Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T01:23:00.894Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Issue of Our Time: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2004

Linda Faye Williams
Linda Faye Williams
Affiliation:
Linda Faye Williams is professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park ([email protected])
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Does deepening economic inequality in the United States threaten our democracy? This is the fundamental question posed by the APSA task force report, and the answer is a resounding Yes. The critical synthesis of the literature on participation, governance, and policy is intellectually provocative, and the forceful presentation of recent trends in political inequality that support this conclusion underscores important practical implications for the nation's political economy.Linda Faye Williams' book The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America won the 2004 W. E. B. DuBois award for best book of the year (National Conference of Black Political Scientists); the Best Book of 2004 on Public Policy (APSA's Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics); and the 2004 Michael Harrington Award (APSA's Caucus for a New Political Science).

Type
APSA TASK FORCE REPORT AND COMMENTARIES
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 4 , December 2004 , pp. 683 - 689
Copyright
© 2004 American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

American democracy in an age of rising inequality. 2004. Report of the American Political Science Association Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy. Perspectives on Politics 2 (4): 651–66.Google Scholar
Brown, Michael K., Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz, and David Wellman. 2003. Whitewashing race: The myth of a colorblind society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Burns, Nancy, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Sidney Verba. 2001. The private roots of public action: Gender, equality, and political participation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Fung, Archon, and Erik Olin Wright, eds. 2003. Deepening democracy: Institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance. London: Verso.
Glass Ceiling Commission, U.S. Department of Labor. 1995. Good for business: Making full use of the nation's human capital—The environmental scan. Fact-Finding Report of the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. http://www.dol.gov/asp/programs/history/reich/reports/ceiling.pdf.
Hochschild, Jennifer. 1995. Facing up to the American dream: Race, class and the soul of the nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hughes, Michael, and Steven A. Tuch. 2000. How beliefs about poverty influence racial policy attitudes: A study of whites, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians in the United States. In Racialized politics: The debate about racism in America, ed. David O. Sears, Jim Sidanius, and Lawrence Bobo, 165–90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Iceland, John, Daniel H. Weinberg, and Erika Steinmetz. 2002. Racial and ethnic residential segregation in the United States: 1980–2000. U.S. Census Bureau, Series CENSR-3, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Jargowsky, Paul. 2003. Stunning progress, hidden problems: The dramatic decline of concentrated poverty in the 1990s. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Kain, John. 2004. A pioneer's perspective on the spatial mismatch literature. Urban Studies 41 (1): 7–32.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Richard L. 2003. Economic inequality and the role of law. Review of Kevin Phillips, Wealth and democracy: A political history of the American rich. Michigan Law Review 101 (6): 1987–2006.Google Scholar
Leach, Colin Wayne. 2002. Democracy's dilemma: Explaining racial inequality in egalitarian societies. Sociological Forum 17 (4): 681–96.Google Scholar
Logan, John. 2002. Separate and unequal: The neighborhood gap for blacks and Hispanics in metropolitan America. Albany: Lewis Mumford Center.
McKinnon, Jesse. 2003. The Black population in the United States: March 2002. Washington, DC: United States Census Bureau.
Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American dilemma: The Negro problem and modern democracy. New York: Harper and Brothers.
O'Connor, Alice, Chris Tilly, and Lawrence D. Bobo, eds. 2001. Urban inequality: Evidence from four cities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Oliver, J. Eric. 1999. The effects of metropolitan economic segregation on local civic participation. American Journal of Political Science 43 (1): 186–212.Google Scholar
Orfield, Myron. 2002. American metropolitics: The new suburban reality. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Pager, Devah. 2003. The mark of a criminal record. American Journal of Sociology 108 (5): 937–75.Google Scholar
Phillips, Kevin. 2002. Wealth and democracy: A political history of the American rich. New York: Broadway Books.
Raphael, Steven, and Michael A. Stoll. 2002. Modest progress: The narrowing spatial mismatch between blacks and jobs in the 1990s. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Squires, Gregory D. 2002. Organize! The limits of public awareness in ensuring fair housing. Housing Policy Debate 13 (3): 505–13.Google Scholar
Squires, Gregory D. 2004. Privileged places: Race, uneven development and the geography of opportunity in urban America. Unpublished paper.
Swanstrom, Todd, Peter Dreier, and John Mollenkopf. 2002. Economic inequality and public policy: The power of place. City and Community 1 (4): 349–72.Google Scholar
Thernstrom, Stephan, and Abigail Thernstrom. 1997. America in black and white: One nation, indivisible. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Tilly, Charles. 2003. Inequality, democratization, and de-democratization. Sociological Theory 21 (1): 37–43.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 2001. Household net worth and asset ownership: 1995. http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p70-71.pdf.
U.S. Bureau of the Census 2003a. Historical poverty tables. Table 4, Poverty status of families, by type of family, presence of related children, race, and Hispanic origin: 1959 to 2002. http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/histpov/hstpov4.html.
U.S. Bureau of the Census 2003b. Net worth and asset ownership of households: 1998 and 2000. http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p70-88.pdf.
U.S. Bureau of the Census 2004. Historical income tables: People. Table P-2, Race and Hispanic origin of people by median income and sex: 1947 to 2001. http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/p02.html.
U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2003. Current Population Survey, Historical Data for the “A” Tables of the Employment Situation Release. Table A-2, Employment status of the civilian population by race, sex, and age. http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab2.htm.
Williams, Linda Faye. 2003. The constraint of race: Legacies of white skin privilege in America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.