Chapter 6 shifts the focus from explaining why aid officials differ in their aid delivery decisions across different political economies to investigating the extent to which these preferences may be driven by what donor publics want aid officials to do.On the basis of survey experimental evidence collected in Germany and the United States, I show that differences in aid delivery decisions between US and German aid officials are not consistent with differences between how the two donor publics think about foreign aid delivery.

Chapter 1 presents the motivation of the study, including empirical and theoretical puzzles about how foreign aid delivery varies markedly across donors and time. The chapter then reviews the relevant foreign aid literature. It outlines the approach to studying foreign aid delivery and briefly summarizes the theoretical argument as well as the empirical strategy used to test the theory. It describes the plan of the book.

Chapter 2 develops the principal claim of the book, which posits that foreign aid delivery is endogenous to national structures. The chapter begins with a brief historical account of how patterns of foreign aid delivery have evolved since the end of World War II. It then fleshes out three theoretical and empirically informed observations about aid decision-making: (1) that aid officials, as key decision-makers, seek to minimize risk in aid delivery, that (2) their response to risk is conditional on the rules and practices that make up the national aid organizations in which they operate, and (3) that these rules and practices have ideological origins that inform us about the substance of aid delivery: why it is that aid officials choose to bypass or engage with the recipient government.

In the winter of 2019, four surprising pieces of news emerged from New York City in quick succession. First, in mid-January, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new program that would provide free healthcare to undocumented immigrants and other uninsured New Yorkers, at an expected cost of $100 million (Goodman 2019b). Across the river in Queens a month later, local activists protested and ultimately defeated the arrival of the Amazon HQ2 corporate campus, which would have employed tens of thousands and generated millions in revenues for city and state coffers (Goodman 2019a). Each of these outcomes runs contrary to long-held beliefs about how we expect American cities to govern themselves in an era of inequality, mobile wealth, and porous municipal borders: public and private elites partner to court outside investment as a top priority, override grassroots protests, and avoid redistributive programs that might push the wealthy out and draw the poor in.

The study of American political economy requires focus on a very different set of actors than does the conventional study of American politics as practiced by contemporary scholars. In particular, the core questions surrounding the American political economy call for a deep understanding of the preferences, power, and tactics of organized actors – and the ways that those organized actors both influence, and are influenced by, economic and political institutions. And within the universe of US organized interests, producer and class interests are especially relevant, encompassing labor, business, and increasingly, wealthy Americans that are collectively constitutive of the political economy. Such a political economy perspective contrasts with other approaches that either do not center economic interests or treat such interests as relatively interchangeable with one another.

For too long, students of the political economy of corporate governance have been enthralled by the language of ownership and control. This language stems from Berle and Means (1932), who observed that trust-busting policies and the diversification of robber-baron fortunes had dispersed stock ownership in the United States, while concentrating corporate control in the hands of a small class of managers.1 Jensen and Meckling’s (1976) agency theory, while reiterating the notions of shareholder dispersion and weakness, conceptualized shareholders as principals – the only actors with a strong material interest in the economic performance of the corporation. Offering a simple solution to what Berle and Means had considered a complex political problem, agency theory reduced corporate governance to the problem of protecting outside minority shareholders against “expropriation” by insiders, namely corporate managers and workers (La Porta et al. 2000: 4).

Since the 1980s, income concentration has increased dramatically, with the top 1 percent increasing their share from 10.7 percent in 1980 to 20.2 percent in 2014 (an 89 percent increase), and the top 0.01 percent income share increasing even more – by approximately 230 percent.1 Before the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars seeking to explain rising inequality emphasized structural economic change and demographics, focusing on factors such as deindustrialization, globalization, aging, union decline, and skill-biased technological change (Alderson and Nielsen 2002; Berman et al. 1998; Bound and Johnson 1992; Danziger and Gottschalk 1995; Goldin and Katz 2008).

The themes animating this volume are on stark display at the local level in American politics. A great deal of scholarship focused on who governs cities explores how authority is exercised to allocate resources, and how markets, economic power, politics, and policy interrelate (Dahl 1961). The evidence suggests that high-resource actors utilize local political institutions to maintain their economic and social dominance.

In the spring of 2020, the world was faced with a new, highly contagious and deadly disease, and at the time of writing, it is not clear what the long-term consequences of the Coronavirus pandemic will be. Epidemiological, medical and public health expertise rapidly became salient due to the potential life-and-death consequences of scientific technology and expertise. From its outset, the importance of knowledge and scientific expertise in government responses and national well-being provided a stark example of a more general underlying trend in the political economies of advanced industrialized capitalist democracies. Though without the same universal life-and-death stakes, changing technologies of production have been increasing the importance of knowledge as an input to economic progress and prosperity for the past forty years.