that political science was "the policy science par excellence." The policy scientist of democracy knew all about the process of…
The Health Care for America Plan
Revisiting Lasswell
The Welfare State
This article provides a review of the avenues of inquiry that students of the welfare state have recently pursued. These recent works have collectively and individually testified to the huge progress that has occurred. This article emphasizes writings on the American welfare state, which has provoked several of the liveliest scholarly debates of the past ten years. The five areas of recent debate are included in the discussion, namely: gender and…
Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State
Measuring the Quality of Life in the U.S
Reports from abroad on the American condition have a special place in the canon of social commentary. There is Lord Bryce's American Commonwealth (1888), Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States ? (1906) and, of course—the standard setter—Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America in 1835. What makes these works touchstones is not just the qu…
Yes We Can? The New Push for American Health Security
What are the prospects for meaningful reform of U.S. health care? To answer this question requires understanding why previous reform efforts (and in particular the 1993 Clinton health plan) 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…
“You Might Be a Public Intellectual If…”
Amitai Etzioni has written something of a pocket guide for public intellectuals, proffering hard-won lessons from his own time in the trenches. I wish that I had read his primer before I tried to break into the club. And I hope that PS readers seeking to be PI players read his guide with the right mix of humor, curiosity, and skepticism about the rules of success that Etzioni evinces
Healing the Rift between Political Science and Practical Politics
Policy what government does, why it does it, and what difference it makes deserves a more central position in political science, especially in the study of American politics. This paper outlines the advantages of such a "policy-focused" political science not just for the engagement of the discipline (and those within it) with pressing real-world problems, but also for the quality of research. My argument is not simply that a focus on policy will …
Political science (48 works) · Law (41 works) · Politics (41 works) · Economics (29 works) · Political economy (28 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (27 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Law (22 works) · Political and Economic history of UK and US (21 works) · Public Administration (18 works)