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P. Reese
Political scientist Benjamin Page,
Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision
Making, is working on a new project
on inequality and acquiescence with
Lawrence Jacobs of the University of
Minnesota. They are currently conducting
a national survey to explore various
hypotheses about U.S. citizens’ reactions
to economic inequality. In particular they
are looking at whether citizens perceive
its growth and extent, whether they want
to reduce inequality or think incentives
are necessary to do so, whether they favor
or oppose various government policies
with redistributive impact as in Social
Security, national health insurance,
education, and progressive taxes. The two
researchers plan to test many political
science theories, including some going
back to Louis Hartz, about American
exceptionalism. They anticipate that
some of these theories, which have
become ensconced as conventional
wisdom, will turn out to be mistaken.
Social Security
Social policy professor Fay Lomax Cook
worked with IPR graduate research
assistant Amy DeSantis on a project
called “How George W. Bush’s Grand
Plans for Social Security Failed: Did
Public Opinion, Organized Interests,
and Policy Feedback Matter?” Following
a proposal in his 2005 State of the Union
Address to partially privatize Social
Security, Bush set out on a 60-day, 60-
city tour to promote it. By late fall 2005,
however, various commentators on the
Left and the Right had pronounced
his proposal dead. Cook and DeSantis
are examining how the proposal’s fate
played out through public opinion
(polls), interest groups (media coverage),
and recommendations by policy elites
(congressional testimony). Their analysis
suggests that a combination of these
factors acted to push Bush’s Social
Security proposal off the agenda.
Political scientist Andrew Roberts is also
looking at Social Security through the
lens of pension privatization around the
world. A growing number of countries
are trying to escape the financial pressures
of aging populations by either fully or
partially privatizing their
pension systems. This
project explores the politics
behind these switches,
investigating why and
when privatization takes
place. This project specifies
a number of conditions
in which privatization
becomes politically
palatable—specifically,
a loss of trust in the
public system and relative
confidence in financial
markets. He finds support
for these mechanisms in
public opinion, the policy
process in new democracies, and the
attempted privatization of Social Security
in the United States.
Politics and Political Parties
Why did neoliberal policies of tax cuts,
reduced social spending, deregulation,
and privatization gain prominence in the
United States under Ronald Reagan and
in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, but
not in similarly industrialized Western
countries such as France or Germany?
In The Politics of Free Markets: The
Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies
in Britain, France, Germany, and the
United States (University of Chicago
Press), sociologist Monica Prasad
undertakes a comparative-historical
analysis of the development of neoliberal
policies in these four countries. She argues
that neoliberalism was made possible in
the United States and Britain not because
the Left in these countries was too weak,
but because it was, in some respects, too
strong.
Sean Gailmard, Wesley Skogan,
and Benjamin Page share their thoughts
following an IPR colloquium.
www.northwestern.edu/ipr 27