Sidewalk, (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999)

Mitchell Duneier delves deeply into the lives of poor black men who make their livelihoods on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village selling secondhand goods, panhandling, and scavenging books and magazines. Based on five 5 years of fieldwork spent, Duneier argues that, contrary to the opinion of city officials and the appearance of disorder, the book vendors contribute significantly to the order and well-being of the Village while taking advantage of the opportunity for income, respect and social support.

Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy
(University of Chicago Press).

Why do Americans who want to "help the poor" have such negative attitudes toward "welfare"? Using detailed analysis of surveys and other sources, Gilens traces this antipathy to portrayals in the media that "racialize" welfare and activate the ancient racial stereotype of African Americans as "lazy." The old notion of "the undeserving poor" is central here; many of those who want "an end to welfare as we know it" think government should be spending more, not less, to help poor people trying to support themselves. Gilens argues that the media are a primary culprit, as notions of individualism and economic self-interest don't adequately explain white Americans' opposition to welfare.

Understanding Poverty

This volume brings together essays by thirty-four leading economists about the most important things they have learnt from their research that relate to poverty. The essays range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the future of micro-credit and the quest for new vaccines.

Social Cognition: From brains to culture (co-author with Taylor)

Social Cognitiion describes the increasingly complete link between neuroscience and culture. It highlights cutting-edge research in social neuropsychology, mainstream experimental social-cognitive psychology, and cultural psychology.

Categorically Unequal

The United States suffers from the most unequal income distribution of any advanced industrialized nation and the problem is growing worse over time. Doug Massey argues that America's disparities are not simply the inevitable result of globalization and technological change, but are born from stratification the permits privileged groups to exploit and exclude many of their fellow Americans. In this volume, Massey weaves together history, political economy, and neuropsychology to provide an explanation of how America's culture and political system perpetuates inequalities.

Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe versus Liberal America
Cornell University Press, 2005.

What are the relative merits of the American and European socioeconomic systems? In Inequality and Prosperity, Jonas Pontusson provides a comparative overview of the two major models of labor markets and welfare systems in the advanced industrial world: the "liberal capitalist" system of the United States and Britain, and the "social market" capitalism of northern Europe. He challenges the conventional wisdom that there is always a trade-off between equity and efficiency, showing that liberal market and social market economies face different challenges and must find different solutions to their problems. Pontusson opposes the notion of inevitable convergence: he believes that social-market economies can survive and indeed flourish in the contemporary world economy.

Hard Heads, Soft Hearts Basic Books

Why is it that good policies often make bad politics? Economic policy, Blinder argues, is increasingly made by politicians who "choose solutions they perceive to be politically correct." Blinder discusses liberal-conservative divisiveness and shows how it often prevents sound economic advice from being heeded. At the same time he puts forward his own nonpartisan vision for the future of our economic society and challenges law-makers—Democrats and Republicans—to do better.

Prentice, D. A., & Miller D. T. (Eds.) (1999). Cultural divides: Understanding and overcoming group conflict. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Thirty years of progress on civil rights and a new era of immigration to the United States have together created an unprecedented level of diversity in American schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. But increased contact among individuals from different racial and ethnic groups has not put an end to misunderstanding and conflict. Can a population of increasingly mixed origins learn to live and work together despite differing cultural backgrounds? Or, is social polarization by race and ethnicity inevitable? These are the dilemmas explored in Cultural Divides, a compendium of the latest research into the origins and nature of group conflict.

The Missing Class Beacon Press

Although the poverty rate in the U.S. is the highest in the industrial world, there is a much larger segment of the American population that virtually no one pays attention to: the near poor. Over fifty million Americans have surpassed the ranks of the "working poor," yet still struggle to maintain a decent standard of living. Through a series of profiles of families living on the financial edge, The Missing Class demonstrates the challenges the near poor face when it comes to housing, education, health care, and debt.

Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (with Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal). MIT Press

The idea of America as politically polarized--that there is an unbridgeable divide between right and left, red and blue states--has become a cliché. In Polarized America, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal examine the relationships of political polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces, characterizing it as a “dance” of give and take and back and forth causality. In "the choreography of American politics" inequality feeds directly into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality.

Lawlessness and Economics

How can property rights be protected and contracts be enforced in countries where the rule of law is ineffective or absent? How can firms from advanced market economies do business in such circumstances? In Lawlessness and Economics, Avinash Dixit examines the theory of private institutions that transcend or supplement weak economic governance from the state.

Social Influences on Ethical Behavior in Organizations (ed. with Messick and Tyler)

For too long, organizational scientists have not adequately attended to the problems of unethical behavior in organizations. This collection of essays provides a stimulus to help move the study of unethical behavior to center stage in the organizational sciences. It does so by posing questions that not only entail a concern for understanding unethical behavior but that also strike at the very core of how and why organizations function as they do.

Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration

Devah Pager randomly assigned fake job applicants criminal records, then sent them on hundreds of real job searches throughout the city of Milwaukee. Her “testers” were attractive and articulate —yet ex-offenders received less than half the callbacks of the equally qualified applicants without criminal backgrounds. Young black men, meanwhile, paid a particularly high price for the widespread assumptions about black criminality: African American applicants with clean records fared no better in their job searches than white men just out of prison. Such shocking barriers to legitimate work make it clear why ex-prisoners soon find themselves back in the realm of poverty, underground employment, and crime that led them to prison in the first place.

Barbershops, Bibles and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought
Princeton University Press

What is the best way to understand black political ideology? Just listen to the everyday talk that emerges in public spaces, suggests Melissa Harris-Lacewell. Using a combination of statistical, experimental, and ethnographic methods in an effort to reveal how public opinion and ideologies are formed at the grassroots level, the author talks to black college students about wide ranging topics from the Million Man March and welfare, to Southern, black Baptists discussing homosexuality in the church, to black men in a barbershop early on a Saturday morning, to the voices of hip-hop music and Black Entertainment Television.

“What do we know about job loss in the United States?: Evidence from the Displaced Workers Survey, 1984-2004", June 2005 by Henry S. Farber. Journal of Economic Perspectives

A defining characteristic of the U.S. labor market is its fluid nature. Half of all new jobs end in the first year and, at any point in time, about 20% of workers have been with their current employer for less than one year. The goal of this article is to characterize the level of job loss and the costs to job losers over the 1981-2003 period, and to look for changes over time, both cyclical and secular, in the types of workers who lose jobs and the costs borne by various types of job losers.

Sellers, R.M. & Shelton, J.N. (2003). "The role of racial identity in perceived racial discrimination". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 1079-1092.

Several reports have documented different patterns in mental health service utilization among ethnic minority groups, particularly for Black Americans, in comparison to Whites. We examine individual variables that may underlie these differences, focusing on experiences of discrimination and racial identity using a community sample of over 1,000 White and Black American adults. Results showed that discrimination or unfair treatment was marginally associated with increased utilization for Black Americans. Black Americans with high racial identity who experienced discrimination reported a lower probability of utilization compared to those with low racial identity. For White Americans, only gender and psychological distress were associated with utilization.

Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (with Sandefur).

How can we disentangle the impact of poverty from that of family dissolution in the lives of children? McLanahan and Sandefur show that, although growing up poor is very damaging to children, single parenthood is in itself extremely injurious. McLanahan and Sandefur dissect the role of income, parenting styles, and the contribution of non-resident fathers as well as stepfathers to the child's social capital, in an effort to account for the fact that children in one-parent families do less well than children in two-parent families.

Democracy and Redistribution(Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Employing analytical tools borrowed from game theory, Carles Boix offers a theory of political transitions, one in which political regimes ultimately depend on the nature of economic assets, their distribution among individuals, and the balance of power among different social groups. Backed by detailed historical research and extensive statistical analysis from the mid-nineteenth century, the study reveals why democracy emerged in classical Athens. It also covers the early triumph of democracy in nineteenth-century agrarian Norway, Switzerland and northeastern America as well as its failure in countries with a powerful landowning class.

“Economic Impacts of New Unionization on Private Sector Employers: 1984-2001,” by David Lee with John DiNardo, in Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119(4), 1383-1441.

Economic impacts of unionization on employers are difficult to estimate in the absence of large, representative data on establishments with union status information. Estimates are also confounded by selection bias, because unions could organize at highly profitable enterprises that are more likely to grow and pay higher wages. This paper estimates the impact of unionization on business survival, employment, output, productivity, and wages. The evidence suggests that-at least in recent decades-the legal mandate that requires the employer to bargain with a certified union has had little economic impact on employers, because unions have been somewhat unsuccessful at securing significant wage gains.

Kwan, V. S. Y., Bond, M. H., & Singelis, T. S. (1997). Pancultural explanations for life satisfaction: Adding relationship harmony to self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 1038-1051.

As predicted from the dynamics of cultural collectivism, the relative importance of relationship harmony to self-esteem was greater in Hong Kong than in the United States. In addition, independent and interdependent self-construals and the five factors of personality are culture-general determinants of life satisfaction, acting through the mediating variables of self-esteem and relationship harmony. Both self-construals and the 5 factors of personality were shown to influence life satisfaction through the mediating agency of self-esteem and relationship harmony in equivalent ways across these two cultural groups.

Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (with Rumbaut)

Nearly one in five children in the U.S. is born to parents who originate from other countries. Their pathways through the American schooling system and the labor market are critically important to the health of the nation as a whole. This comprehensive study of second generation immigrants shows that some are doing very well, finishing high school, going on to college, and taking their place in the middle class, while others are floundering and ending up in the prison system. The variations have to do with the cultural capital of the immigrant parents, the social context of the communities in which they settled, and the thicket of laws that surround some immigrants with support (Cubans) and subject others to exclusion (Nicaraguans).

The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality
Princeton University Press, 2001.

Do politicians routinely evoke racial stereotypes, fears, and resentments without voters' awareness? This book argues that they do. Tali Mendelberg examines how and when politicians play the race card and then manage to plausibly deny doing so. In the age of equality, politicians cannot prime race with impunity due to a norm of racial equality that prohibits racist speech. Yet incentives to appeal to white voters remain strong. As a result, politicians often resort to more subtle uses of race to win elections. Mendelberg's conclusion is that politicians--including many current state governors--continue to play the race card, using terms like "welfare" and "crime" to manipulate white voters' sentiments without overtly violating egalitarian norms.

Handbook of Labor Economics

This book presents a systematic and empirical analysis of labor economics consistent with a systematic and parsimonious theoretical understanding of the diverse phenomenon that make up the labor market (three volume set).

LeBoeuf, R., & Shafir, E. 2006. The long and short of it: Physical anchoring effects. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19: 393-406.

Attempts to reconstruct the magnitude of recently encountered physical stimuli were influenced by the provision of physical anchors. Whether estimating length, weight, or loudness, those increasing the magnitude of a relatively small (short, light, or quiet) physical anchor produced estimates that were reliably lower than did those decreasing the magnitude of a relatively large (long, heavy, or loud) anchor. Estimates produced without an anchor were also low, suggesting that when people physically adjust upwards from a self-selected starting point, no anchor may, in fact, act as a very low anchor.

Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism (Basic Books, April 2007).

Liberalism in America is under siege. Conservatives treat it as an epithet and some progressives spurn it. But according to Paul Starr, liberalism is a sturdy public philosophy, deeply rooted in our traditions, capable of making America and the world more free and secure. This book tracks the development of liberalism as the world's dominant political tradition and argues for its continued ascendancy as the best guarantor of individual rights and prosperity on the global stage. At a time when conservative policies are weakening America’s long-term fiscal, economic, and international strength as well as its liberties, Freedom’s Power attempts to show why liberalism works—and how it can work for America again.

Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice

Blending statistical analyses, campaign anecdotes, and political insight, Larry Bartels explores one of America's most controversial political institutions: the nomination process. He focuses on the nature and impact of "momentum,” describing the complex interconnections among primary election results, expectations, and subsequent primary results that have made it possible for candidates like Jimmy Carter, George Bush, and Gary Hart to emerge from relative obscurity into political prominence in recent nominating campaigns. Bartels examines the likely consequences of some proposed alternatives to the current nominating process, including a regional primary system and a one-day national primary.

Kuziemko, I. and E. Werker, “How Much is a Seat on the Security Council Worth? Foreign Aid and Bribery at the United Nations,” Journal of Political Economy 114, no. 5 (October 2006): 905-930.

Ten of the fifteen seats on the U.N. Security Council are held by rotating members serving two-year terms. The authors find that a country’s U.S. aid increases by 59 percent and its U.N. aid by 8 percent when it rotates onto the council. This effect increases during years in which key diplomatic events take place (when members’ votes should be especially valuable) and the timing of the effect closely tracks a country’s election to, and exit from, the council. Finally, the U.N. results appear to be driven by UNICEF, an organization over which the United States has historically exerted great control.

Gender and Computers: Understanding the digital divide

Gender and Computers presents evidence that shows that girls and young women are being left behind on the road to information technology. This book not only documents the digital divide but also provides guideposts to overcoming it. Social psychological theories and data are brought to bear on understanding the societal and environmental roots of the divide. Remedies ranging from family dynamics to teacher-student interactions to the controversial question of the gender organization of schools and school systems are proposed.

The Twenty-First Century Firm: Changing Economic Organization in International Perspective (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Leading experts in sociology, law, economics, and management studies explain the varying ways in which contemporary businesses are transforming themselves to respond to globalization, new technologies, workforce transformation, and legal change. The focal point of their essays is an emerging network form of organization, bring order to the chaotic tumble of diagnoses, labels, and descriptions used to make sense of the rapidly changing world of the firm.

The European Union Decides

European legislation affects countless aspects of daily life in modern Europe but just how does the European Union make such significant legislative decisions? How important are the formal decision-making procedures in defining decision outcomes and how important is the bargaining that takes place among the actors involved? This volume focuses on the practice of day-to-day decision-making in Brussels and the interactions that take place among the Member States in the Council and among the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament. A unique data set of actual Commission proposals are examined against which the authors develop, apply and test a range of explanatory models of decision-making.

Regulating Managed Care

What should be government's role in a market-oriented health care system? What's the appropriate amount of regulation? Who should regulate-states, federal government, or market forces? What role do the courts play in this regulation? Are there existing models that might guide leaders in designing an effective regulatory structure? Welcome to the great managed care debate. In Regulating Managed Care, twenty-six of the nation's leading health policy experts give health care administrators, clinicians, and policy makers insight into the issues behind this critical exchange and provide leaders with a road map to assess the policy options available to protect the quality of our health care delivery system.

Engell, A. D., Haxby, J. V., & Todorov, A. (2007). “Implicit trustworthiness decisions: Automatic coding of face properties in human amygdala.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 1508-1519.

Deciding whether an unfamiliar person is trustworthy is one of the most important decisions in social environments. In this study, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that the amygdala is involved in implicit evaluations of trustworthiness of faces, consistent with prior findings. Individual judgments accounted for little residual variance in the amygdala after controlling for the shared variance with consensus ratings. Findings suggest that the amygdala automatically categorizes faces according to face properties commonly perceived to signal untrustworthiness.

Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State Latin America. Penn State University Press.

Our understanding of the rise of the nation-state is based heavily on the Western European experience of war. Blood and Debt shifts the lens to Latin America, with additional comparisons with regions as varied as the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa. Rather than building nation-states and fostering democratic citizenship, as has often been the consequence of war in the west, Centeno argues that in Latin America it destroyed institutions, confirmed internal divisions, and killed many without purpose or glory.

Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World

Democracy-building efforts from the early 1990s on have funneled billions of dollars into nongovernmental organizations across the developing world. This book poses the question: is it possible that many such "civil society" initiatives are fatally flawed? Focusing on the Palestinian West Bank and the Arab world, Barriers to Democracy challenges the core tenet of civil society initiatives: namely, that public participation in private associations necessarily yields the sort of civic engagement that, in turn, sustains effective democratic institutions. The author investigates the role of civic associations in promoting democratic attitudes and behavioral patterns in contexts that are less than democratic.

Uncertainty in Economics: Readings and Exercises (book, ed. With Diamond and Shell)

The volume brings together classic and modern thinking in the economics of uncertainty as well as material on search theory. Articles, introduced with brief commentaries, are divided into three broad sections: theory of choice under uncertainty, general equilibrium models of financial institutions, and models of the effects of uncertainty on market institutions.

Pronin, E., Berger, J., & Molouki, S. (2007). "Alone in a crowd of sheep: Asymmetric perceptions of conformity and their roots in an introspection illusion". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 585-595.

Five studies show that people see others as more conforming than themselves. This asymmetry is documented in domains ranging from consumer purchases to political views. Participants claimed to be less susceptible than their average peers to broad descriptions of social influences, and they also claimed to be less susceptible than specific peers to specific instances of conformity. This asymmetry is not simply the result of social desirability, but it is also rooted in people's attention to introspective vs. behavioral information when making conformity assessments. Implications for self—other asymmetries, implicit social influence, and interpersonal conflict are also discussed.

Harris, Angel L., and Keith Robinson. (2007). "Schooling Behaviors or Prior Skills?: A Cautionary Tale of Omitted Variable Bias within the Oppositional Culture Theory" Sociology of Education; Apr2007, Vol. 80 Issue 2, p139-157, 19p

Prior research on oppositional culture theory focuses on beliefs about the opportunity structure, or the "acting white" hypothesis, as an explanation for racial differences in school achievement. However, little attention has been given to the mechanism by which these beliefs affect achievement: schooling behaviors. This article focuses on the role that prior skills play in shaping students schooling behaviors and hence on their achievement levels, using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey.

Congress, the Press, and Political Accountability

How do local media outlets cover members of the United States Congress? Do local newspapers provide the information citizens need in order to hold representatives accountable for their actions in office? In contrast with previous studies, which largely focused on the campaign period, Doug Arnold tests various hypotheses about the causes and consequences of media coverage by exploring coverage during an entire congressional session. The variation in coverage is enormous and only the most competitive races, and those commanding huge sums of money, receive extensive coverage.

Jesse Rothstein, "Good Principals or Good Peers? Parental Valuations of School Characteristics, Tiebout Equilibrium, and the Incentive Effects of Competition among Jursidictions". American Economic Review, vol 96 (4), 2006 Pp. 1333-1350.

School choice policies may improve productivity if parents choose well-run schools, but not if parents primarily choose schools for their peer groups. Theoretically, high income families cluster near preferred schools in housing market equilibrium; these need only be effective schools if effectiveness is highly valued. If it is, equilibrium 'effectiveness sorting' will be more complete in markets offering more residential choice. Although effectiveness is unobserved to the econometrician, I discuss observable implications of effectiveness sorting. I find no evidence of a choice effect on sorting, indicating a small role for effectiveness in preferences and suggesting caution about choice's productivity implications.

Oppenheimer, D.M. (2003). "Not so Fast! (and not so Frugal!): Rethinking the Recognition Heuristic". Cognition, 90, B1-B9.

The ‘fast and frugal’ approach to reasoning claims that individuals use non-compensatory strategies in judgment – the idea that only one cue is taken into account in reasoning. The simplest and most important of these heuristics postulates that judgment sometimes relies solely on recognition. However, the studies that have investigated usage of the recognition heuristic have confounded recognition with other cues that could also lead to similar judgments. Two studies provide evidence that judgments do not conform to the recognition heuristic when these confounds are accounted for.

Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder, 2003, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and the problem of drinking during pregnancy are examined simultaneously to illuminate the ways in which social problems are individualized, and the intertwining of health and morality that characterizes American society. Armstrong argues that medical beliefs about drinking during pregnancy ignore the poverty, chaos, and insufficiency of some women's lives that may play a bigger role than alcohol in producing adverse outcomes in babies and children.

Racism, Xenophobia and Distribution

From the Republican Party's "Southern Strategy" in the U.S. to the rise of Le Pen's National Front in France, conservative politicians in the last thirty years have capitalized on voters' resentment of ethnic minorities to win votes and undermine government aid to the poor. In this book, the authors construct a theoretical model to calculate the effect of voters' attitudes about race and immigration on political parties' stances on income distribution. They find that the Right is able to push fiscal policies that hurt working and middle class citizens by attracting voters who may be liberal on economic issues but who hold conservative views on race or immigration.

The Fiscal Behavior of State and Local Governments

How are state and local spending and taxing decisions influenced by the economic environment in which they operate? Rosen investigates the effect of tax structure on the growth of expenditure, the influence of the level of expenditure of neighboring governments, and the impact of the federal income tax on the fiscal structure of state and local governments. Relying on the tools of modern dynamic analysis to shed new light on state and local behavior in an intertemporal setting, Rosen uses both panel and aggregate data. In addition, he discusses the problems involved in characterizing state tax structure. Finally, he explores a number of methodological issues relating to the theory and econometrics of tax analysis.

Social Beings: A core motives approach to social psychology

Belonging, Understanding, Controlling, Enhancing Self, and Trusting – these are the five core social motives that form the framework for the study of personality and social psychology. This book integrates material which helps reveal the field's relevance to human problems and incorporates motivation, social evolution, and culture, not as after-thoughts, but as intrinsic features of the text.

American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to be a Better Nation Fall Short
Princeton University Press

American narratives about individualism, immigration, success, religion, and ethnicity come to life through the eyes of recent immigrants. Wuthnow reveals how Americans have traditionally relied on these narratives to address what it means to be strong, morally responsible individuals and to explain why some people are more successful than others. American Mythos documents the disconnect between the stories we tell and the reality we face by examining how cultural narratives may not, and often do not, reflect the reality of today's society.

Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation in Brazil and South Africa
Cambridge University Press 2003.

The politics of taxation emerges here as a way of understanding the development of governments. Brazil and South Africa are upper-middle-income countries, highly unequal--both in terms of income and racial status. Lieberman argues that different constitutional approaches to race (whether or not to grant equal citizenship to blacks) and federalism (whether to have it or not) shaped the organization of politics in the two countries, leading to the development of very different tax systems.

Cecilia Rouse, "Do Accountability and Voucher Threats Improve Low-Performing Schools?" (with David Figlio), Journal of Public Economics, 90, 2006, 239-255.

This paper considers the effects of the threat of vouchers and stigma in Florida on the performance of “low-performing” schools. Estimates of the change in raw test scores from the first year of the reform are consistent with the early results which claimed large improvements associated with the threat of vouchers. They report that many of the estimated effects may be due to other factors. Relative gains in reading are largely explained by changing student characteristics and the gains in math—though larger—appear limited to the high-stakes grade. The authors find some evidence that these improvements were due more to the stigma of receiving the low grade rather than the threat of vouchers.

The International Migration of the Highly Skilled

Although only the federal government is empowered to set immigration policy, the consequences are felt in states where international migrants are concentrated--pointing to the need to examine the implications of U.S. immigration at the subnational level. This book focuses on New Jersey as a high-immigration state whose immigrant population matches the race and ethnic composition of the U.S. population as a whole more closely than that of any other state, and whose immigration impacts have been relatively favorable. Its experience thus provides evidence of what it takes for a state to manage a relatively smooth transition into the economic, social, and political mainstream. Topics include wage and employment impacts, state and local fiscal impacts, public opinion toward immigrants, fertility, birth outcomes, education, political behaviors, homeownership, and undocumented immigration.

Jessica Trounstine, “Dominant Regimes and the Demise of Urban Democracy.” The Journal of Politics, Volume 68, Number 4 (November 2006), pp. 879-893

Elections can offer citizens representative government, but only when certain conditions are met. I provide evidence that when elections become uncompetitive for long periods of time and political coalitions establish dominant regimes, the distribution of government benefits change. Examining twentieth-century political patterns in nine of the United States' largest cities, I find that dominant regimes establish electoral control, then target core supporters and powerful interests at the expense of the larger community.

The Quiet Revolution Yale University Press

Although little noticed, the face of central banking has changed significantly over the past ten to fifteen years, says the author of this book. Alan S. Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve System and member of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, shows that the changes, though quiet, have been sufficiently profound to constitute a revolution in central banking. The author examines the origins of these changes and their pros and cons.

Hispanics and the Future of America. Tienda, Marta and Faith Mitchell (eds.) 2006. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Political Game Theory Cambridge University Press (with Adam Meirowitz).

Political Game Theory is a self-contained introduction to game theory and its applications to political science. The book presents choice theory, social choice theory, static and dynamic games of complete information, static and dynamic games of incomplete information, repeated games, bargaining theory, mechanism design and a mathematical appendix covering, logic, real analysis, calculus and probability theory. This book is tailored to students without extensive backgrounds in mathematics and traditional economics. There are also many special sections that present technical material that will appeal to more advanced students. A large number of exercises are provided to practice the skills and techniques discussed.

Statistics and Econometrics (with Levine and Zimmerman)

Every major econometric method is illustrated, using real life examples applied to real data. Explores subjects such as sample design, which are critical to practical application econometrics. Other topics include: Basic Probability, Random Variables and Probability Distributions, Multivariate Distributions, Inference in Simple Linear Regression, Multiple Regression, Dummy Dependent Variable, Analysis of Time Series Data, and Panel Data Models.

No Shame in My Game

Newman explodes the myth of America's unmotivated poor through this ethnographic study of workers at “Burger Barn,” inner city African Americans and Latinos who take minimum wage jobs and try to provide for themselves and their families on inadequate earnings. The dignity of work – even at low prestige and often oppressive jobs – emerges from an embrace of mainstream (rather than sub cultural) values. But values alone are not enough since the absence of health insurance, the high costs of continuing education, and uneven access to childcare undercut even the most determined efforts of working poor.

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Contrary to popular and academic wisdom, segregation is still with us. One-third of all American blacks live in one of just 16 urban areas, in neighborhoods so racially segregated they have almost no chance at interracial contact. The authors argue that segregation--and disassocation from not only other cultures, but other ways of life--is at the root of many problems facing African-Americans today.

The Making of Economic Policy: A Transaction Cost Politics Perspective

Most countries' trade policies are so blatantly contrary to all the prescriptions of the economist that there is no way to understand this discrepancy except by delving into the politics. This book presents an improved understanding of the politics of economic policymaking from a transaction cost perspective. The costs of planning, implementing, and monitoring an exchange have proved critical to explaining many phenomena in industrial organization. The author organizes a burgeoning body of research in political economy in this framework. Using U.S. fiscal policy and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as two examples that illustrate the framework, the volume shows how policy often deviates from the economist's ideal of efficiency. The approach reveals, however, that some seemingly inefficient practices are quite credible attempts to cope with transaction costs such as opportunism and asymmetric information.

Out of the Shadows: Political Action and the Informal Economy in Latin America
(co-ed. with Jon Shefner, University of Tennessee), Penn State University Press (2005).

Out of the Shadows brings leading scholars of the informal economy and informal politics together to address how globalization has influenced local efforts to resolve political and economic needs—and how these seemingly separate issues are indeed deeply related. Contributors are Javier Auyero, Miguel Angel Centeno, Sylvia Chant, Robert Gay, Mercedes González de la Rocha, José Itzigsohn, Alejandro Portes, and Juan Manuel Ramírez Sáiz.

Slim’s Table (University of Chicago Press, 1992

This book deals with the lives of older working-class African American men living in the South Side ghettos of Chicago. Author Mitchell Duneier spent four years getting to know a group of older working class African American men living on Chicago’s South Side at Valois, the "see your food" Cafeteria in Hyde Park. Departing sharply from stereotypes of disengagement, Duneier’s cafeteria buddies are employed, mainly single men living in rooms or small apartments, who exhibit tolerance and pride and demonstrate respect and civility toward others.

Cross-Level Inference (co-author with Shively)

Cross-level inference makes unusually strong demands on substantive knowledge, so that no one method will fit all situations. Criticizing Goodman's model and recent attempts to replace it, the authors argue for a range of alternate techniques, including extensions of cross-tabular, regression analysis, and unobservable variable estimators. This volume also explains why older methods like ecological regression often fail, and it gives a comprehensive treatment of some of the more promising new techniques for cross-level inference.

Harris, Angel L. (2006) "I (Don't) Hate School: Revisiting Oppositional Culture Theory of Blacks' Resistance to Schooling." Social Forces; 85: 797-834.

Using data from the Maryland Adolescence Development In Context Study (MADICS), I test Ogbu’s contention that blacks resist school more than whites, and that this difference grows with age. Five major tenets of his theory were not supported, findings which challenge the existence of a pervasive oppositional culture among black Americans. Second, maturation after grade 7 had minimal impact on white-black differences on the outcomes. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for sociological theory and educational policy.

The Future of Children

Congress and the Bureaucracy: A Theory of Influence

How much influence do congressmen and bureaucrats have over each other's policy decisions? Doug Arnold focuses on the efforts of congressmen to influence bureaucrats' decisions concerning the geographic allocation of federal expenditures. Arnold argues that bureaucrats seeking support enter a marriage of convenience, by tailoring their allocation strategies to fit each program's situation in Congress.

The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (Basic Books, 2004).

Paul Starr chronicles the history of the media in America, contrasting the regulatory role of government with new issues of monopoly and threats to the guaranteed rights of free expression and individual privacy. At the same time, he demonstrates how complicated that role became when it had to confront motion pictures and broadcasting in the period when the nation experienced increased immigration, urbanization and other major cultural shifts. Counter forces in favor of moral regulation began to petition the government to use its power to restrain mass media, the institutional genesis for today’s culture wars.

“Union Success in Representation Elections: Why Does Unit Size Matter?” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, January, 2001.

Four important trends emerge from this study of representation elections supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over the period 1952-98: (1) election activity fell sharply and discontinuously beginning in the mid-1970s, after increasing for two decades; (2) unions' election win rate declined less sharply, though continuously, over the entire period; (3) a 'size gap' characterized unions' win rate throughout the period, with a lower win rate in large units than in small ones; and (4) the size gap widened substantially between 1958 and 1998. A simple optimizing model of the union decision to hold a representation election can explain the first three facts. Two possible interpretations for the fourth fact include differing behavior by employers in different size classes and purely statistical explanations. Results of empirical tests using NLRB election data for 1952-98 suggest that those two explanations together can largely account for the observed patterns.

America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity
Princeton University Press

Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and adherents of other non-Western religions have become a significant presence in the United States in recent years. Yet many Americans continue to regard the United States as a Christian society. How are we adapting to the new diversity? Do we casually announce that we "respect" the faiths of non-Christians without understanding much about those faiths? Are we willing to do the hard work required to achieve genuine religious pluralism? Robert Wuthnow tackles these and other difficult questions surrounding religious diversity.