Paul Frymer

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 events such as Katrina ought instead to serve as crucial reminders to scholars and the public that the quest for racial equality is only a work in progress. New Orleans, we argue, was not exceptional; it was the product of broader and very typical elements of American democracy—its ideology, attitudes, and institutions. At the dawn of the century after “the century of the color-line,” the hurricane and its aftermath highlight salient features of inequality in the United States that demand broader inquiry and that should be incorporated into the analytic frameworks through which American politics is commonly studied and understood. To this end, we suggest several ways in which the study of racial and other forms of inequality might inform the study of U.S. politics writ large, as well as offer a few ideas about ways in which the study of race might be re-politicized. To bring race back into the study of politics, we argue for greater attention to the ways that race intersects with other forms of inequality, greater attention to political institutions as they embody and reproduce these inequalities, and a return to the study of power, particularly its role in the maintenance of ascriptive hierarchies.

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 result of a complex set of factors, and that latent psychology is less helpful to understanding them than are the maneuverings and behavior of strategic actors following rules and incentives provided by institutions. We need to examine the ways in which institutions encourage racist acts by motivating people to behave in a racist manner or behave in a manner that motivates others to do so. To further explore and compare institutional and individual-psychological approaches to understanding racism, I examine manifestations of racism in labor union elections. I analyze and contrast more than 150 cases in which the National Labor Relations Board and U.S. federal appellate courts formally responded to reported violations of racism in a union election. The principles of this approach can easily be applied to other contexts and suggests that racism in society is less intractable and innate than malleable and politically determined.

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-purposes, and courts imposed great financial costs on unions. The result of this effort was a host of unintended consequences for unions and civil rights groups. By putting race at the center, it also suggests an alternative understanding of the twentieth-century American state.

“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 without a large military, and to maintain an official fidelity to constitutional principles while engineering a dominant racial vision. I examine both the success and failures of these policies over the nineteenth century, with material drawn from government documents and primary sources. I discuss the consequences of this land policy for how we understand the American state in the context of comparative state and racial formation.

Labor and American Politics

I n A Preface to Economic Democracy, Robert Dahl begins his chapter, “The Right to Democracy Within Firms,” with a provocative claim: “If democracy is justified in governing the state, then it must also be justified in governing economic enterprises; and to say that it is not justified in governing economic enterprises is to imply that it is not justified in governing the state.” Dahl argues that in order to achieve greater substantive political equality in America, we must narrow the degree of economic inequality between poor and rich and between employers and employees. In his view, the rise of the corporation in the late nineteenth century created a level of economic inequality that “helped to create a body of citizens highly unequal in the resources they could bring to political life.” Written in 1985, Dahl’s sentiments may have been provocative, but they were hardly unique among democratic theorists and empiricists within political science. At the time, many of the discipline’s foremost contributors made quite grandiose assertions regarding the importance of attaining workplace democracy in order to bring about a more thriving and equitable democracy in the electoral and legislative arena. Twenty-five years later, the United States is in the midst of what some are labeling the “new Gilded Age.” The aptness of this label derives from the fact that economic inequalities between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else have reached a level of disparity not observed since the Roaring Twenties, at the same time that a series of political and legal developments have scaled back important aspects of the welfare state while increasing the freedoms of corporations and Wall Street. Political scientists have been active and responsive in calling attention to this rising inequality. In 2004, the American Political Science Association published a widely publicized and discussed report, “American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” and the last several years have seen an outpouring of books devoted to describing the nature of inequality, drawing out many of the implications that this inequality has for democratic representation. These works have both pointed to an alarming array of statistical trends and illuminated developments within the nation’s legislative and executive branches, its political parties, courts, and public policies—all of which have been marked by the effects of increased corporate power, decreased participation by disadvantaged groups, and retrenchment of many pieces of a once-vibrant political and economic safety net that regulated big business and protected workers from economic disaster. Less frequent within these current academic discussions, however, is either a conversation about the role that worsening conditions in the workplace have had in exacerbating political and economic inequality, or a more general interest in worker rights and workplace democracy. This silence is not because workplace democracy has become a reality since the time of Dahl’s writing; far from it. Democracy in the workplace, as well as a broader set of rights, securities, and protections for workers, have all declined in an economic and political climate that has empowered employers and disempowered labor unions and the individual rights of many workers. In this essay, I begin with a review of the findings presented in a recent publication by Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America, 2008/2009. In the book, the authors detail disturbing economic trends in the areas of family income, individual wages and benefits, employment patterns, and distribution of wealth. The statistics they provide are systematic and powerful reminders of what have become increasingly apparent trends in the modern American economy and society: rising inequality, a struggling middle class, a declining working class, and a continuing trend of significant economic disparities between races. Many of these statistics are familiar to political scientists, even those with a scant interest in inequality. But my broader purpose in discussing The State of Working America is to urge political scientists to return to the concerns expressed by Dahl and others about democracy Paul Frymer is Acting Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs and Associate Professor of Politics at Princeton University. | |

Teachers Unions and Public Education

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 to these debates. Their 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and Americas Schools , set the terms of much subsequent discussion about the importance of school autonomy and “educational choice.” Moes Special Interest extends these arguments through a more frontal critique of the role of teachers unions. This book represents an important contribution to public discussion of school reform. It also incorporates a distinctive perspective on the relationship between power and public policy, and between the role of states and that of markets in the provision of public goods and services. In this symposium, we feature a range of serious commentaries on the books central arguments about educational policy and politics and on its approach to “engaged” or “applied” political science.

Reading Greenstone's Labor in American Politics in Light of Labor's Decline

Four decades after its initial publication, we pause for good reason to contemplate, celebrate, and discuss J. David Greenstone’s Labor in American Politics. Greenstone’s book is an important part of multiple canons within political science. His claims about the democratic possibilities for workers, both as members of labor unions and as members of national interest groups allied with the Democratic Party, have inspired numerous works about the continuing influence of the American labor movement. His sophisticated understanding of the limits of pluralism, in which he engages liberal, Marxist, and neo-institutional theories of power, in many ways presaged the rise of ‘‘new institutionalism’’ and the field of American political development. His even-handed prose that both provides empirical rigor and engages in big theoretical and normative questions about democracy and inequality in America remains the kind of combination that is too rarely found today in political science. In this short essay, I want to reflect on how well Greenstone’s book stands four decades later, both in order to explain the current position of labor unions in American politics and more broadly to consider how we measure and understand power in the nation’s political system. I examine each in turn.