Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (5 results)

  • Article
Working Paper Series (2013)
For decades, America’s state and local governments have promised their workers increasingly generous pensions but failed to fully fund them, producing a fiscal problem of staggering proportions. In this paper, we examine the politics of public pensions. While it might seem obvious that the pension problem is due to Democrats and unions pushing for generous pensions over Republican resistance, we develop a theory—rooted in voters, interest groups, and myopic politicians—to argue that, during normal times, we should expect both parties to support generous (and underfunded) pensions, and thus to be responsible for the larger problem. It is only after the onset of the Great Recession, which disrupted normalcy by expanding the scope of conflict, that we should expect partisan conflict. Using a new dataset of state legislators’ votes on hundreds of pension bills passed between 1999 and 2011, we carry out an empirical analysis that supports these expectations.
    Cover page: The Politics of Pensions
    • Article
    Working Paper Series (2016)

    A subversive line of new scholarship in American politics argues that interest groups need to be brought to the analytic center of the field once again. This paper attempts to further that agenda. We reconnect with an older literature of great importance—on capture, subgovernments, and interest group liberalism—to study interest groups as insiders that play routine, officially recognized roles as part of government itself. Our empirical focus is on staterun public pension boards: which control trillions of dollars, have vast fiscal and social consequences, and are commonly designed to give public employees and their unions official roles in governing their own pension systems. We develop a theory arguing—contrary to existing scholarly work—that these groups can actually be expected to favor policies that undermine the fiscal integrity of these plans. Through an analysis of key decisions by 99 pension boards over the period 2001-2014, we show that this is in fact the case—and that, for public-sector pensions, these “interest groups on the inside” wield genuine influence that weakens effective government.

      Cover page: Interest Groups on the Inside: The Governance of Public Pension Funds
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2017)
      For decades, America's state and local governments have promised their workers increasingly generous pensions but failed to fully fund them, producing a fiscal problem of staggering proportions. In this article, we examine the politics of public pensions. While mainstream theoretical ideas in the American politics literature would suggest the pension issue should be polarized, with Democrats pushing for generous pensions over Republican resistance, we develop an argument—rooted in more traditional theoretical work by Schattschneider, Lowi, Wilson, and others—implying that both parties should be expected to support generous pensions during normal times and that only after the onset of the Great Recession, which expanded the scope of conflict, should the parties begin to diverge. Using a new data set of state legislators' votes on hundreds of pension bills passed between 1999 and 2011, we carry out an empirical analysis that supports these expectations.
        Cover page: Polarization and Policy: The Politics of Public‐Sector Pensions
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2015)
        Public sector unions are major interest groups in American politics, but they are rarely studied. New research would not only shed much-needed light on how these unions shape government and politics, but also broaden the way scholars think about interest groups generally: by highlighting interests that arise inside governments, drawing attention to long-ignored types of policies and decision arenas, and underlining the importance of groups in subnational politics. Here we explore the effects of public sector unions on the costs of government. We present two separate studies, using different datasets from different historical periods, and we examine several outcomes: salaries, health benefits, and employment. We find that unions and collective bargaining increase the costs of government and that the effects are especially large for benefits. We view this analysis as an opening wedge that we hope will encourage a more extensive line of new research - and new thinking about American interest groups.
          Cover page: Public Sector Unions and the Costs of Government
          • Article
          Working Paper Series (2015)
          Schattschneider’s insight that “policies make politics” has played an influential role in the modern study of political institutions and public policy. Yet if policies do indeed make politics, rational politicians clearly have opportunities to use policies to create a future structure of politics more to their own advantage — and this strategic dimension has gone almost entirely unexplored. Do politicians actually use policies to make politics? Under what conditions? In this paper, we develop a theoretical argument about what can be expected from strategic politicians, and we carry out an empirical analysis on a policy development that is particularly instructive: the adoption of public sector collective bargaining laws by the states during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s — laws that fueled the rise of public sector unions, and “made politics” to the great advantage of Democrats over Republicans.
            Cover page: Do Politicians Use Policy to Make Politics? The Case of Public Sector Labor Laws
            Top