Paul Frymer
Biographic Data
| ID | 92865 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Frymer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Frymer |
| SIGNATURE | FRYMER P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4207-4628 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 357 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The Invisible Farmworker: Racial Political Economy, Policy Development, and the Second Dimension of Power
The US agriculture industry has long been reliant on inequalities that intersect race and political economy. Farm policy further accentuates these inequalities as most farmworkers were excluded from New Deal labor and economic statutes due to pressure from Southern Congressmen and agricultural interests. Since then, the agricultural workforce has shifted from being overrepresented by southern Blacks and European immigrants to undocumented residen…
Right to Work or Right to Vote? Labor Policy and American Democracy
There is growing attention to the role of organized labor in maintaining and expanding democratic institutions in the United States. In this article, we investigate the effect of right-to-work laws on electoral democracy in the states. We theorize a series of mechanisms by which labor unions contribute to the maintenance and expansion of democratic institutions, including contributing money to campaigns and influencing the electorate. Right-to-wo…
American Political Development and the Crises in American Politics
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
Labor Unions and White Racial Politics
Scholars and political observers point to declining labor unions, on the one hand, and rising white identity politics, on the other, as profound changes in American politics. However, there has been little attention given to the potential feedback between these forces. In this article, we investigate the role of union membership in shaping white racial attitudes. We draw upon research in history and American political development to generate a th…
Mission Statement
We are honored to have the opportunity to serve as the latest editors of Studies in American Political Development . We wish to thank and credit Anthony Chen and Eric Schickler for their outstanding service and contributions. First established by Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek in 1986 as a space for theoretical, methodological, and substantive commitments intrinsic in the study of American political development (APD), we look forward to mainta…
Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP
The transition from Barack Obama to Donald J. Trump provides a striking backdrop for engaging historians' renewed interest in black Republicanism. Joshua D. Farrington examines black Republican thought and action over the long twentieth century up to Ronald Reagan, illuminating critical moments of transition and struggle. The roots of black Republicanism, he argues, are located in civil rights and freedom struggles. Black Republicans, at least pr…
Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion
This book examines the politics of the United States' westward expansion, showing how the government's regulation of population movements on the frontier, both settlement and removal, advanced national aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation. The book details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policies to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering th…
Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion
The People Against Themselves: Rethinking Popular Constitutionalism
In the course of reviewing Jed Shugerman's The People's Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America and Bruce Ackerman's The Civil Rights Revolution , we argue for a reassessment of the way that scholars think about popular constitutionalism. In particular, we urge scholars to resist the tendency to create a dichotomy between judicial interpretation of law and a set of nonjudicial venues in which popular constitutionalism supposedly takes p…
Why Aren't Political Scientists Interested in Native American Politics
Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a …
A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours: Territorial Expansion, Land Policy, and U.S. State Formation
I examine the role of US land policy in strategically controlling and moving populations around the continent with the goal of expanding borders and securing and incorporating new territory on the frontier. The government effectively used land policies and population control to enable an otherwise constrained American state to assert authority over the direction of expansion, to engineer settlement patterns in a manner to secure the territory wit…
Grassroots Not Astroturf: The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
Teachers Unions and Public Education: A Discussion of Terry Moe's Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools
Public education is one of the most important “public goods” of a democratic society. In recent decades, public policy analysts, public intellectuals, and politicians have debated the state of public education in the United States and have argued about the sorts of public policies that might best promote the academic achievement, educational success, and political socialization of youth. Terry Moe and John Chubb have been important contributors t…
Partisan Balance: Why Political Parties Don't Kill the U.S. Constitutional System by David R. Mayhew
Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America
Uneasy Alliances is a powerful challenge to how we think about the relationship between race, political parties, and American democracy. While scholars frequently claim that the need to win elections makes government officials responsive to any and all voters, Paul Frymer shows that not all groups are treated equally; politicians spend most of their time and resources on white swing voters--to the detriment of the African American community. As b…
Reading Greenstone'sLabor in American Politicsin Light of Labor's Decline
Labor and American Politics
The State of Working America, 2008/2009. By Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz. An Economic Policy Institute Book. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. 461 p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper
Law and American Political Development
This essay reviews the recent volume edited by Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch, The Supreme Court and American Political Development (2006), as well as the broader literature by law scholars interested in American Political Development (APD). The Law and APD literature has advanced our knowledge about courts by placing attention on the importance of executive and legislative actors, and by providing political context to our understanding of judicia…
Affirmative Action in American Labor Unions: Necessary but Problematic for the Cause of Civil Rights”
Au lendemain de l’adoption de discrimination positive (affirmative action) par le president Lyndon Johnson, les syndicates américains doivent se confronter à la question des droits civiques qu’ils ont longtemps évitée. Au cours des décennies ultérieures, leur engagement pour les travailleurs issus des minorités permit d’obtenir des avantages certains mais eut des conséquences importantes pour le mouvement syndical. L’article commence avec une brè…
New Orleans Is Not the Exception: Re-politicizing the Study of Racial Inequality
Although political science provides many useful tools for analyzing the effects of natural and social catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, the scenes of devastation and inequality in New Orleans suggest an urgent need to adjust our lenses and reorient our research in ways that will help us to uncover and unpack the roots of this national travesty. Treated merely as exceptions to the "normal" functioning of society, dramatic e…
Racism Revised: Courts, Labor Law, and the Institutional Construction of Racial Animus
How should we understand and explain individual acts of racism? Despite extensive debate about the broader place and importance of racism in America, there is surprisingly little theoretical or empirical analysis of what leads individuals to commit racist acts. In contrast to most political scientists who understand racism as an individual psychological attitude-an irrational prejudice-I argue that individual manifestations of racism are the resu…
Race, Labor, and the Twentieth-Century American State
The author examines the federal government's civil rights promotion in labor unions, focusing in particular on the consequences of this halting, fragmented effort. After the government deflected racial politics from labor policy in the 1930s, it attempted to integrate unions not by reforming labor law but by developing new agencies and empowering federal courts. This created an institutional environment where different agencies worked at cross-pu…
The Modern Presidency and Civil Rights: Rhetoric on Race from Roosevelt to Nixon
Acting When Elected Officials Won't: Federal Courts and Civil Rights Enforcement in U.S. Labor Unions, 1935–85
Using the racial integration of national labor unions as a case study, I find that courts played an important and meaningfully autonomous role in integrating unions while elected officials largely failed to act. Courts, unlike elected officials, offered civil rights groups relatively easy access to the legal agenda. In response to thousands of cases in federal courts, judges rewrote key civil rights statutes, oversaw the implementation of their r…
Coalition-Building and the Politics of Electoral Capture During the Nixon Administration: African Americans, Labor, Latinos
In November of 1968, Richard Nixon became only the second Republican in four decades to win control of the Executive Office. For helpful comments, we would like to thank Shana Bass, Michael Brown, Scott James, David Mayhew, Corey Robin, Joel Silbey, Pam Singh, Stephen Skowronek, Tom Sugrue, Rick Valelly, and the anonymous reviewers for Studies in American Political Development. Unlike the administration of his party's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhow…
Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America
Uneasy Alliances is a powerful challenge to how we think about the relationship between race, political parties, and American democracy. While scholars frequently claim that the need to win elections makes government officials responsive to any and all voters, Paul Frymer shows that not all groups are treated equally; politicians spend most of their time and resources on white swing voters--to the detriment of the African American community. As b…
Acting When Elected Officials Won't: Federal Courts and Civil Rights Enforcement in U.S. Labor Unions, 1935–85
Using the racial integration of national labor unions as a case study, I find that courts played an important and meaningfully autonomous role in integrating unions while elected officials largely failed to act. Courts, unlike elected officials, offered civil rights groups relatively easy access to the legal agenda. In response to thousands of cases in federal courts, judges rewrote key civil rights statutes, oversaw the implementation of their r…
Labor Unions and White Racial Politics
Scholars and political observers point to declining labor unions, on the one hand, and rising white identity politics, on the other, as profound changes in American politics. However, there has been little attention given to the potential feedback between these forces. In this article, we investigate the role of union membership in shaping white racial attitudes. We draw upon research in history and American political development to generate a th…
A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours: Territorial Expansion, Land Policy, and U.S. State Formation
I examine the role of US land policy in strategically controlling and moving populations around the continent with the goal of expanding borders and securing and incorporating new territory on the frontier. The government effectively used land policies and population control to enable an otherwise constrained American state to assert authority over the direction of expansion, to engineer settlement patterns in a manner to secure the territory wit…
Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion
Ideological Consensus Within Divided Party Government
Many scholars have suggested recently that the American electorate intentionally votes to divide control of the Congress and the executive between the Democratic and Republican parties. Lacking full confidence in either party, the voters seek to ensure that neither side has too much power.' Such arguments overlook a much more plausible explanation: voters split their ballots because they see, for example, a Republican president and a Democratic H…
New Orleans Is Not the Exception: Re-politicizing the Study of Racial Inequality
Although political science provides many useful tools for analyzing the effects of natural and social catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, the scenes of devastation and inequality in New Orleans suggest an urgent need to adjust our lenses and reorient our research in ways that will help us to uncover and unpack the roots of this national travesty. Treated merely as exceptions to the "normal" functioning of society, dramatic e…
Racism Revised: Courts, Labor Law, and the Institutional Construction of Racial Animus
How should we understand and explain individual acts of racism? Despite extensive debate about the broader place and importance of racism in America, there is surprisingly little theoretical or empirical analysis of what leads individuals to commit racist acts. In contrast to most political scientists who understand racism as an individual psychological attitude-an irrational prejudice-I argue that individual manifestations of racism are the resu…
Race, Labor, and the Twentieth-Century American State
The author examines the federal government's civil rights promotion in labor unions, focusing in particular on the consequences of this halting, fragmented effort. After the government deflected racial politics from labor policy in the 1930s, it attempted to integrate unions not by reforming labor law but by developing new agencies and empowering federal courts. This created an institutional environment where different agencies worked at cross-pu…
Coalition-Building and the Politics of Electoral Capture During the Nixon Administration: African Americans, Labor, Latinos
In November of 1968, Richard Nixon became only the second Republican in four decades to win control of the Executive Office. For helpful comments, we would like to thank Shana Bass, Michael Brown, Scott James, David Mayhew, Corey Robin, Joel Silbey, Pam Singh, Stephen Skowronek, Tom Sugrue, Rick Valelly, and the anonymous reviewers for Studies in American Political Development. Unlike the administration of his party's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhow…
Party Elites, Ideological Voters, and Divided Party Government
Do voters consciously split their tickets in order to balance the national government between the two major political parties, as some theories of divided government contend they do? Or do sincere and ideologically consistent voters split their ballots in response to elite behavior and party cleavages? Focusing on the 1988 election, the last time divided government was the direct result of split-ticket voting, we find that most split-ticket voter…
Law and American Political Development
This essay reviews the recent volume edited by Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch, The Supreme Court and American Political Development (2006), as well as the broader literature by law scholars interested in American Political Development (APD). The Law and APD literature has advanced our knowledge about courts by placing attention on the importance of executive and legislative actors, and by providing political context to our understanding of judicia…
Labor and American Politics
The State of Working America, 2008/2009. By Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz. An Economic Policy Institute Book. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. 461 p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper
Why Aren't Political Scientists Interested in Native American Politics
Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a …
The People Against Themselves: Rethinking Popular Constitutionalism
In the course of reviewing Jed Shugerman's The People's Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America and Bruce Ackerman's The Civil Rights Revolution , we argue for a reassessment of the way that scholars think about popular constitutionalism. In particular, we urge scholars to resist the tendency to create a dichotomy between judicial interpretation of law and a set of nonjudicial venues in which popular constitutionalism supposedly takes p…
Right to Work or Right to Vote? Labor Policy and American Democracy
There is growing attention to the role of organized labor in maintaining and expanding democratic institutions in the United States. In this article, we investigate the effect of right-to-work laws on electoral democracy in the states. We theorize a series of mechanisms by which labor unions contribute to the maintenance and expansion of democratic institutions, including contributing money to campaigns and influencing the electorate. Right-to-wo…
Reading Greenstone'sLabor in American Politicsin Light of Labor's Decline
Ideological Consensus Within Divided Party Government
Many scholars have suggested recently that the American electorate intentionally votes to divide control of the Congress and the executive between the Democratic and Republican parties. Lacking full confidence in either party, the voters seek to ensure that neither side has too much power.' Such arguments overlook a much more plausible explanation: voters split their ballots because they see, for example, a Republican president and a Democratic H…
Party Elites, Ideological Voters, and Divided Party Government
Do voters consciously split their tickets in order to balance the national government between the two major political parties, as some theories of divided government contend they do? Or do sincere and ideologically consistent voters split their ballots in response to elite behavior and party cleavages? Focusing on the 1988 election, the last time divided government was the direct result of split-ticket voting, we find that most split-ticket voter…
Coalition-Building and the Politics of Electoral Capture During the Nixon Administration: African Americans, Labor, Latinos
In November of 1968, Richard Nixon became only the second Republican in four decades to win control of the Executive Office. For helpful comments, we would like to thank Shana Bass, Michael Brown, Scott James, David Mayhew, Corey Robin, Joel Silbey, Pam Singh, Stephen Skowronek, Tom Sugrue, Rick Valelly, and the anonymous reviewers for Studies in American Political Development. Unlike the administration of his party's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhow…
The Modern Presidency and Civil Rights: Rhetoric on Race from Roosevelt to Nixon
Acting When Elected Officials Won't: Federal Courts and Civil Rights Enforcement in U.S. Labor Unions, 1935–85
Using the racial integration of national labor unions as a case study, I find that courts played an important and meaningfully autonomous role in integrating unions while elected officials largely failed to act. Courts, unlike elected officials, offered civil rights groups relatively easy access to the legal agenda. In response to thousands of cases in federal courts, judges rewrote key civil rights statutes, oversaw the implementation of their r…
Race, Labor, and the Twentieth-Century American State
The author examines the federal government's civil rights promotion in labor unions, focusing in particular on the consequences of this halting, fragmented effort. After the government deflected racial politics from labor policy in the 1930s, it attempted to integrate unions not by reforming labor law but by developing new agencies and empowering federal courts. This created an institutional environment where different agencies worked at cross-pu…
Racism Revised: Courts, Labor Law, and the Institutional Construction of Racial Animus
How should we understand and explain individual acts of racism? Despite extensive debate about the broader place and importance of racism in America, there is surprisingly little theoretical or empirical analysis of what leads individuals to commit racist acts. In contrast to most political scientists who understand racism as an individual psychological attitude-an irrational prejudice-I argue that individual manifestations of racism are the resu…
New Orleans Is Not the Exception: Re-politicizing the Study of Racial Inequality
Although political science provides many useful tools for analyzing the effects of natural and social catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, the scenes of devastation and inequality in New Orleans suggest an urgent need to adjust our lenses and reorient our research in ways that will help us to uncover and unpack the roots of this national travesty. Treated merely as exceptions to the "normal" functioning of society, dramatic e…
Affirmative Action in American Labor Unions: Necessary but Problematic for the Cause of Civil Rights”
Au lendemain de l’adoption de discrimination positive (affirmative action) par le president Lyndon Johnson, les syndicates américains doivent se confronter à la question des droits civiques qu’ils ont longtemps évitée. Au cours des décennies ultérieures, leur engagement pour les travailleurs issus des minorités permit d’obtenir des avantages certains mais eut des conséquences importantes pour le mouvement syndical. L’article commence avec une brè…
Law and American Political Development
This essay reviews the recent volume edited by Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch, The Supreme Court and American Political Development (2006), as well as the broader literature by law scholars interested in American Political Development (APD). The Law and APD literature has advanced our knowledge about courts by placing attention on the importance of executive and legislative actors, and by providing political context to our understanding of judicia…
Reading Greenstone'sLabor in American Politicsin Light of Labor's Decline
Labor and American Politics
The State of Working America, 2008/2009. By Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz. An Economic Policy Institute Book. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. 461 p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper
Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America
Uneasy Alliances is a powerful challenge to how we think about the relationship between race, political parties, and American democracy. While scholars frequently claim that the need to win elections makes government officials responsive to any and all voters, Paul Frymer shows that not all groups are treated equally; politicians spend most of their time and resources on white swing voters--to the detriment of the African American community. As b…
Teachers Unions and Public Education: A Discussion of Terry Moe's Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools
Public education is one of the most important “public goods” of a democratic society. In recent decades, public policy analysts, public intellectuals, and politicians have debated the state of public education in the United States and have argued about the sorts of public policies that might best promote the academic achievement, educational success, and political socialization of youth. Terry Moe and John Chubb have been important contributors t…
Partisan Balance: Why Political Parties Don't Kill the U.S. Constitutional System by David R. Mayhew
Grassroots Not Astroturf: The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism
A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours: Territorial Expansion, Land Policy, and U.S. State Formation
I examine the role of US land policy in strategically controlling and moving populations around the continent with the goal of expanding borders and securing and incorporating new territory on the frontier. The government effectively used land policies and population control to enable an otherwise constrained American state to assert authority over the direction of expansion, to engineer settlement patterns in a manner to secure the territory wit…
The People Against Themselves: Rethinking Popular Constitutionalism
In the course of reviewing Jed Shugerman's The People's Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America and Bruce Ackerman's The Civil Rights Revolution , we argue for a reassessment of the way that scholars think about popular constitutionalism. In particular, we urge scholars to resist the tendency to create a dichotomy between judicial interpretation of law and a set of nonjudicial venues in which popular constitutionalism supposedly takes p…
Why Aren't Political Scientists Interested in Native American Politics
Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a …
Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion
This book examines the politics of the United States' westward expansion, showing how the government's regulation of population movements on the frontier, both settlement and removal, advanced national aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation. The book details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policies to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering th…
Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion
Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP
The transition from Barack Obama to Donald J. Trump provides a striking backdrop for engaging historians' renewed interest in black Republicanism. Joshua D. Farrington examines black Republican thought and action over the long twentieth century up to Ronald Reagan, illuminating critical moments of transition and struggle. The roots of black Republicanism, he argues, are located in civil rights and freedom struggles. Black Republicans, at least pr…
Mission Statement
We are honored to have the opportunity to serve as the latest editors of Studies in American Political Development . We wish to thank and credit Anthony Chen and Eric Schickler for their outstanding service and contributions. First established by Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek in 1986 as a space for theoretical, methodological, and substantive commitments intrinsic in the study of American political development (APD), we look forward to mainta…
Labor Unions and White Racial Politics
Scholars and political observers point to declining labor unions, on the one hand, and rising white identity politics, on the other, as profound changes in American politics. However, there has been little attention given to the potential feedback between these forces. In this article, we investigate the role of union membership in shaping white racial attitudes. We draw upon research in history and American political development to generate a th…
American Political Development and the Crises in American Politics
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
Political science (26 works) · Law (24 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Economics (10 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Race, History, and American Society (8 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (7 works) · Public Administration (7 works)