Thad Williamson

Sprawl, Spatial Location, and Politics: How Ideological Identification Tracks the Built Environment

This study explores how spatial characteristics commonly associated with suburban sprawl (including density, reliance on the automobile, neighborhood age, and commuting patterns) help predict voting patterns and individual ideological orientation. I find that, at the county level, greater reliance on automobile commuting and younger housing stock were strong predictors of greater support for the Republican candidate in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, controlling for demographic factors. Using the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey (SCCBS), I also find that greater automobile reliance and younger housing stock, measured at the census tract level, are strong predictors of more conservative ideological orientation among individuals, controlling for other individual and contextual factors. I go on to explore three possible mechanisms driving the relationship between sprawling spatial environments and conservative political outlooks: self-selection, shifting self-interest based on spatial location within the metropolitan area, and shifting social perceptions resulting from the character of the built environment.

Local policy responses to globalization : place-based ownership models of economic enterprise.

The destabilizing forces wrought by economic globalization increasingly buffet local communities throughout America. This article explores a local policy strategy for coping with the effects of these forces and restoring some degree of stability to local economies. This strategy entails the creation of place-based ownership models of economic enterprise. With ownership and control held in a more collective or community-oriented fashion, such enterprises tend to anchor or root investment more securely in communities, providing a counterforce to globalization. We present and critically assess six place-based ownership models while providing illustrative examples to demonstrate how each model can work in practice. Even during the recent long-running economic expansion in the United States, a sober mood shrouded many American communities. Buffeted by the destabilizing forces wrought by economic globalization, localities struggled mightily to cope with the effects of these forces and restore some degree of stability to their economies. This quest for community economic stability—in which communities possess job opportunities and a general level of economic activity to provide a decent standard of living for their populations over a sustained period of time—preoccupied, and continues to preoccupy, the hearts and minds of local policymakers throughout the America. Drawing on large national surveys of local economic development policies, Clarke and Gaile (1997) delineated and categorized the myriad policy strategies for community stabilization that localities are employing as a response to globalization (also see Clarke & Gaile, 1998). Communities are pursuing classic locational policies to lower production factor costs (land, labor, and capital) relative to other cities through, for example, tax incentives or other subsidies for businesses (also see Peterson, 1981). They also are pursuing world-class community policies, developing innovative production capacities to gain a niche in the global economy via, for example, public-private partnerships, encouragement of research

An Emancipatory Interpretation of Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls, Wright, Sen, and Politics

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Constitutionalizing Property-Owning Democracy

Abstract This paper explores how a regime recognizable as a Rawlsian property-owning democracy might be enshrined constitutionally in the context of the U.S. Five specific constitutional amendments are proposed: establishing an equal right to education, establishing a guaranteed social minimum, clarifying the legitimacy of regulating corporate political speech for the sake of political equality: establishing an individual right to a share of society’s productive wealth, and assuring communities of significant size the right to remain economically viable over time. The substance and reasoning behind each proposal is discussed in length, and the paper also briefly discusses why a focus on constitutional amendments may be helpful both in clarifying how a property-owning democracy might be realized in practice and in establishing clear goals for social movements motivated by the aim of establishing a more equitable distribution of wealth, power, and opportunity in the United States.

Emancipatory Politics, Emancipatory Political Science: On Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias

categories of change. A close look at evolving institutional change opens the possibility of moving beyond the avoidance of larger systemic design questions, both in the economic realm and also in terms of democratic political theory. Doing so is ultimately likely to add both rigor and new energies to the long term “evolutionary reconstruction” of our nation. We need to know clearly where we are going and where we want to go. And we need to begin to face and debate matters of structure, principle, and theory now and as we go.

Leadership and Global Justice

Douglas A. Hicks & Thad Williamson Introduction * Gillian Brock Global Justice and Leadership Challenges: How Do We Overcome the Difficulties Involved in Realizing or Advancing Global Justice? * Mathias Risse Justice, Accountability, and the WTO * David A. Crocker Democratic Leadership, Citizenship, and Social Justice * Daniel K. Finn Power, Leadership, and the Struggle Against Government Corruption * Steve Vanderheiden Leadership, Moral Authority, and Global Climate Change * Simon Caney Global Justice, Climate Change, and Human Rights * Jennifer Prah Ruger Global Health Justice * Andrea Sangiovanni Justice and the Free Movement of Persons: Educational Mobility in the European Union and the United States*Waheed Hussain Filling the Gap: Political Consumerism in a World of Weak States * Rebecca Todd Peters Examining the Value of Solidarity as a Moral Foundation for Poverty Alleviation * Thad Williamson and Douglas Hicks Concluding Essay

The Triple Threat to Community Economic Stability in the United States

How important are stable communities? These authors argue that in the pursuit of globalization and growth, we have forgotten that maintaining communities requires attention as well. The authors propose policies to reinvigorate communities that few have thought about.

Seeking Spatial Justice, by Edward W. Soja. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 256 pp. ISBN: 978‐0‐8166‐6688‐3 (

Seeking Spatial Justice begins with an account of the 1996 class-action lawsuit brought by the Bus Riders Union of Los Angeles against the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority, a lawsuit that produced a consent decree forcing the MTA to make investments in its neglected bus system. Soja sees this case—and the struggle that led to it—as a paradigm for establishing spatial justice. In Soja’s view, scholars fail to understand both the nature of injustice, and the possibilities for remedying it, if we do not take seriously its spatial dimensions. Seeking Spatial Justice seeks to establish and help define the idea of “spatial justice” and demonstrate its relevance in practical political struggles, while also showing how academic work informed by a spatial justice framework can contribute to those same struggles. How are justice and space interrelated? Soja takes a strong position on this question, asserting that the “spatiality of (in)justice . . . affects society and social life just as much as social processes shape the spatiality or specific geography of (in)justice” (p. 5). Soja wants scholars and activists to take geography as seriously as they do social processes in analyzing social justice, and to recognize that there is a “dialectical” relationship between spatial arrangements and social processes. The degree to which Soja pushes this idea, however, strains plausibility. It is one thing to argue that space is an important mechanism by which social injustices are realized or perpetuated, and that the specific ways space is organized has implications for social life. It is another thing to suggest that “spaciality, sociality and historicality are mutually constitutive, with no one inherently privileged a priori” (p. 18). Soja repeatedly critiques not only the “space-blinkered social historicism” of many social scientists and historians (p. 19), but also the work of scholars who while giving attention to spatial questions continue to “privilege” social processes in their analyses. But if social processes and human choices are responsible for converting raw geographical elements into “socialized lived space,” it seems natural that most analysts will privilege the study of social processes, because it is through such processes that spaces have been created and that spaces might in the future change. In Chapter Three, Soja provides a short review of theories of social and spatial justice, beginning with the work of John Rawls and culminating with particular attention to the work of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre. Soja correctly points out that since social processes are necessarily realized in particular places and spaces, we must be attentive to the

24.95 Paper)

Advocates for the idea of global justice typically make at least one of the following (not mutually exclusive) claims concerning the moral obligations of citizens of the affluent, developed world: First, that we, whether directly or via our governments or other institutions, have a moral responsibility to make a good-faith effort to relieve extreme human suffering in the world, no matter what its causes and no matter where in the world it takes place.

Leadership toward Global Justice: Conceptual and Practical Challenges

This essay critically examines possibilities for expanding democratic participatory governance in light of Mark Bevir’s treatment of the subject in his book Democratic Governance. The essay argues that a theory of participatory governance should retain an explicit role for expert analysis, and that the appropriate scope given to such analysis will vary by policy area. The essay also argues that the present organization of capitalist economies mandates a heavy reliance on experts, and that a full-blown account of expanding participatory governance thus must be paired with an account of how to achieve a more democratic political economy. Such an account should also specify how democratic-minded public officials can contribute to greater public participation in policymaking.