Department of Methodology Seminar Series - Professor Jennifer Hochschild

Race, Class, and What Else? Policies and Politics in Four American Cities
Since the 1960s, the study of policy and politics in American cities has revolved around the role of race or the interaction of race and class. This project examines the degree to which race/class hierarchy should remain the dominant paradigm in research on inequality in the United States. I consider four policies in four large American cities in order to see how well race/class inequality explains their trajectories.
The policy arenas are policing (especially “stop-question-frisk” in New York City), land use development (especially the BeltLine in Atlanta), school reform (especially charter schools in Los Angeles), and fiscal policy (especially public sector pension funding in Chicago). The research base includes a national survey, elite interviews, media analyses, and perusal of documents.
I find that race/class inequality matters, but not uniformly and not straightforwardly. It is integral to, even determinative of, implementation and impact of the first two cases, but has an attenuated, almost submerged, role in the other two. On school reform, the politics of geography and institutional boundaries matter most; on pension funding, the politics of time horizons and generational injustice dominate. This is an exercise in inductive theory-building; we need to develop more systematic analyses of when and why race/class inequality explains important swaths of American politics and policy-making.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

CON 1.01, Department of Methodology, Connaught House, 65 Aldwych, London, United Kingdom