Winner-Take-All Politics: Organizations, Policy, and the New American Political Economy.

After a quarter century of surprising neglect, the intersection of American politics and rising economic inequality has emerged as a central subject of inquiry within the discipline. This new research is welcome and needed. Yet recent scholarship on inequality and American politics continues to betray some of the major blind spots that fostered the neglect of this crucial topic for so long. In this paper, we argue that these blind spots must be directly confronted and overcome to fashion a convincing analysis of the relationship between rising inequality and the changing landscape of American politics. By a "convincing analysis," we mean an analysis that is (1) consistent with the known facts about economic inequality—namely, the meteoric gains at the very top of the economic ladder that have occurred since the 1970s—and (2) identifies not just plausible but realistic causal pathways connecting inequality to public policy and vice versa. We argue that none of the major recent analyses, valuable as they are, meets these twin tests. A chief reason is that they look for their answers in models, methods, and causal relationships that systematically shift attention away from outcomes and explanations that must be part of the picture. In response, we sketch out an alternative perspective that draws heavily on the tools of comparative political economy to bring into focus the role of organized interests and large-scale policies in shaping and mediating distributional outcomes. We then use this perspective to illuminate three fundamental policy shifts of recent decades that are at the heart of the stunning rise in inequality yet largely missed by existing accounts: the drop in effective tax rates at the very top, the dramatic transformation of corporate governance, and the decline of unions relative to employers. Far from apolitical or inevitable, these shifts can only be explained by reference to the organizational transformation of American politics since the 1970s. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]