The American Political Economy: Markets, Power, and the Meta Politics of US Economic Governance

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the emerging field of American political economy (APE). Methodologically eclectic, this field seeks to understand the interaction of markets and government in America's unequal and polarized polity. Though situated within American politics research, APE draws from comparative political economy to develop a broad approach that departs from the American politics mainstream in two main ways. First, APE focuses on the interaction of markets and governance, a peripheral concern in much American politics research. Second, it invokes a theoretical orientation attentive to what we call meta politics—the processes of institution shaping, agenda setting, and venue shopping that unfold before and alongside the more visible processes of mass politics that figure so centrally in American politics research. These substantive and theoretical differences expand the study of American politics into neglected yet vital domains, generating fresh insights into the United States’ distinctive mix of capitalism and democracy. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The Environmental State: Nature and the Politics of Environmental Protection

“…Third, our approach also assumes that the internal heterogeneity of environmental states and the politics that shape them grow out of a relatively small set of social structures and institutions that help determine the state's role in providing environmental welfare. The basic push and pull between pro-and anti-environmental factions, often in line with economic interests, is well appreciated in environmental sociology, although of late, political scientists have probably made more progress than sociologists in specifying the institutional conditions that support or hinder pro-environmental reforms in capitalist democracies (e.g., Dryzek et al 2003;Hacker et al 2022;Kitschelt 1986;Mildenberger 2020;Stokes 2020;Vogel 2018). Even these accounts, however, struggle to explain why some areas of environmental welfare provision are relatively robust while others wither or fail to take hold or how and why environmental welfare provision varies over long stretches of time.…”

The Right to Work and American Inequality

“…Institutionalized social reproduction reflects the "congealed power" of the outcomes of previous social movements and mobilization (Western 1997); historical victories thus follow path-dependent trajectories that structure notions of a smaller set of subsequent behaviors as efficient or reasonable (Pierson 2004). Contemporary instances of political contestation, therefore, often operate within the institutional parameters established by the resolution and formalization of previous social struggles (Hacker et al 2022). Such path dependence can lock in place levels and types of egalitarianism that are perceived as achievable and reasonable.…”

“…Similarly, RTW may adjust the “meta politics” of institutions and agenda-setting (Hacker et al 2022; Hertel-Fernandez 2019b). Indeed, Feigenbaum and colleagues (2018) find that left-party power and working-class political involvement rapidly decline following RTW passage.…”

“…Thus, RTW also includes a potential second-order institutionalization effect occurring after policy change, which may change standards, norms, and values that privilege the individualization of the worker and legitimates a polarized wage distribution. This argument draws insights from the comparative welfare literature's focus on institutional context that shapes the legitimate range of behavior by economic actors (Huber and Stephens 2010;Jepperson 1991;Pierson 2004;Thelen 2012), economic sociology's conceptualization of market logic as fundamentally interconnected with broader social systems (DiMaggio and Goldberg 2018;Granovetter 1995;Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012), and the recent focus on the U.S. political economy and "meta politics" in political science (Hacker et al 2022). This focus expands the scope of analysis and aligns the empirical study of RTW consequences with their stakes described in historical accounts (De Leon 2015;Farhang and Katznelson 2005;Hogler 2015).…”

Global Markets, Corporate Assurances, and the Legitimacy of State Intervention: Perceptions of Distant Labor and Environmental Problems

“…State intervention is a direct and intuitive way of restricting the boundaries of markets, and states have become far more interventionist vis-à-vis global supply chains over the past decade (Kay and Evans 2018). But the legitimacy of state mandates continues to be in question, particularly amid polarized perceptions of evidence (Eyal 2019) and corporate power to resist or reshape government (Hacker et al 2022). Methodologically, we use a conjoint survey experiment, a useful tool for analyzing multidimensional perceptions of sociopolitical phenomena (Flores and Schachter 2018).…”