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Democratic Opposition to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938: Reply to Seltzer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2004

ROBERT K. FLECK
ROBERT K. FLECK
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717. E-mail: [email protected].
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Extract

Andrew J. Seltzer raises an interesting question: How large was the net effect of southern political institutions on congressional support for the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)? Although Seltzer claims to use my econometric results to show that those institutions had little effect, his interpretation of my results depends entirely on two assumptions that I did not make and that he does not justify. The first assumption is that two variables—the Turnout-Manufacturing Correlation and Turnout—somehow “defined the southern political system.” The second is that southern political institutions caused higher values of Turnout-Manufacturing Correlation. Seltzer's assumptions are theoretically baseless and empirically indefensible, and they lead him to the wrong conclusion. I will explain why.

Type
NOTES AND DISCUSSION
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 231 - 235
Copyright
© 2004 The Economic History Association

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References

Fleck Robert K. 2002 “Democratic Opposition to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.” This JOURNAL 62, no. 1 25– 54.Google Scholar
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Poole Keith T., and Howard Rosenthal. 1991 “The Spatial Mapping of Minimum Wage Legislation.” In Politics and Economics in the 1980s, edited by Alberto Alesina and Geoffrey Carliner, 215–46. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Poole Keith T., and Howard Rosenthal. 1997 Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting. New York: Oxford University Press
Seltzer Andrew J. 1995 “The Political Economy of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.” Journal of Political Economy 103, no. 6 1302–42.Google Scholar
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