Tag Archives: American-politics

The State and the Emergence of the First American Party System: Roll Call Voting in the New York State Assembly during the Early Republic

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Rohr, B., & Martin, J. L. (2025). The State and the Emergence of the First American Party System: Roll Call Voting in the New York State Assembly during the Early Republic. American Sociological Review, 90(4), 726-754. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224251344574

Prevailing theories about the nature and development of the democratic party system fail to account for the important case of the United States. Using a novel dataset on legislators and roll call votes in the New York State Assembly after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, we show that, contrary to existing accounts, legislative parties had already formed at this early stage. Yet these parties did not arise from the translation of social cleavages such as economic or social class into political oppositions, as sociologists might expect, nor were they merely networks of powerful elites disconnected from the polity, as political scientists and historians have suggested. Instead, these parties coalesced around formal issues—structural questions like the procedures for election and appointment, questions whose answer would determine the rules of the game for future contests. Parties emerged, we argue, not because of an inherent need to adjudicate conflicts between sectors of the polity, but because of the organizational affordances of the modern democratic state. Our findings suggest the formation of party systems is an integral part of the formation of the modern state.

Secularism, sorting, and Americans’ political knowledge

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Samuel L Perry, Secularism, sorting, and Americans’ political knowledge, Social Forces, 2025;, soaf150, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf150

Political knowledge, including knowledge of basic civics and current political conditions, is associated with a host of pro-democratic outcomes including institutional trust and civic and political participation. Religion is also historically associated with these outcomes, yet a link between religion and indicators of political knowledge remains underexamined. Integrating research on religion/secularism and political engagement with work on partisan sorting, I theorize self-consciously secular Americans, particularly if they are sorted politically, will exhibit the strongest grasp on basic civics and current political conditions. Analyses of data from a recent, nationally representative survey affirm my expectations. Self-identified atheists/agnostics consistently score significantly higher than religious or non-affiliated Americans on questions about basic civics and current political conditions. Interactions reveal that education helps most other religious groups catch up to atheists/agnostics on civics knowledge, but not knowledge about current politics. And on knowledge of both basic civics and current politics, atheists/agnostics’ advantage is strongest among liberals and Democrats and disappears among conservatives and Republicans. A similar pattern appears for evangelical Protestants in the opposite direction with their scores on both civics and current politics increasing significantly as they identify more with ideological conservatism, but this does not apply to partisan identity. Findings extend literatures on political knowledge, religious/secular political engagement, and partisan sorting by showing that (1) self-identified secular Americans, particularly if they are sorted, tend to be the most knowledgeable about basic civics and current political conditions, and (2) this pattern is to a weaker extent mirrored by evangelicals, another politicized religious group.

From Equality to Economic Development: Culture, Intersectionality, and Justifications for Women’s Entrepreneurship Policy in the United States, 1973–1988

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Gracia J Lee, From Equality to Economic Development: Culture, Intersectionality, and Justifications for Women’s Entrepreneurship Policy in the United States, 1973–1988, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2025;, jxaf012, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxaf012

This article examines the discursive strategies underpinning advocacy for women’s entrepreneurship policy in the United States between 1973 and 1988. It demonstrates a shift in policy justifications from equality to economic development leading up to the passage of the Women’s Business Ownership Act in 1988. This discursive shift shows how women evoked the cultural ideas of gender sameness and equal opportunity, yet their claims were further shaped by the masculine logics of small business, policy changes, and pushback against affirmative action in the 1980s. Bridging ideas from the civil rights, anti-poverty, and women’s movements in the United States and abroad, advocates also addressed the problems and interests of intersectionally marginalized poor mothers and Black women, alongside middle-class White women. The case of women entrepreneurs thus highlights the need for attention to the interplay between cultural ideas, the sociopolitical context, and intersectional dynamics when analyzing gender as a political category.

Seeding the divide: John Tanton, the Sierra Club and the struggle over US environmentalism

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Elcioglu, E. F. (2025). Seeding the divide: John Tanton, the Sierra Club and the struggle over US environmentalism. Race & Class, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/03063968251371957

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Sierra Club, one of the most prominent environmental organisations in the United States, faced a polarising internal battle over whether to endorse immigration restrictions. Two dominant explanations have emerged to account for why immigration became such a flashpoint in an environmental organisation. One, advanced by watchdog groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, cast the controversy as a far-right infiltration, a cynical effort to greenwash xenophobia. The other, grounded in critical race and decolonial theory, argued that exclusionary politics have always been an intrinsic part of environmentalism, given its settler-colonial and eugenicist foundations. I offer a third explanation by turning to the 1970s, a pivotal moment when mainstream environmentalism briefly embraced population control as an ecological imperative. Drawing on archival records, I show how this institutional flirtation with population control − though short-lived − created an infrastructure and ideological opening that activists like John Tanton would later exploit. As population control lost mainstream legitimacy due to political backlash and the rise of laissez-faire demographic thinking, Tanton repurposed its ecological language and organisational networks to build an immigration restrictionist movement. I show how he strategically reworked liberal environmentalism to cast racial exclusion as ecological necessity. At the same time, however, the archival record reveals paths not taken, reminding us that environmentalism, like any political project, has always been a terrain of struggle.

Policing Welfare: Punitive Adversarialism in Public Assistance

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Headworth, Spencer. 2021. Policing Welfare: Punitive Adversarialism in Public Assistance. University of Chicago Press.

policing welfare

Means-tested government assistance in the United States requires recipients to meet certain criteria and continue to maintain their eligibility so that benefits are paid to the “truly needy.”  Welfare is regarded with such suspicion in this country that considerable resources are spent policing the boundaries of eligibility, which are delineated by an often confusing and baroque set of rules and regulations.  Even minor infractions of the many rules can cause people to be dropped from these programs, and possibly face criminal prosecution.  In this book, Spencer Headworth offers the first study of the structure of fraud control in the welfare system by examining the relations between different levels of governmental agencies, from federal to local, and their enforcement practices. Policing Welfare shows how the enforcement regime of welfare has been constructed to further stigmatize those already living in poverty and deepens disparities of class, race, and gender in our society.