Constructing Industrial Order in the Center of the American Economy: How Electoral Competition and Social Collaboration Evolved in Twentieth-Century New York

Abstract

Comparative studies of capitalist political economies have settled on a new understanding of how historical choices about electoral rules were constitutive of the current varieties of capitalism that are distinguished by their strategies of growth and adjustment to competitive conditions. The countries that have “coordinated market economies” typically have well-organized unions and employers with distinct partisan representation under multiparty electoral rules, and they have more egalitarian outcomes. The countries that have “liberal market economies” have arms-length market-based relationships under the plurality rule that are more conflictual, and they have inegalitarian outcomes. This article develops the analysis of electoral rules and industrial order by taking another look at the United States, which has always been taken as a case of plurality and liberal market economy. In contrast, New York had multiparty politics for most of the twentieth century, in part because of its cross-endorsement fusion rule of nominations. This article argues that fusion operated in a similar way to proportional representation to enable labor–management collaboration and social regulation. Collaboration in New York City was a constitutive element of the New Deal's laboristic politics. The later disruption of this American version of coordination transformed the U.S. political economy into a liberal market economy.

Comparing America: Reflections on Democracy across Subfields

“…Esping-Anderson (1990) described the United States as an example of a liberal, as opposed to conservative or social democratic, welfare state; Hall and Soskice (2001) use it as an example of a liberal, as opposed to coordinated, market economy, in their work on varieties of capitalism. In this literature, the factors that explain why welfare and redistributive outcomes look so different in the United States include federalism, majoritarian electoral systems, large numbers of veto players, pluralist versus corporatist arrangements, coordination between firms, low workingclass consciousness or class conflict, and the ever-vague notion of political culture (Linz and Stepan 2011;Martin and Swank 2012;Iversen and Soskice 2009;Lynch 2006;Amberg 2017).…”