The role of business interests in fighting or supporting core New Deal social policy reforms of the 1930s remains a highly contested issue across the disciplines of history, sociology, and political science. Some argue that capitalists were entirely hostile and therefore simply ineffective in...

Why are democracies so unequal? Despite the widespread expectation that democracy, via expansion of the franchise, would lead to redistribution in favor of the masses, in reality majorities regularly lose out in democracies. Taking a broad view of inequality as encompassing the distribution of...

In his 2006 World Politics article, “Power Resources and Employer-Centered Approaches,” Walter Korpi challenges Peter Swenson's work on business and the politics of the welfare state as “deeply flawed.” This response to Korpi's article counters with the criticism that he neglects to...

"Meticulously tracing the dramatic conflicts both inside organized medicine and between the medical profession and the larger society over quality, equality, and economy in health care, Peter A. Swenson illuminates the history of American medical politics from the late nineteenth century to the...

A profoundly important step in political development is the licensing of professions as quasi-public agencies of societal and especially economic governance. Medical licensing of the 1870s onward ranks as about the most important step in America’s move away from Jacksonian libertarianism...