In 2003, tough new regulations to ensure smoke-free environments in workplaces and public locations were enacted by the Oklahoma legislature. This was a striking victory for public health and reformers advocating tobacco controls in one of the most conservative heartland states – a victory that no one would have predicted just a few years earlier. For decades, tobacco industry insiders and lobbyists correctly saw their relationship with Oklahoma legislators as a “love fest.” Compared to many other states, Oklahoma did very little to regulate smoking or tax cigarettes, despite mounting evidence of smoking’s adverse impact on health.

Inaction might well have continued but for the arrival in 2001 of an activist new Commissioner of Public Health. Recruited from Florida and installed by Governor Frank Keating, Dr. Leslie Bietsch instituted “emergency” regulations and launched an aggressive public campaign for tobacco controls – getting out well in front of health advocacy groups and provoking ire from lobbyists and many legislators. Bietsch only lasted two years, but his battle against tobacco interests was a critical turning point. Not only was he victorious in the arena of clean indoor air, he also set the stage for increasing Oklahoma’s cigarette taxes to levels more on par with other states. As we analyze in our new book Heartland Tobacco War, Bietsch’s story show how a principled public official can escape the constraints of business as usual and mobilize public pressure to support reforms. This remarkable heartland tobacco war shows that well-financed, sophisticated, and seemingly invincible political insiders who maintain an iron grip on policymaking can be overcome and defeated.
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Most research on rising economic inequality focuses on growing wage gaps between different groups of workers. But of course that is only part of the story. Just as important is the division of the national economic pie between profits going to capitalists and the “labor share” that includes all of the wages and benefits earned by workers. It’s a zero-sum game: the portion of the total national income that is not going to the workers goes to profits for capitalists.

In recent times, U.S. corporate profits have been going up at the expense of workers’ wages and fringe benefits. From 1979 through 2007, labor’s share of national income in the U.S. private sector decreased by six percentage points. What does that mean? Back in 1979, American workers claimed about 64% of national income, and if labor’s share had stayed at this level, the 120 million American workers employed in the private sector in 2007 would have received as a group an additional $600 billion in compensation. That is more than $5,000 extra per worker!

Where did that huge amount of money go instead of into workers’ wallets? It went to corporate profits, mostly benefiting very wealthy individuals. And things did not change with the recent economic recession. Although the big economic downturn of 2009 reduced corporate profits as a share of national income, the effect was short-lived. Since 2010, the golden age of swelling corporate profits has resumed. more...

By 1980, the wages earned by African-American women and white women came close to being equal, but since then the gap has nearly tripled. Meanwhile, average wages for African-American men stagnated, and wage inequalities between black and white men remained stubbornly high. In this same period, membership in U.S. labor unions has plummeted – from one in every three private sector workers enrolled in a union in the mid-1950s to just one in twenty today. So it is natural to ask whether such sharp union decline helps to explain racial economic gaps today.

Our research uses 40 years of nationally representative data and a technique sometimes called “counterfactual analysis” to discover what wage trends among blacks and whites, men and women, would have looked like if union membership in the private sector of the U.S. economy had not declined so sharply. The short answer is that union decline has made racial gaps worse, especially among women. more...

Labor unions are known to improve wages and benefits for their members. Yet economic results are not all that unions accomplish. They also make a difference in democratic politics by lobbying for policies, by providing money and volunteers in elections – and also by fostering leadership skills among their members and helping some win elected public offices.

The role of unions in helping members win elected office has not received as much scholarly attention as the other economic and political functions unions perform. In part that is because this function is not easy to study in a rigorous, empirical manner. I have devised a new way to test the hypothesis that unions foster elected officials – and my findings open the door for further explorations of how union membership facilitates electoral careers – and why this matters. more...

Democratic government depends on active, well-informed citizens. But why and how do citizens become more engaged with community and political life? This question has long interested social scientists—and the traditional research approach has been to look at how various individual characteristics either encourage or discourage participation in politics. Researchers have established, for instance, that people are more likely to vote if they have higher incomes, more years of education, and strong partisan preferences.

Another approach goes beyond individual traits to probe the role of social ties and contexts in shaping civic participation. Using innovative methods, I advance this agenda by asking whether civic engagement is increased by everyday discussions among friends, family members, and other acquaintances. Simply stated, the answer is yes. When people are exposed to discussions of politics in their immediate daily environment, they are likely to become more active civically. Talking about politics encourages people to become more active citizens. more...

During the first seventy years of the twentieth century, the high school graduation rate for American teenagers skyrocketed from six percent to eighty percent. This remarkable boost in rates of high school graduation fueled the national economic growth that produced rising incomes for most American families. But recent trends in high school graduation have been more complicated and puzzling, as my research seeks to describe and explain.

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Charter schools operate in the public sector and are supported by taxpayers, but like private schools they grant considerable autonomy to principals and teachers and allow parents to make choices not constrained by zip codes or neighborhood boundaries. Boosters often make extravagant claims for charter schools, promising to fix deficits in American education and close achievement gaps between minority and white children and between students from richer and poorer backgrounds. Understandably, such glowing promises capture the imagination of public officials – and, above all, appeal to parents searching for quality schooling who are disillusioned with neighborhood public schools yet unable to afford tuition at Catholic or elite private schools.

But is the hype about charter schools backed up by the evidence? Is there solid research suggesting that charter schools are doing any better for students than traditional neighborhood or magnet schools? So far, the best objective research studies have arrived at mixed results, and there is a strong need to supplement existing approaches with a closer look at the on-the-ground experiences of teachers, principals, parents, and schoolchildren, comparing the daily operation of charter schools with other schools in their areas. Parents and citizens alike need to learn much more about how well charter schools actually are performing. more...

Stand Your Ground laws are suddenly in the spotlight, as Americans debate whether they counter violence or put more people in danger of death or injury by gunfire. It is a good time to look closely at what these laws do – and what we know, so far, about their effects. more...

Reelected to a second term, President Barack Obama is speaking with new force and clarity about the threat of climate change; and he is encouraging the Environmental Protection Agency to take bold steps to reduce dangerous greenhouse gas emissions. To make up for Congressional unwillingness to legislate, the Obama administration seems ready to do all it can through executive actions. Many professional environmentalists are delighted, and will rely on inside-the-beltway lobbying to urge regulators onward. That is fine for the short run, but it would be too bad if efforts to counter damage from global warming stopped at insider advocacy.

The new few years are exactly the right time to build a broad nationwide network of popularly rooted organizations committed to supporting carbon-capping as part of America’s transition to a green economy. To be prepared when the next opening arises in Congress, organizational efforts must reach far beyond the Beltway – to knit together alliances and inspire tens of millions of ordinary Americans to push for change. more...

When a 23-year-old physiotherapy student was brutally raped and beaten after she got on a public bus in India, the world reacted with appropriate horror. Yet we should not imagine that assaults directed against women using public transportation are unusual or isolated to one nation. In fact, a severe attack similar to the assault in India took place in May 2012 in the hilly region of Nepal, where a 21-year-old Buddhist nun was gang raped on a public bus by five men, including the driver and his staff.

Less horrendous sexual harassment of women taking public transport is part of everyday life in Nepal – and two-thirds of Indian women also say they have experienced such incidents, most of which are not officially reported. Nearly half of Japanese women say they have had at least one such experience, and the problem has also been reported in Hong Kong and Jakarta, Indonesia.   more...