Description:

Please join Comparative Historical Social Sciences for a joint event with the University of Chicago's comparative historical sociologists at the American Bar Association. Hear from speakers Greta Krippner (University of Michigan) and Alex Hertel-Fernandez (Columbia University). Lunch will be provided, followed by a Q&A, presentations, and a reception.

Lunch roundtable (12-1:30)
Seeking an explanation for the fascism and horrors of the 1930s and 1940s, both Karl Polanyi and Hannah Arendt began with the strained relationships between global and national capitalist markets and the democratic/democratizing nation-state.  Some would argue that during the "golden years" of mid-century welfare capitalism and Keynesian policies, we saw some accommodation of these forces, while the neoliberal turn and financialization destabilized those arrangements. As we seek to understand the current moment, can a Polanyian-Arendtian starting point provide analytic leverage?  If so, how?

Presentations (1:45-4)

Alex Hertel-Fernandez

"Not Working: Constricting Effects of Media Coverage on Unemployment Insurance Policymaking During COVID-19"

Why did the Biden-Harris Administration cut short extensions to unemployment insurance (UI) benefits and fail to enact comprehensive UI reform? I explore the role of the media in constraining action on UI during the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining trends in media coverage, opinion polling, and results from an original survey experiment, I show how the media coverage of the UI system shifted towards concerns about labor shortages and the disincentive effects of UI benefits on worker job search efforts. Media outlets also began relying disproportionally on quotes from businesses, rather than workers, during the key period when legislation was being debated in Congress. Results from a media framing survey experiment show that this shift in coverage may have reduced support for expanding and reforming UI benefits. This analysis illuminates constricting effects of media on policymaking as well as economic biases in news coverage and implications for public opinion and policy agendas. 

Greta Krippner

“A (Brief) History of the Individualization of Risk: Lessons for Political Economy.”

In this talk, I trace the history of the individualization of risk in American society, asking how risk was transformed from being understood as a property of groups to being understood as a property of individuals. While conventional arguments locate this development in the “personal responsibility revolution” orchestrated by neoliberal policy entrepreneurs, my account points to distinct origins of the shift toward individualized understandings of risk. I use the case of feminist mobilization against insurers’ risk classification practices to suggest that anti-discrimination movements seeded the individualization of risk over the latter decades of the twentieth century. Turning to what this means for the future of political economy, I put this paradoxical finding in conversation with a broader literature on “left neoliberalism” that locates the sources of antipathy to the state and embrace of market freedoms in left political projects, including especially feminism. Although contributors to this literature correctly point to convergences between anti-discrimination movements and neoliberalism, I take issue with how they read neoliberal premises into feminist mobilization, with the result that emancipatory possibilities are lost from view.

Reception (4-5)