Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States
Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States
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DOI：
10.1177/0032329210365042
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发表时间：
2010-06-01
影响因子：
2.4
通讯作者：
Pierson, Paul
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hacker, Jacob S.;Pierson, Paul
在过去一代人的时间里，美国的不平等程度急剧上升，这引起了经济学家相当大的关注，但令人惊讶的是，研究美国政治的学生却很少关注这个问题。这种情况已经开始改变：近年来，一批数量不多、但在不断增加的政治学研究对强调经济变革的非政治性过程的标准经济学解释提出了挑战。然而，尽管这一新的学术研究非常复杂，但它也未能对不平等加剧的政治根源和影响提供令人信服的解释。特别是，这些研究与占主导地位的经济学描述有三个共同的弱点：(1)它们淡化了美国不平等的显著特征--即收入增长极端集中在经济阶梯的顶端；(2)它们忽略了政府政策在创造这种“赢家通吃”模式中的深刻作用；(3)它们几乎没有关注或重视这些政策变化背后的美国政治组织格局的戏剧性长期变化。这些弱点是相互关联的，最终源于一种政治观，这种政治观强调“中间选民”在选举政治中的影响力(或缺乏影响力)，而不是有组织的利益集团在决策过程中的影响。以组织和政策变化为中心的观点更能解释为什么美国的政治经济已经明显变成赢家通吃的原因。这种观点指出了那些提升了最高层人士经济地位的重大政策转变，然后将这些转变与足智多谋的私人利益集团的具体组织努力联系起来。
The dramatic rise in inequality in the United States over the past generation has occasioned considerable attention from economists, but strikingly little from students of American politics. This has started to change: in recent years, a small but growing body of political science research on rising inequality has challenged standard economic accounts that emphasize apolitical processes of economic change. For all the sophistication of this new scholarship, however, it too fails to provide a compelling account of the political sources and effects of rising inequality. In particular, these studies share with dominant economic accounts three weaknesses: (1) they downplay the distinctive feature of American inequality-namely, the extreme concentration of income gains at the top of the economic ladder; (2) they miss the profound role of government policy in creating this "winner-take-all" pattern; and (3) they give little attention or weight to the dramatic long-term transformation of the organizational landscape of American politics that lies behind these changes in policy. These weaknesses are interrelated, stemming ultimately from a conception of politics that emphasizes the sway (or lack thereof) of the "median voter" in electoral politics, rather than the influence of organized interests in the process of policy making. A perspective centered on organizational and policy change-one that identifies the major policy shifts that have bolstered the economic standing of those at the top and then links those shifts to concrete organizational efforts by resourceful private interests-fares much better at explaining why the American political economy has become distinctively winner-take-all.