Capitalism and Democracy

Former Roosevelt Institute senior research Sunny Malhotra and BESI Capitalism and Democracy affiliate Steve Vogel and analyze the American political economy past and present through the lens of predistribution.

In a November 2025 article for the journal Politics & Society, UC Berkeley Political Economy director and BESI steering committee member Steve Vogel argues that that economists should bring power into the heart of their analysis of wage formation.

In a July 2025 article for the journal Perspectives on Politics, political science Ph.D. student and BESI graduate student researcher Sarang Shah and Tufts political science professor Eitan Hersh report on the results of a survey of business leaders and the mass public. They find that while the public cares very little about corporate leader engagement, business leaders would like to see active engagement on issues from their firms, albeit from behind the scenes.

Sarang Shah, a Ph.D. candidate in political science and a Designated Emphasis in Political Economy student, and his co-author, Eitan Hersh, recently conducted a survey of American firm leaders’ political alignment. The two present their results in a May 2025 article in the British Journal of Political Science.

In this essay for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, BESI director Paul Pierson and his frequent collaborator, Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, describe the shifting coalitional bases of America’s two major parties and how relate to the political-economic geography of the U.S.

BESI Climate affiliated faculty member Ryan Brutger and Designated Emphasis in Political Economy student Daniel Lobo co-authored this article for the American Political Science Review, which reviews their survey of white and Black Americans on their attitudes toward trade.

In a February 2025 article for The Journal of Law and Economics, Berkeley Law assistant professor and BESI faculty affiliate David Hausman examines the effects of the removal of an option to recommend release from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s risk assessment tool on actual release decisions.

In an October 29, 2024, article for American Political Science Review, BESI participating faculty member Hunter E. Rendleman and her co-author Jesse Yoder study how public policies influence citizens’ political attitudes and behavior using the rollout of state-level earned income tax credit (EITC) programs. The staggered roll-out provides opportunity to estimate the causal effect of a public policy program on elections, voter behavior, and attitudes about the government.

In their May 2025 article for American Political Science Review, BESI participating faculty member Sarah Anzia and her co-author Jessica Trounstine analyze data from more than 1,000 municipal governments to determine the role city employees played in the transition from patronage-based systems to civil service in local government.

In an article for the journal Economy and Society, BESI participating faculty member Armanda Lara-Millán and Berkeley Sociology Ph.D. candidate Emily H. Ruppel show how the efficacy institutions set up in the 1980s to control healthcare spending was abated through temporary, annual legislation known as “doc fixes.”

In a December 2023 article for the journal Perspectives on Politics, BESI director Paul Pierson and his co-authors argue that the Democratic Party has assembled its “U-shaped” coalition by formulating an increasingly bold economic program — not by appealing to culture and identity, as is often suggested.

In an essay for the journal Politics & Society, BESI participating faculty and steering committee member Steve Vogel conceptualizes market governance as a balance of power and discusses the implications for current debates over antitrust policy.