Real Utopias
When radical critics of capitalism become desperate for empirical models that embody their aspirations, wishful thinking can triumph over sober assessments. The complementary danger is cynicism; there is great cachet among intellectuals in debunking naïve enthusiasm. What is needed, then, are accounts of empirical cases that are neither gullible nor cynical, but try to fully recognize the complexity and dilemmas as well as the real potentials of practical efforts at social empowerment. – Erik Olin […]
Intergenerational income mobility
Intergenerational income mobility in the United States: A racial-spatial account. Abstract The study of intergenerational income mobility has witnessed more visibility in academic and public policy circles in light of the new estimates generated by Chetty and colleagues. The distribution of race-based estimates of intergenerational income mobility demonstrates strong spatial patterning, such that the success of a child’s traversal to the top income quintile in the United States is spatially conditioned and dependent on […]
Varieties of capitalism and income inequality
Abstract Why do countries diverge significantly in the levels of income inequality across the Global North? Most scholars believe that the answer lies in the ways that economic resources are organized through institutions. Drawing on a country-level, longitudinal dataset from 1985 to 2016 matched with three other data sources, the author explains how and to what extent institutions matter for income inequality across the “varieties of capitalism.” To sort countries based on their institutional similarities, […]
The New Class and Right-Wing Populism: The Case of Wisconsin
Abstract While previous scholarship highlights the importance of cross-class alliances between intellectuals and workers in past social-democratic and labor movements, the growth of right-wing populism may signal the breakdown of this political alignment today. We investigate the extent to which intellectuals and workers remain politically aligned through a case study of political developments in the state of Wisconsin, which pioneered social-democratic reforms in the US in the early twentieth century and then turned toward […]
The regional determinants of collective action in the era of American Resistance
Abstract This study investigates the regional determinants of collective action in the era of “American Resistance.” Drawing on a new dataset from “Count Love”—a machine learning tool that collects data on protest events, timing, location, and number of attendees—we explore the regional determinants of collective action in the first three years following President Trump’s election. In particular, we investigate how socio-economic factors, political partisanship and demographic composition of states affect the rate of protest […]