Fall 1996
The Conference was organized by the Boston Area Seminar on American Political Development. The meeting was the group's second annual day-long forum designed to engage interdisciplinary perspectives on politics and governance. The panelists and audience at this year's gathering were primarily political scientists, leavened with a sprinkling of sociologists, academic public administrators, economists, and historians. One might have predicted that a subject as complex as inequality would engender a range viewpoints and no consensus about its historical configuration or current causes. Yet most attendees appeared to concur that inequality was a worsening political malady that needed correction. No consensus on a cure emerged from the conversations. But conferees agreed that history offers a useful tool for analyzing connections between economic inequality and public policy. Some of the ten presentations are scheduled to appear on H-Pol.
A second theme that surfaced during the day's proceedings were the constraints of data limitations to longitudinal analysis. Claudia Goldin emphasized this impediment in her overview of wage inequality in American history. The scarcity of systemic wage data for the 19th and early 20th centuries, before the advent of "modern" income reports in 1939, hinder assessment of Simon Kuznets' conjecture (1954) that wage inequality rose during the period of industrial transformation until an apex in 1928. The validity of this hypothesis bears on appraisal of the U shaped curve of wage inequality that Goldin observed in wages since 1939.
Several panelists considered past political responses to inequality. Allen Hertzke hypothesized that the low SES of adherents of evangelic "upstart" churches, compared to the middle class membership of the "mainline" churches, helps to account for the evangelicals' critique of industrial capitalism in the populist era. By the 1920s evangelicals had turned politically conservative, a reversal that Hertzke attributed to the rise of secularism and Darwinian thought, which became their chief preoccupation. Elizabeth Sanders contended that the roots of class politics in the era of industrial transformation can be traced to dynamics embedded in regional economies. This model helps to explain why farmers from the South, Plains, and Mountain regions of the United States led the effort to control industrial capitalism in the progressive era. Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian, sketched the politicization of wages since the 1930s. Business, labor, and government arrived at an accommodation during the Great Depression in a mutual effort to combat underconsumption, which contemporaries believed explained the economic stagnation. This accord became a reference for subsequent stages in labor relations, but by the 1960s a new rights-based model of labor activity undermined the earlier harmony.
The changing class configuration of politics was examined in a panel on voters, parties, and elections. Martin Shefter observed that locally based and patronage oriented political parties of the 1830-1960 era had evolved into organizations dominated by the upper middle class by the later 20th century. The class convergence in the leadership of the two parties, whereby Democrats became more like Republicans, accounts for the greater salience of social as compared to redistributional issues in the contemporary polity. In a similar vein, David Weaklien, a sociologist, saw class convergence in the composition of Democratic and Republican voter coalitions, a trend that apparently accelerated during the late 1960s and early 1970s, if Gallup poll data can be relied upon. No one contradict his conclusion that nonvoters in the United States were concentrated among low individual individuals, in contrast to the pattern in Britain. John Gerring presented a content analysis of cultural and economic symbols in national party platforms since the 1840s, and found that the rhetoric of class resentment peaked in the 1896-1940s era. Yet, economic themes tended to predominate at all periods in platform history, a pattern Gerring attributed to the explosive divisiveness of cultural issues, which national politicians purposefully sidestepped.
In a panel on policy, Jeffrey Berry contented that the congressional agenda manifested an expansion, not contraction, of liberalism since the Kennedy administration. He arrived at this conclusion by sorting major legislative concerns (bills that had hearings) during three congresses (1963, 1979, 1991) into issue categories denoted material (re. economic prosperity and equality) and postmaterial (re. environmental protection, consumer protection, rights, and governmental reform). Paul Pierson offered some reflections on speculation that business influence on politics has increased in the recent past. He expressed reservations about the conjecture that the globalization of capitalism has dictated a single political strategy among American business, or that politicians are the captives of the bond traders. Seven Steinmo reviewed the history of national taxation in crossnational perspective and argued that insufficient revenue, not the reduction of taxation on the wealthy (i.e. the result of tax cuts in the 1980s), constitutes the primary fiscal problem of the modern era. His recommendation was higher taxation on the middle class, which would help restore equality in program funding. The suggestion highlighted the gap between academicians and politicians over appropriate policy directions.
Ballard Campbell