Christopher Witko
Biographic Data
| ID | 392058 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher Witko |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Witko |
| SIGNATURE | WITKO C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9507-2677 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 634 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Issue Attention in Public Opinion Polls: Pollsters as Agenda Responders and Agenda Setters
Polling organizations, like other policy actors, must prioritize certain issues. We argue that, for normative and financial reasons, pollsters prioritize issues that are viewed as important by other institutions and the public, leading them to focus survey questions on issues that are on congressional and media agendas, and which are public priorities. We also argue that it is possible that polling issue agendas shape the issue attention of those…
Abortion Bans and Interstate Migration
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling created a patchwork of abortion regulations across the U.S. Proponents of federalism argue that the easy exit option federalism entails allows people to flee areas that restrict rights. We ask whether people flee or avoid moving to states with abortion bans. We argue that dislike of abortion bans is strongest among those directly affected (women, doctors), the affluent, and the highly educated, and that these grou…
Deserving Government Assistance? Public Support for Aid to Struggling Firms and Workers
Attitudes toward government, rich and poor, and support for redistribution
Scholars have argued that negative attitudes toward government inhibit support for redistributive policies, while other studies show that individual attitudes toward the rich and the poor shape support for redistribution. How these individual attitudes relate to support for redistribution together has seldom been examined. Using the third round of the Life in Transition Survey (fielded in 2016, including 29 countries transitioning from communism)…
Self-interest and preferences for the regulation of artificial intelligence
Workers have often advocated for regulation to protect themselves from labor market threats. Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to transform many jobs in the coming years, especially those of white collar professionals. Yet we know little about the attitudes these and other workers hold or may develop toward the regulation of such technology. We argue that both self-interested and sociotropic concerns likely shape AI regulatory attitudes, a…
Class, Policy Attitudes, and U.S. Presidential Voting in the Post-Industrial Era: The Importance of Issue Salience
In the Post-industrial Era, there has been an apparent weakening of the relationship between class and voting in the U.S., with lower class voters becoming less likely to support the Democratic Party. We argue that this reflects that lower class status predicts liberal economic attitudes, but conservative views on cultural and racial issues, while the parties are consistently liberal or conservative, creating conflicts for many voters. How do vot…
Revisiting the role of civic organizations in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan: Confidence, membership, and democratic practice
In many emerging and authoritarian countries, civil society organizations that focus on political or sensitive policy issues are being cracked down upon, while service‐oriented ones are given a relatively greater ability to operate. What might the consequence of this be for democratic practice given the important role civic organizations play in this process? We examine this question by considering whether the absence of confidence in a country's…
Unions, Class Identification, and Policy Attitudes
Compared to other Western democracies, in the United States fewer people subjectively identify as working class historically and many working-class individuals think of themselves as middle class. This likely has important political implications. We argue, however, that union membership can strengthen identification with the working class, through communications from leaders and interactions among members. Using General Social Survey data from fi…
Introducing the party-interest group relationships in contemporary democracies datasets
Few existing datasets on parties and interest groups include data from both sides and a wide variety of interest groups and parties. We contribute to filling this gap by making several interconnected new datasets publicly available. The Party-Interest Group Relationships in Contemporary Democracies (PAIRDEM) datasets include cross-national data from three different surveys of (1) central party organizations, (2) legislative party groups, and (3) …
Support for the environment post-transition? Material concerns and policy tradeoffs
Though many individuals are aware of the need to address environmental concerns, fewer are willing to pay for climate action or think the environment should be a priority for government spending. One compelling reason is that they prioritize using scarce resources to address immediate material concerns. This is particularly likely for individuals facing absolute material scarcity or for those who think they are relatively economically worse off, …
Policy positions, power and interest group-party lobby routines
Prior literature points to the importance of party power and ideology for interest group-party contacts in the legislative arena. But interest groups do not often have ideologies – they are typically active in a small number of policy domains and there may be different parties that share more similar preferences across different policy areas. Therefore, we examine whether and how party power and proximity in policy preferences predict the existen…
Public support for assistance for workers displaced by technology
Technology is expected to displace many workers in the future. The public generally supports government assistance for workers viewed as less responsible for their unemployment; thus, we ask whether individuals who lose their jobs to technology are perceived as less at fault and more deserving of government benefits, compared to those who lose their jobs to other workers. We conducted a survey experiment on a nationally representative sample in t…
The Economic Costs of Democratic Backsliding? Backsliding and State Location Preferences of US Job Seekers
Political checks on democratic backsliding can be ineffective. But, there may be economic costs for backsliding regimes if talented individuals seeking job opportunities prefer to not live in backsliding areas. Of course, factors other than the quality of democracy may be more important to job seekers, limiting the efficacy of this economic check. We test these possibilities in an area characterized as experiencing backsliding—the US states—using…
Technology Threats to Employment, Issues, and Candidate and Party Preferences in the United States
Research indicates that susceptibility to having one’s job replaced by technology is associated with candidate and party preferences in affluent democracies, but there is little understanding of why. We investigate whether workers exposed to technology are more supportive of candidates and parties that prioritize the economy, unemployment, and welfare state programs, currently or with historical reputations for doing so. In the United States whic…
Emerging political and demographic divides: State politics, welfare generosity, and adult mortality in U.S. states 1977–2017
Technology-Induced Job Loss and the Prioritization of Economic Problems in the Mass Public
Observers argue that robots and other advanced technology will eliminate millions of jobs across affluent democracies in the coming decades. But do citizens in affluent democracies recognize this, and if so, does it affect how salient they find economic problems compared to other problems the governments might address? Using a unique Eurobarometer survey with an extensive set of questions about technology we investigate the extent of sociotropic …
Government reputational effects of Covid-19 public health actions: A job opportunity evaluation conjoint experiment
The tradeoff between short-term economic and public health has been very salient in debates surrounding U.S. government responses to COVID-19. But highly salient choices by very visible executive branch leaders, like state COVID-19 public health actions, have implications beyond current economic performance. We argue that by shaping perceptions of state governments, or state “reputations”, these responses may affect how individuals evaluate econo…
Rule by Violence, Rule by Law: Lynching, Jim Crow, and the Continuing Evolution of Voter Suppression in the U.S
Although restricting formal voting rights—voter suppression—is not uncommon in democracies, its incidence and form vary widely. Intuitively, when competing elites believe that the benefits of reducing voting by opponents outweigh the costs of voter suppression, it is more likely to occur. Internal political and state capacity and external actors, however, influence the form that voter suppression takes. When elites competing for office lack the a…
Public Support for Higher Taxes on the Wealthy: California’s Proposition 30
It has long been argued that growing inequality would lead to growing demands for redistribution, especially from less affluent individuals who would benefit most from redistribution. Yet, in many countries we have not seen tax increases and even when ballot initiatives allow individuals to directly vote to raise taxes on the wealthy they decline to do so. This raises the question of how economic self-interest shapes voting on tax proposals, and …
Federalism, Government Liberalism, and Union Weakness in America
Unlike most other countries, in the United States, subnational governments (states) have substantial authority over collective bargaining and union organization laws. Because states compete for business investment and union (dis)organization likely has spillover effects beyond state borders, weak unions in one state may affect union organization in other states. We examine how union decline in one state is associated with union decline in neighbo…
The Public Administration Manifesto II: Matching Methods to Theory and Substance
This essay introduces the articles in the public administration methods symposium that will appear in this and the next two issues of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. Overall the articles present the need for a rigorous methodological pluralism in public administration where the methods used need to match the substantive questions asked. The symposium hopes to provide a spring board for a discussion of future methodologic…
How the Unorganized Mass Public (Sometimes) Gets Represented in Regulatory Politics
Many scholars have argued that because consumers are poorly organized, regulatory enforcement will tend to be lax and serve the interests of industry. Considering, however, that elections are one of the main mechanisms by which the public exerts control over policy, surprisingly few studies have examined how electoral incentives may spur the government to regulate vigorously on behalf of consumers. We argue that when the threat of electoral accou…
Income inequality and the growth of redistributive spending in the United States (US) states: Is There a Link
Prominent public policy models have hypothesised that rising income inequality will lead to more redistributive spending. Subsequent theoretical advancements and empirical research often failed to find a positive relationship between inequality and redistributive spending, however. Over the last few decades both income inequality and redistributive spending have been growing in the United States states. In this work, we consider whether temporal …
The New Economic Populism
While most observers and scholars of inequality focus on how the federal government has created, or at minimum failed to respond to, inequality, in this book Franko and Witko argue that this nearly exclusive emphasis on Washington, DC, is misplaced. The authors explain that this federal inaction in the face of emerging economic problems is the norm in American history because of the structure of American government and the ability of organized in…
Growing Inequality and Public Awareness of Inequality in the States
Here the authors present the variation that exists in income inequality across the states, and variation in public awareness or concern about income inequality as measured by public opinion polls. Though politicians may decide to tackle income inequality even in the absence of public concern about inequality, the authors argue that government responses are more likely when and where there is a growing awareness of, and concern about, inequality, …
Inequality, Self-Interest, and Public Support for “Robin Hood” Tax Policies
Influential economic models predict that as inequality increases, the public will demand greater redistribution. However, there is limited research into the determinants of support for redistributive tax increases because such proposals have been so rare in America in recent decades. We use Washington State’s Proposition 1098 to examine how economic self-interest, concerns about inequality, and partisanship influence support for redistributive ta…
Federalism and American Inequality
Studies of the political determinants of economic inequality have usually focused on the national government, but in federalist systems subnational governments may also be important. In recent decades, the U.S. national government has been less active in fighting inequality, but increasing devolution means that states wanting to address this problem have had a greater incentive and perhaps means by which to do so. Applying power resources theory,…
Conditional Status Quo Bias and Top Income Shares: How U.S. Political Institutions Have Benefited the Rich
This article develops and tests a model of conditional status quo bias and American inequality. We find that institutional features that bias policy outcomes toward the status quo have played a central role in the path of inequality. Using time-series analysis of top income shares during the post-Depression period, we identify the Senate as a key actor in the politics of income inequality. Our findings suggest that the supermajoritarian nature of…
PACs, Issue Context, and Congressional Decisionmaking
Scholars have claimed that PAC influence on congressional behavior is more likely on certain types of issues. After considering both roll-call voting and committee participation, I argue that the conditions making PAC influence on voting most likely make influence on participation least likely, and vice versa. The analysis of 20 legislative proposals indicates that PACs are able to influence voting on non-ideological/non-visible issues, but are m…
Class Bias in Voter Turnout, Representation, and Income Inequality
The mass franchise led to more responsive government and a more equitable distribution of resources in the United States and other democracies. Recently in America, however, voter participation has been low and increasingly biased toward the wealthy. We investigate whether this electoral “class bias” shapes government ideology, the substance of economic policy, and distributional outcomes, thereby shedding light on both the old question of whethe…
Bayesian Analytical Methods: A Methodological Prescription for Public Administration
In this article we describe in detail the Bayesian perspective on statistical inference and demonstrate that it provides a more principled approach to modeling public administration data. Because many datasets in public administration are population-level, one-time unique collections, or descriptive of fluid events, the Bayesian reliance on probability as a description of unknown quantities is a superior paradigm than that borrowed from Frequenti…
Business Backgrounds and Congressional Behavior
In the following paper, we analyze whether the behavior of members of Congress with business backgrounds differs from that of other legislators, and we find that it does. Specifically, House members with business backgrounds have closer relationships with business interests (as measured by larger contributions from corporate PACs) and demonstrate more probusiness roll call voting. We also find that members making a direct transition from a busine…
Campaign Contributions, Access, and Government Contracting
It is clear that corporations seek to use campaign contributions to gain government contracts, but despite anecdotes, whether they succeed has been largely ignored in academic studies. In this article, I discuss how campaign contributions may influence contracting and consider the relationship between the donation of campaign contributions and the receipt of government contracts for a sample of firms politically active between 1979 and 2006. The …
The Politics of Financialization in the United States, 1949–2005
Financial activity has become increasingly important in affluent economies in recent decades. Because this ‘financialization’ distributes costs and benefits unevenly across groups, politics and policy likely affect the process. Therefore, this article discusses how changes in the power of organizations representing the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of financialization affect its pace. An analysis of the United States from 1949–2005, shows that when unio…
Pollution, Politics, and Preferences for Environmental Spending in the States
While state environmental and natural resource spending is designed to address actual environmental problems, the budget process is also inherently political. Thus, in the following article we ask a simple question: to what extent does state environmental and natural resource spending respond to the scope of environmental problems in a state, versus the demands of the political process? Unlike the bulk of previous research, we consider both aggre…
Business Mobilization and Public Policy in the U.S. States
Objective. The goal of this study is to examine how the political mobilization of business interests influences aggregate public policy outputs in the states. We examine the relationship between business mobilization and general state policy liberalism, as well as policy that we term state “business policy climate.” Methods. We construct a measure of the “business policy climate” from a number of tax and regulatory indicators in the states and ex…
The Ecology of Party–Organized Interest Relationships
The relationship between political parties and organized interests is critical to understanding democratic politics, yet few scholars have systematically studied this topic in recent decades. In the following essay, I review the American politics literature examining the interactions between parties and organized interests and assess the current state of our knowledge. I then argue that we should make more explicit and systematic use of the under…
Explaining Increases in the Stringency of State Campaign Finance Regulation, 1993–2002
Recent research has taught us much about the effects of campaign finance laws, but we know little about why states adopt the regulations that they do. I address this question by examining why states increased the stringency of their campaign finance laws from 1993 to 2002. As is the case with other policies regulating the conduct of elected officials, the popular perception exists that politicians resist stringent campaign finance out of a concer…
Measuring the Stringency of State Campaign Finance Regulation
Scholars are beginning to consider how state campaign finance regulation influences political behavior and elections, but they lack the systematic measure of these regulations needed to do so. This article describes a simple measure of state campaign finance regulation stringency that is based on state statutes in 2002. Further, this article explains the construction of the measure and assesses its validity and reliability. The index generally co…
The Public Administration Manifesto II: Matching Methods to Theory and Substance
This essay introduces the articles in the public administration methods symposium that will appear in this and the next two issues of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. Overall the articles present the need for a rigorous methodological pluralism in public administration where the methods used need to match the substantive questions asked. The symposium hopes to provide a spring board for a discussion of future methodologic…
The Strange Disappearance of Investment in Human and Physical Capital in the United States
Many scholars have argued that there are strong incentives for states to spend less money on redistributive or consumption programs, such as welfare, and more on developmental or investment programs, such as highways. Yet, over the last few decades, the proportion of state budgets allocated to expenditures intended to develop human and physical capital, specifically education and highways, has declined. In real terms, spending on virtually every …
Government Ideology and Unemployment in the U.S. States
Research shows that when the more liberal Democratic Party controls the national government, unemployment is lower, but whether liberal state governments are associated with lower unemployment has not been examined. We argue that more left-leaning governments in the U.S. states have the same preference for and willingness to use government to reduce unemployment, but that the greater resource and policymaking constraints that the states face duri…
School Choice and the Creation of Social Capital Reexamined
Scholars have argued that by spurring parental involvement in school activities, school choice creates social capital. While government policies may be able to create social capital, we doubt that school choice is such a policy and argue that participation in school activities is largely determined by individual‐level attributes and the school context, rather than choice per se. To assess this claim we use the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study d…
Unions, Class Identification, and Policy Attitudes
Compared to other Western democracies, in the United States fewer people subjectively identify as working class historically and many working-class individuals think of themselves as middle class. This likely has important political implications. We argue, however, that union membership can strengthen identification with the working class, through communications from leaders and interactions among members. Using General Social Survey data from fi…
Introducing the party-interest group relationships in contemporary democracies datasets
Few existing datasets on parties and interest groups include data from both sides and a wide variety of interest groups and parties. We contribute to filling this gap by making several interconnected new datasets publicly available. The Party-Interest Group Relationships in Contemporary Democracies (PAIRDEM) datasets include cross-national data from three different surveys of (1) central party organizations, (2) legislative party groups, and (3) …
The Economic Costs of Democratic Backsliding? Backsliding and State Location Preferences of US Job Seekers
Political checks on democratic backsliding can be ineffective. But, there may be economic costs for backsliding regimes if talented individuals seeking job opportunities prefer to not live in backsliding areas. Of course, factors other than the quality of democracy may be more important to job seekers, limiting the efficacy of this economic check. We test these possibilities in an area characterized as experiencing backsliding—the US states—using…
Technology Threats to Employment, Issues, and Candidate and Party Preferences in the United States
Research indicates that susceptibility to having one’s job replaced by technology is associated with candidate and party preferences in affluent democracies, but there is little understanding of why. We investigate whether workers exposed to technology are more supportive of candidates and parties that prioritize the economy, unemployment, and welfare state programs, currently or with historical reputations for doing so. In the United States whic…
Federalism, Government Liberalism, and Union Weakness in America
Unlike most other countries, in the United States, subnational governments (states) have substantial authority over collective bargaining and union organization laws. Because states compete for business investment and union (dis)organization likely has spillover effects beyond state borders, weak unions in one state may affect union organization in other states. We examine how union decline in one state is associated with union decline in neighbo…
Income inequality and the growth of redistributive spending in the United States (US) states: Is There a Link
Prominent public policy models have hypothesised that rising income inequality will lead to more redistributive spending. Subsequent theoretical advancements and empirical research often failed to find a positive relationship between inequality and redistributive spending, however. Over the last few decades both income inequality and redistributive spending have been growing in the United States states. In this work, we consider whether temporal …
Party Government and Variation in Corporate Influence on Agency Decision Making: Osha Regulation, 1981–2006
Objective To understand how changes in the partisan control of the institutions of government may condition the effect of corporate political activities on bureaucratic decision making. Methods I examine the variation in the effectiveness of corporate political expenditures in reducing workplace safety (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) violations across partisan contexts between 1981 and 2006 for a large number of corporations. Resu…
Cold War Belligerence and U.S. Public Opinion toward Defense Spending
The relationship between political events and aggregate opinion change is complicated, and the influence of actual events, as opposed to domestic political elites' responses to those events, has seldom been analyzed. This article attempts to untangle these relationships with data examining events and statements of the political leaders (belligerence) of both the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. Considering the salience of t…
Business Mobilization and Public Policy in the U.S. States
Objective. The goal of this study is to examine how the political mobilization of business interests influences aggregate public policy outputs in the states. We examine the relationship between business mobilization and general state policy liberalism, as well as policy that we term state “business policy climate.” Methods. We construct a measure of the “business policy climate” from a number of tax and regulatory indicators in the states and ex…
Measuring the Stringency of State Campaign Finance Regulation
Scholars are beginning to consider how state campaign finance regulation influences political behavior and elections, but they lack the systematic measure of these regulations needed to do so. This article describes a simple measure of state campaign finance regulation stringency that is based on state statutes in 2002. Further, this article explains the construction of the measure and assesses its validity and reliability. The index generally co…
PACs, Issue Context, and Congressional Decisionmaking
Scholars have claimed that PAC influence on congressional behavior is more likely on certain types of issues. After considering both roll-call voting and committee participation, I argue that the conditions making PAC influence on voting most likely make influence on participation least likely, and vice versa. The analysis of 20 legislative proposals indicates that PACs are able to influence voting on non-ideological/non-visible issues, but are m…
Explaining Increases in the Stringency of State Campaign Finance Regulation, 1993–2002
Recent research has taught us much about the effects of campaign finance laws, but we know little about why states adopt the regulations that they do. I address this question by examining why states increased the stringency of their campaign finance laws from 1993 to 2002. As is the case with other policies regulating the conduct of elected officials, the popular perception exists that politicians resist stringent campaign finance out of a concer…
Pollution, Politics, and Preferences for Environmental Spending in the States
While state environmental and natural resource spending is designed to address actual environmental problems, the budget process is also inherently political. Thus, in the following article we ask a simple question: to what extent does state environmental and natural resource spending respond to the scope of environmental problems in a state, versus the demands of the political process? Unlike the bulk of previous research, we consider both aggre…
School Choice and the Creation of Social Capital Reexamined
Scholars have argued that by spurring parental involvement in school activities, school choice creates social capital. While government policies may be able to create social capital, we doubt that school choice is such a policy and argue that participation in school activities is largely determined by individual‐level attributes and the school context, rather than choice per se. To assess this claim we use the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study d…
Business Backgrounds and Congressional Behavior
In the following paper, we analyze whether the behavior of members of Congress with business backgrounds differs from that of other legislators, and we find that it does. Specifically, House members with business backgrounds have closer relationships with business interests (as measured by larger contributions from corporate PACs) and demonstrate more probusiness roll call voting. We also find that members making a direct transition from a busine…
The Ecology of Party–Organized Interest Relationships
The relationship between political parties and organized interests is critical to understanding democratic politics, yet few scholars have systematically studied this topic in recent decades. In the following essay, I review the American politics literature examining the interactions between parties and organized interests and assess the current state of our knowledge. I then argue that we should make more explicit and systematic use of the under…
The Strange Disappearance of Investment in Human and Physical Capital in the United States
Many scholars have argued that there are strong incentives for states to spend less money on redistributive or consumption programs, such as welfare, and more on developmental or investment programs, such as highways. Yet, over the last few decades, the proportion of state budgets allocated to expenditures intended to develop human and physical capital, specifically education and highways, has declined. In real terms, spending on virtually every …
Campaign Contributions, Access, and Government Contracting
It is clear that corporations seek to use campaign contributions to gain government contracts, but despite anecdotes, whether they succeed has been largely ignored in academic studies. In this article, I discuss how campaign contributions may influence contracting and consider the relationship between the donation of campaign contributions and the receipt of government contracts for a sample of firms politically active between 1979 and 2006. The …
Does the amount of school choice matter for student engagement
School choice may increase student engagement by enabling students to attend schools that more closely match their needs and preferences. But this effect on engagement may depend on the characteristics of the choices available. Therefore, we consider how the amount of educational choice of different types in a local educational marketplace affects student engagement using a large, national population of 8th grade students. We find that more choic…
Federalism and American Inequality
Studies of the political determinants of economic inequality have usually focused on the national government, but in federalist systems subnational governments may also be important. In recent decades, the U.S. national government has been less active in fighting inequality, but increasing devolution means that states wanting to address this problem have had a greater incentive and perhaps means by which to do so. Applying power resources theory,…
Party Government and Variation in Corporate Influence on Agency Decision Making: Osha Regulation, 1981–2006
Objective To understand how changes in the partisan control of the institutions of government may condition the effect of corporate political activities on bureaucratic decision making. Methods I examine the variation in the effectiveness of corporate political expenditures in reducing workplace safety (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) violations across partisan contexts between 1981 and 2006 for a large number of corporations. Resu…
Inequality, Self-Interest, and Public Support for “Robin Hood” Tax Policies
Influential economic models predict that as inequality increases, the public will demand greater redistribution. However, there is limited research into the determinants of support for redistributive tax increases because such proposals have been so rare in America in recent decades. We use Washington State’s Proposition 1098 to examine how economic self-interest, concerns about inequality, and partisanship influence support for redistributive ta…
Bayesian Analytical Methods: A Methodological Prescription for Public Administration
In this article we describe in detail the Bayesian perspective on statistical inference and demonstrate that it provides a more principled approach to modeling public administration data. Because many datasets in public administration are population-level, one-time unique collections, or descriptive of fluid events, the Bayesian reliance on probability as a description of unknown quantities is a superior paradigm than that borrowed from Frequenti…
Conditional Status Quo Bias and Top Income Shares: How U.S. Political Institutions Have Benefited the Rich
This article develops and tests a model of conditional status quo bias and American inequality. We find that institutional features that bias policy outcomes toward the status quo have played a central role in the path of inequality. Using time-series analysis of top income shares during the post-Depression period, we identify the Senate as a key actor in the politics of income inequality. Our findings suggest that the supermajoritarian nature of…
Government Ideology and Unemployment in the U.S. States
Research shows that when the more liberal Democratic Party controls the national government, unemployment is lower, but whether liberal state governments are associated with lower unemployment has not been examined. We argue that more left-leaning governments in the U.S. states have the same preference for and willingness to use government to reduce unemployment, but that the greater resource and policymaking constraints that the states face duri…
Class Bias in Voter Turnout, Representation, and Income Inequality
The mass franchise led to more responsive government and a more equitable distribution of resources in the United States and other democracies. Recently in America, however, voter participation has been low and increasingly biased toward the wealthy. We investigate whether this electoral “class bias” shapes government ideology, the substance of economic policy, and distributional outcomes, thereby shedding light on both the old question of whethe…
The Politics of Financialization in the United States, 1949–2005
Financial activity has become increasingly important in affluent economies in recent decades. Because this ‘financialization’ distributes costs and benefits unevenly across groups, politics and policy likely affect the process. Therefore, this article discusses how changes in the power of organizations representing the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of financialization affect its pace. An analysis of the United States from 1949–2005, shows that when unio…
The New Economic Populism
While most observers and scholars of inequality focus on how the federal government has created, or at minimum failed to respond to, inequality, in this book Franko and Witko argue that this nearly exclusive emphasis on Washington, DC, is misplaced. The authors explain that this federal inaction in the face of emerging economic problems is the norm in American history because of the structure of American government and the ability of organized in…
Growing Inequality and Public Awareness of Inequality in the States
Here the authors present the variation that exists in income inequality across the states, and variation in public awareness or concern about income inequality as measured by public opinion polls. Though politicians may decide to tackle income inequality even in the absence of public concern about inequality, the authors argue that government responses are more likely when and where there is a growing awareness of, and concern about, inequality, …
State Responses to Federal Inaction and Growing Inequality: How States Respond to Economic Inequality
In this chapter the authors return to aggregate data to examine how the state minimum wage has responded to a growing awareness of inequality and other state political factors. The minimum wage was initially pursued by the states a number of years before the federal government adopted a minimum wage in the 1930s. However, the minimum wage law is still jointly controlled by the states and the federal government, allowing us to directly examine how…
Upper Class Bias and Class Conflict in America
Compared to other affluent democracies, class conflict has not been very intense nor as much of an organizing principle in American politics. However, as wages stagnate for the working class and economic inequality grows, class conflict is becoming increasingly salient. Yet, reviewing recent political science studies, I argue that rather than politics becoming a clearer class “war” between the upper and lower classes, the growing class bias in po…
State Responses to U.S. Supreme Court Campaign Finance Decisions
Recent federal court decisions have deregulated state campaign finance systems to a significant degree. These decisions are not only rooted in First Amendment jurisprudence but also raise issues of federalism. Although most studies of federal–state conflict focus on disputes between state officials and elected federal policy makers, courts are also policy-making institutions, and in the absence of policy making by other federal branches, courts h…
Political science (42 works) · Economics (38 works) · Politics (33 works) · Law (26 works) · Law (20 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (19 works) · Public economics (19 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Demographic economics (12 works) · Political economy (12 works)