Inequality a Major Theme in Latest Issue of Politics & Society

Three of the four articles in the June 2020 issue of Politics & Society deal with dimensions of inequality. In his article on housing for the poor, John Robinson III, an assistant professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, looks at the way in which a new kind of organization, which Robinson calls "grassroots for hire," competes with traditional community-based organizations for federal tax credits. The grassroots-for-hire organizations have ties to elite constituencies such as state officials and the world of finance and real estate. Robinson concedes that the new organizations have succeeded in providing housing for the poor. But something has been lost in the bargain, as the grassroots-for-hire nonprofits are not embedded in the communities they serve and treat housing as an independent concern rather than as part of a broader effort to improve the lives of the poor.

In "Varieties of Urbanism," Yonah Freemark, Justin Steil, and Kathleen Thelen discuss how wealthy areas in the United States form their own jurisdictions and use their new independence to hoard resources. Over the past twenty years, the number of independent jurisdictions, be they municipalities or school districts or something else, has increased by more than 2,500. The new jurisdictions separate themselves from their poor and middle-class neighbors, making inequality even worse than it was before. The authors compare two US cities--Boston and San Francisco--with Toronto, Paris, and London to show that the proliferation of jurisdictions in the United States is the result of deliberate policies. As the authors conclude, "The United States stands out among the rich democracies in the way the institutional structure of local governance facilitates (indeed, incentivizes) jurisdictional proliferation and actively supports resource hoarding, typically by affluent white homeowners."

The third article dealing with inequality examines the effective tax rates paid by the largest corporations. As Sandy Brian Hager and Joseph Baines show, the effective tax rates of the largest corporations have declined since 1970 from 37% to 28%. At the same time, the rates of the remaining corporations have increased from 34% to 41%. In short, corporate taxes are now regressive. The authors situate their findings in the context of today's economy, one increasingly dominated by fewer and fewer companies. Their findings discredit "the notion that lower corporate taxes will 'trickle down' to the benefit of everyone in society. On the contrary," they write, "in a system in which successive rounds of corporate tax reform translate into a persistently regressive corporate tax structure, wealth and income become further concentrated at the top." They argue that in trying to understand corporate concentration, scholars should pay more attention to corporate taxation.

Inequality, of course, has long been an important theme in the pages of Politics & Society. The three articles discussed here continue the journal's focus on the kinds of policies and practices that weaken democracy and community while exacerbating plutocratic trends.