Download File
enns-kelly-morgan-witko-econinterests-policyagenda-working-paper
Read the full PDF in your browser
Authors:
Peter K. Enns, Associate Professor in the Department of Government,
Cornell University
Nathan J. Kelly, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Tennessee
Jana Morgan, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Tennessee
Christopher Witko, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of South Carolina
Abstract:
While there is an oft-noted “bias” toward upper income groups in the U.S. organized interest system, it is debatable whether this bias matters very much since many studies find that lobbying and campaign contributions have a limited effect on policy outcomes. How bias may shape which economic problems are addressed or neglected in the first place has seldom been studied, however. We argue that in order to receive resources from organized interests members of Congress must “signal” their support for these interests by discussing the economic problems that they prioritize. Because there is upper class bias in the interest system this process produces disproportionate congressional attention to the economic problems of greatest concern to upper income interests and a relative neglect of economic problems that concern other groups. To examine this argument we develop measures of attention to various economic problems using congressional speech in the Congressional Record from 1995-2012. We find that during this period of relatively high upper class bias in the interest system there was a great deal of attention to the concerns of the wealthy, and far less attention to some of the concerns of lower income groups. At the microlevel, using a difference-in-differences analysis we observe that when individual MCs become more reliant on the resources of upper income interests they subsequently discuss the problems prioritized by these interests more.
Download File
faricy-partisanpol-fedtaxprog-working-paper
Read the full PDF in your browser
Author:
Christopher Faricy, Assistant Professor, Political Science
The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University
Abstract:
This paper theorizes and examines the relationship among mass public opinion, political party control of the federal government, and changes to tax progressivity. I hypothesize that a shift to a conservative public mood and increased Republican Party power results in lower levels of tax progressivity in both the short- and long-terms. This study has implications for understanding the political conditions that determine who pays for government activity and policy factors that influence inequality.
Download File
bruch-soss-school-experiences-marginalization-working-paper
Read the full PDF in your browser
Authors:
Sarah K. Bruch, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Iowa
Joe Soss, Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service, University of Minnesota, Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs
Abstract:
How does formal education matter for political inequality? Most answers focus on the things schools allocate, such as skills, knowledge, and other forms of human capital. In this paper, we shift attention to the relations that schools organize and the ways students experience them. Schools, we argue, operate as sites where individuals have their first, formative experiences with the rules and cultures of public institutions, authority relations with officials, and what it means to be a member of a rights-and-obligations-bearing community of putative equals. Connecting the recent turn toward meso-level analysis in citizenship studies to relational theories of inequality, we develop a novel account of how schools construct citizens and position them in the polity. Building on this theoretical intervention, our empirical analysis shows, first, how race (in conjunction with class and gender) structures experiences of school relations and, second, how school experiences matter for citizens’ positions and dispositions in the polity. American schools, we conclude, function as relational mechanisms that convert social hierarchies into civic and political inequalities.
Must-Read: When I think of the standard uses of “moral economy”, I think not of “fairness” and “justice” but rather of tradition and hierarchy. I think of the Odyssey, in which the fact that Laertes looks like a badly-treated garden slave rather than like a prince is a violation of the moral-economic order:
Indeed your face and figure have nothing of the slave about them, and proclaim you of noble birth. I should have said that you were one of those who should wash well, eat well, and lie soft at night…
The market can and very often does produce pressure for outcomes that violate “moral economy” understood as tradition and hierarchy, but they may or may not violate “moral economy” understood as reasonable and humane notions of justice and fairness. Indeed, Prometheus the fire-bringer’s and the disruptions he causes have an alternative and stronger claim to “moral economy”:
Kieran Healy: The Moral Economy of Technology: “‘moral economy’ refers to some kind of informal but forceful collective control over the market…
…justice over efficiency, fairness over freedom, and community expectations over individual opportunity…. Technologies are counting and classifying your actions constantly in an effort to make you a better person. Their promoters and investors constantly moralize about their products, too…. This kind of moral economy is not about justice or fairness. Instead it evangelizes social progress through technological disruption. This vision has deep historical roots that are uncomfortably entwined with the origins of the social sciences…. The Saint-Simonian vision became what Hayek called ‘the religion of the engineers’, full of faith in the power of rational expertise. That religion is very much still with us….
Consider two basic experiences of our new world of smart devices and internet-enabled things. The first is the nice one… the lives of people who live in Apple advertisements… a computer or device knows what you want it to do, or has anticipated a need that you have and acted on it in a pleasing way. It is a feeling of magic and delight, or at least a sense of ease and convenience…. The second basic experience is the bad one. I associate it with a parade of malfunctioning, misconceived or badly-designed software and smart devices…. Most recently I’ve experienced it with allegedly smart devices that pretend they can talk with and understand you, but which are really just verbal command lines operating on the narrowest of gauges. If you stray from the expected path at all, the illusion of both interactivity and smartness is destroyed….
Social theorists consistently underestimate the value of technology’s delightful aspects… want to say your Fitbit or Apple Watch is exercising a subtle form of control over you by encouraging you not just to meet your step count for the day but also encouraging you to value the act of meeting your step count for the day, and most perniciously by arranging things so that you experience your valuation of the act of meeting your step count for the day as a satisfying personal choice, rather than an instrument of neoliberal governmentality. Conversely, though, the same theorists also consistently overestimate how often software and hardware actually works properly…. They reverse left and right, so that cheerful hype becomes a harsh critique of the all-consuming power of technology. But… they do not reverse up and down. The technology is still assumed to work, even though it probably doesn’t, most of the time. It matters which technologies are going to work, and which ones are just going to be billion dollar cargo-cults…
Must-Read: Very good. Mind you, I am not sure that it is right–while the risk premium ought to be linear in units of fundamental operating risk, and while requiring banks to maintain larger capital reserves ought to be irrelevant (save for the small financial-repression taxes involved) to costs of financing for Modigliani-Miller reasons, it is not clear to me that that is how things actually work in reality:
Anat R. Admati, Peter M. DeMarzo, Martin F. Hellwig, and Paul Pfleiderer (2013): Fallacies, Irrelevant Facts, and Myths in the Discussion of Capital Regulation: Why Bank Equity is Not Socially Expensive: “We examine the pervasive view that ‘equity is expensive’…
…which leads to claims that high capital requirements are costly for society and would affect credit markets adversely. We find that arguments made to support this view are fallacious, irrelevant to the policy debate by confusing private and social costs, or very weak. For example, the return on equity contains a risk premium that must go down if banks have more equity. It is thus incorrect to assume that the required return on equity remains fixed as capital requirements increase. It is also incorrect to translate higher taxes paid by banks to a social cost. Policies that subsidize debt and indirectly penalize equity through taxes and implicit guarantees are distortive. And while debt’s informational insensitivity may provide valuable liquidity, increased capital (and reduced leverage) can enhance this benefit. Finally, suggestions that high leverage serves a necessary disciplining role are based on inadequate theory lacking empirical support.
We conclude that bank equity is not socially expensive, and that high leverage at the levels allowed, for example, by the Basel III agreement is not necessary for banks to perform all their socially valuable functions and likely makes banking inefficient. Better capitalized banks suffer fewer distortions in lending decisions and would perform better. The fact that banks choose high leverage does not imply that this is socially optimal. Except for government subsidies and viewed from an ex ante perspective, high leverage may not even be privately optimal for banks.
Setting equity requirements significantly higher than the levels currently proposed would entail large social benefits and minimal, if any, social costs. Approaches based on equity dominate alternatives, including contingent capital. To achieve better capitalization quickly and efficiently and prevent disruption to lending, regulators must actively control equity payouts and issuance. If remaining challenges are addressed, capital regulation can be a powerful tool for enhancing the role of banks in the economy.
Must-Read: Dan Drezner: The Truth of Cosmopolitanism: “Douthat’s column is a perfect cocktail consisting of one part insight, one part self-loathing and one part flagrant error…
…The insight… Chris Hayes…. “The problem was so deep and so tied to the entire social order and rising inequality in the American model of enlightened meritocratic rule that even competent leadership from President Obama, or a period in which there weren’t the same sort of succession of elite failures, wasn’t going to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”… I’m not necessarily convinced that this is the defining cleavage of our era (see below), I’m convinced it’s a cleavage.
And yet, never underestimate the self-loathing contained in these kinds of essays…. By definition, cosmopolitans are supposed to be open to criticism–so any of them with any sense of self-doubt will seize upon this argument as an example of what’s what’s wrong with their lives.
The final point, however, is that the rooted/cosmopolitan divide is only one of many…. I’m not even sure it’s the most salient…. Replace ‘nativist’ with ‘old’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ with ‘young.’… Does talking about a young/old divide make things any different?… Douthat is no doubt correct to point out the biases that cosmopolitans possess. But his implicit counterpoint is that nativists possess some deep reservoir of local knowledge that cosmopolitans overlook. Except that if the cleavage is split by age, it suggests… older voters… fueled by a sense of nostalgia… that… may or may not be true….. George Saunders….
The Trump supporter might be best understood as a guy who wakes up one day in a lively, crowded house full of people, from a dream in which he was the only one living there, and then mistakes the dream for the past: a better time, manageable and orderly, during which privilege and respect came to him naturally, and he had the whole place to himself…. Spoiled Americans, imbued with unreasonable boomer expectations… grievances… more theoretical than actual, more media-induced than experience-related.
Indeed, Trump’s whole campaign shtick is predicated on this kind of nostalgia, which contains far more truthiness than truth.
Must-Read: Austin Smith: Don’t Punish Journalists for Software Problems: “Editors are cornered by two problems…
…a hard job that gets harder by the month, and a media/social beast that feeds ravenously on every minor mistake.
No, wait, sorry, some editors are cornered by three problems, because their news organizations can’t get their damn CMS straight…. At the heart of any CMS is a text editor, which must offer writers and editors many different options for presenting an article correctly in every form factor. The text editor in the Daily News’s CMS stripped out formatting that declared blockquotes or hanging indents. Whoops! Of these three problems… one is actually possible to solve right now. It is absolutely possible to build a CMS that handles inbound formatting neatly…
Must-Read: Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt: Mortality Inequality: The Good News from a County-Level Approach: “Inequality in mortality rates are a good indicator of economic wellbeing…
…but most of the existing literature does little to distinguish between developments in infants and adults. This column uses extensive US data to analyse mortality trends across all age groups. It finds that the health of the next generation in the poorest areas of the US has improved significantly and the race gap has declined significantly. Underlying explanations include declines in the prevalence of smoking and improved nutrition, and a major cause is social policies that target the most disadvantaged.
