Description:

Please join the Commune as they host a practice job talk with PhD Candidate Sean Diament, who will present a chapter from his dissertation discussing, "Congressional Representation of the Poor, 1933-1946".

Sean Diament is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University with an emphasis on American politics. He received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. His interests broadly encompass political inequality (including class, race, gender, and migration), American political development, Congress, representation, policymaking, political geography, and multi-method research.

His dissertation entitled “Dividing the Poor” examines how the poor are represented by political elites in American politics by focusing on the path-breaking New Deal period of Congressional history from 1933 to 1946. An overarching finding of the work is that even when poverty is highly salient on the national stage, the poor receive a highly fractious form of representation.  First, only a minority of lawmakers modestly engage poverty in their rhetoric. Second, among those lawmakers that do speak about the poor, they vary widely in who they depict as poor. And third, landmark antipoverty policies divide the poor further by incorporating certain poor groups while excluding others, through both overt (i.e., group-based statutory language) and covert (i.e., shifting decisions away from Congress towards bureaucrats and the states) means. This dissertation helps uncover the role of politics in the continuation in poverty in the United States.