Winner-Take-All Politics and Political Science: A Response

The term "market-conditioning" comes from Nathan Kelly, The Politics of Income Inequality in the United States ( New York: Cambridge, 2009); the term "enactments" from David Mayhew, Divided We Govern (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). In general, we minimize citations in this response. For full documentation of points made in this essay, we refer readers to our essay in this volume.

Vincent A. Mahler and David K. Jesuit , "Fiscal Redistribution in the Developed Countries: New Insights from the Luxembourg Income Study ," Socio-Economic Review 4 (2006): 483-511; Thomas L. Hungerford , "Income Inequality, Income Mobility, and Economic Policy: U.S. Trends in the 1980s and 1990s," Congressional Research Service Report for Congress , April 4, 2008.

Jacob S. Hacker , "Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of U.S. Social Policy Retrenchment," American Political Science Review 98 (2004): 243-60.

See, e.g., David Moss , "An Ounce of Prevention," Harvard Magazine, September/October 2009.

Indeed, we have developed such arguments at length in these pages. See Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, "Business Power and Social Policy: Employers and the Formation of the American Welfare State," Politics & Society 30, no. 2 (2002): 277-325.

Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson , Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson , Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Abandoned the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster , forthcoming), chap. 7-8.

Mark Smith , The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Alice O’Connor , "Financing the Counterrevolution," in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zeilizer ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 148-68.

John Gaventa , Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Champaign: University of Illinois Press), 1982.

Henry Brady and David Collier , eds., Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

We provide a detailed discussion in Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010, chap 10.

Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson , "The Case for Policy-Focused Political Analysis," paper presented at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, Toronto, September 2009; Paul Pierson , "The Costs of Marginalization: Qualitative Methods in the Study of American Politics," Comparative Political Studies 40, no. 2 ( 2007): 146-69.

Lindblom was one of Pierson’s dissertation advisors.

Hacker and Pierson , "Business Power"; Paul Pierson, "The Prospects for Democratic Control in an Age of Big Government," in Politics at the Turn of the Century, ed. Arthur M. Meltzer , Jerry Weinberger , and M. Richard Zinman (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001 ), 140-61. Related to this, the exchange recounted between Piven and Hacker concerned not the power of business but the strategy of the GOP. Piven had argued that the GOP of the early 2000s was using government policy to strengthen its political coalition and weaken Democrats’, an argument to which we are quite sympathetic, having written a book that discusses many of these gambits (Off Center). Against the backdrop of a looming defeat on Social Security reform, however, Hacker noted that this argument was overstated and that its overstatement suggested the need for a more conditional theory of GOP policy control. We would say the same about business power: it is highly conditional (although the conditions have certainly been ripe over the past generation) and scholars must pay attention to the causes of its variation. We should also note that one cause of variation that Piven’s own work has importantly documented is the presence or absence of large-scale popular mobilization. Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Random House, 1979).

Among many contributions, see Peter A. Gourevitch and James Shinn, Political Power and Corporate Control: The New Global Politics of Corporate Governance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Peter Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001); Evelyn Huber and John Stephens, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Torben Iversen and Anne Wren, "Equality, Employment, and Budgetary Restraint: The Trilemma of the Service Economy," World Politics 50 (1990): 507-46; and Jonas Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe vs. Liberal America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).