BOSTON COLLEGE POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPARTMENT. POLI4932 Honors Seminar: Inequality and Politics. Prof. Kay Schlozman Spring, 2015

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1 BOSTON COLLEGE POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPARTMENT POLI4932 Honors Seminar: Inequality and Politics Prof. Kay Schlozman Spring, 2015 The last generation has witnessed complicated trends with respect to equality among citizens. On one hand, in many developed democracies -- including, especially, the United States -- economic inequalities have been exacerbated and the gap between the top and the bottom has widened. On the other, one of the dominant themes of politics has been pressure on the state to promote equality. From South Africa, where members of the black majority have acquired the basic rights of citizenship, to Kuwait, where women were belatedly enfranchised, to the United States, where the handicapped gained extensive right in the Americans with Disabilities Act, demands for greater equality have been an important part of political debate. In this course, we will seek to understand the relevance of inequality for politics in America, where Tocqueville long ago noted an egalitarian commitment. We will consider the nature, justice, and dimensions of inequalities in society; the contrast between the formal political equality that inheres in citizenship and the actual inequalities of political influence; and the nature and impact of public policies that enhance or diminish equality. Office Hours McGuinn Tuesdays: 10:00-11:30 AM If this time is not convenient please, please get in touch with me by at kschloz@bc.edu. A Brief Note on Digital Civility Although it might be convenient to take notes on your computer, an open laptop constitutes a physical barrier that gets in the way of free discussion. So, please close your laptops and take notes the old-fashioned way -- with a quill pen, if you like! If you have a disability that requires you to take notes on your computer, please let me know. Also, as a courtesy to your classmates, please turn off your cell phones and wait until class is over to send that important text message. Policy on Academic Integrity of the College of Arts and Sciences Boston College values the academic integrity of its students and faculty. It is your responsibility to familiarize yourself with the university s policy on academic integrity: Please do not hesitate to ask if you have any questions. Violations of academic integrity will be reported to your class dean and judged by the academic integrity committee in your school. If you are found responsible for violating the policy, penalties may include a failing grade as well as possible probation, suspension, or expulsion, depending on the seriousness and circumstances of the violation.

2 Grading Class participation 20% Questions on the reading 20 Papers 30 Take-home final % Course Requirements Questions Inspired by the Reading By 10 AM on each Tuesday that we meet, me three questions that are inspired by the reading. You could pose a question that you think the class could usefully discuss together, or a question that asks for further exploration and evidence beyond what was covered in the reading, or even a question that might be appropriate for the final exam. As we proceed through the semester, you can make your questions comparative -- referring both to the reading for the current seminar and to material covered earlier. Keep electronic copies of the questions that you send me in a single electronic file. Towards the end of the semester, collect them into a single file, and hand me a hard copy of the questions you have posed across the semester on the last day of class, April 28. Be sure that your final list of questions makes clear the dates and topics to which they pertain. I reserve the right to appropriate your questions for use on the takehome final examination. Research Papers This course requires a seminar paper on a topic relevant to the reading of your selection. The range of possible topics is almost endless. You could read material that takes a different ideological perspective from the material assigned for class: for example, when we consider the welfare state, you might consider conservative critiques of the welfare state. You might consider a similar issue in another historical era: for example, the way that that the GI Bill expanded educational opportunity after World War II. You might consider a similar issue or policy with respect to another group: for example, Medicare in conjunction with the American welfare state or inequalities of political voice on the basis of race. Or you might consider a similar policy in another place: for example, equality under the law for men and women in Arab countries or the extension of the right to vote in France. Because one of the purposes of these papers is to enrich the collective background that students bring to the seminar, it is useful to make sure that the papers are spread across the semester. By the end of class on January 20, please give me a ranked list of three seminar dates around which you would be willing to write a paper. Honoring preferences insofar as possible, I shall assign you a date. On the day that we discuss the topic to which your paper is germane, we will begin class with a 10-minute oral presentation

3 of what you found and how, if at all, it relates to what we read. Hard copies (No s, please!) of papers are due at 9 AM on Friday of the week the relevant topic is considered. (Please hand them in at the Office of the Department of Political Science and ask that they be put in my box.) Suggested length: pages Books Ordered at the Boston College Bookstore Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press/Russell Sage, 2008). William G. Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005). Andrea Louise Campbell, Trapped in America s Safety Net: One Family s Struggle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Kenneth R. Feinberg, What Is Life Worth? (New York: Public Affairs, 2005). Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005). Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote, Rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009). David L. Kirp, Kids First (New York: Public Affairs, 2011). Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Kay L. Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady, The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

4 Reading List I. Introduction 1/13 A. Thinking about inequality 1/20 B. The nature and bases of inequality Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron, from Welcome to the Monkey House (New York: Dell, 1968). Mark Twain, Captain Stormfield s Visit to Heaven (New York: Harper Brothers, 1909) (excerpt). Hans Christian Andersen, The Princess and the Pea, (1835) at Max Weber, Class, Status, and Party, in Rhonda F. Levine, ed., Social Class and Stratification (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), chap. 3. T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, in Class Citizenship and Social Development (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965), pp II. Economic and Political Inequalities 1/27 A. Growing economic inequality Timothy Noah, The Great Divergence (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), chaps Hedrick Smith, Who Stole the American Dream (New York: Random House, 2012), chaps. 4, 15. Steven N. Kaplan and Joshua Rauh, It s the Market: The Broad-Based Rise in the Return to Top Talent, Journal of Economic Perspectives 27 (Summer, 2013): Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel, The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals as Evidence of Rents in Top 1 Percent Incomes, Journal of Economic Perspectives 27 (Summer, 2013): Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp Timothy M. Smeeding, Public Policy, Economic Inequality, and Poverty: The United States in Comparative Perspective, Social Science Quarterly, Supplement to Volume 86 (2005): Uri Dadush, Kemal Dervis, Sarah Puritz Milsom, and Bennett Stancil, Inequality in America: Facts, Trends, and International (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012), chap. 4. 2/3 B. Shrinking equality of opportunity Michael Greenstone, Adam Looney, Jeremy Patashnik, and Muxin Yu, Thirteen Economic Facts about Social Mobility and the Role of Education, The Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution, June, 2013 at facts-higher-education. Mark Robert Rank, Thomas A. Hirschl, and Kirk A. Foster, Chasing the

5 American Dream (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), chap. 7. Miles Corak, Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility, Journal of Economic Perspectives 27 (Summer, 2013): Richard Reeves, Is America Dreaming?: Understanding Social Mobility : 2/10 C. Inequalities of political voice Kay L. Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady, The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), chaps. 1, 5-7, 11-12, 14, 16, Kenneth P. Vogel, Big Money (New York: Public Affairs, 2014), chap. 10. Clyde Haberman, The Cost of Campaigns, New York Times, October 18, 2014 (including video) at 2/17 D. Citizens, Opinion, and Unequal Responsiveness Benjamin I. Page and Lawrence R Jacobs, Class War?: What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), chaps Leslie McCall, The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press), chap. 4. Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press/Russell Sage, 2008), chaps. 1-4, Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), chaps 3-4. (Suggested) III. Creating and perpetuating inequality: The role of the state 2/24 A. Race and public policy between the Civil War and Civil Rights eras C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp , 67-74, 82-93, V.O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1949), chaps (Suggested). Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), chaps. 1-3, 5 (or all). 3/10 B. Economic inequality since 1980 Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), chaps. 1-2, Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies

6 Undermine American Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 8-30, Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), chap. 14. Adam Bonica, Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Why Hasn t Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality? Journal of Economic Perspectives 27 (Summer, 2013): Bartels, Unequal Democracy, chap. 6 (Suggested). IV. Promoting greater equality: The role of the state 3/17 A. Establishing equality under the law Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 3/24 B. Guaranteeing political citizenship: Voting rights in the U.S. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote, Rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009), chaps. 1-3, 6, Conclusion, Afterward (or all). 3/31 C. Guaranteeing equality of opportunity: Investing in the young OECD, Child Well-Being across OECD Countries, in Doing Better for Children (OECD Publishing, 2009), chap.2 at David L. Kirp, Kids First (New York: Public Affairs, 2011). 4/7 D. Guaranteeing equality of opportunity: Higher education William G. Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press), pp , , Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 4/14 E. Outlawing discrimination in private settings: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Joseph Fishkin, Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp David B. Filvaroff and Raymond E. Wolfinger, The Origin and Enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in Legacies of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, ed., Bernard Grofman (Charlottesville; University Press of Virginia, 2000), chap. 1. Robert D. Loevy, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), chaps. 1. Charles and Barbara Whalen, The Longest Debate (Cabin John, MD: Seven Locks Press, 1985), Appendix.

7 Raymond F. Gregory, The Civil Rights Act and the Battle to End Workplace Discrimination (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), pp. 1-47, , , Robert C. Lieberman, Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), chap. 7. 4/21 F. Providing a social safety net Andrea Louise Campbell, Trapped in America s Safety Net: One Family s Struggle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 4/28 G. Compensating Victims Fairly: The 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund Kenneth R. Feinberg, What Is Life Worth? (New York: Public Affairs, 2005). Kenneth R. Feinberg, Who Gets What? (New York: Public Affairs, 2012), chap. 4 (or chaps. 4-5).