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In recent decades, it has become clear that the major economic, political, and social problems in the world require contemporary development research to examine intersections of race and class in the global economy. Theorists in the Black Radical Tradition (BRT) were the first to develop and advance a powerful research agenda that integrated race–class analyses of capitalist development. However, over time, progressive waves of research streams in development studies have successively stripped these concepts from their analyses. Post-1950s, class analyses of development overlapped with some important features of the BRT, but removed race. Post-1990s, ethnicity-based analyses of development excised both race and class. In this chapter, I discuss what we learn about capitalist development using the integrated race–class analyses of the BRT, and how jettisoning these concepts weakens our understanding of the political economy of development. To remedy our current knowledge gaps, I call for applying insights of the BRT to our analyses of the development trajectories of nations.

Regardless of whether “elite” is defined with respect to social status, economic wealth, or professional accomplishment, these sources of advantage are blunted by democratic political commitments to equality. This durable dilemma has shaped the institutional development of the American polity and the economy, as those with extra-political advantages have sought new forms of political influence, at times subverting rules or advancing cultural projects that elaborate an image of corporations as moral actors or the development of a “business creed.” American elites have also worked at the margins of the formally democratic policy to construct fields of public action that are accepted as public, legitimate, and admirable, but not strictly democratic. Corporate philanthropy has been central to these efforts. Organizations like the Community Chest can be understood as practical responses to the constraints of ideological commitments to political egalitarianism. This line of response to the democratic dilemma is “constructive” in the nonnormative sense that it produces new fields of social action and reconfigures institutional arrangements. By linking economic position to civic influence, organizations of this type translate economic power into elevated influence over public affairs through the constitution and stabilization of partially hybridized forms or fields.

Interest in developing institutional explanations of political and economic behavior has blossomed among social scientists since the early 1980s. Three intellectual perspectives are now prevalent: rational choice theory, historical institutionalism and a new school of organizational analysis. This paper summarizes, compares and contrasts these views and suggests ways in which cross‐fertilization may be achieved. Particular attention is paid to how the insights of organizational analysis and historical institutionalism can be blended to provide fruitful avenues of research and theorizing, especially with regard to the production, adoption, and mobilization of ideas by decision makers.

The US Congress is a racialized governing institution that plays an important role structuring the racial hierarchy in the nation. Despite Congress’s influence, there is little theoretical and empirical research on its racialized structure – that is, how it operates and the racial processes that shape it. This lacuna has developed from a narrow conceptualization of Congress as a political institution, and it ignores how it is a multifaceted organization that features a large and complex workplace. Congressional staff are the invisible force in American policymaking, and it is through their assistance that members of Congress can fulfill their responsibilities. However, the congressional workplace is stratified along racial lines. In this chapter, I theorize how the congressional workplace became racialized, and I identify the racial processes that maintain a racialized workplace today. I investigate how lawmakers have organized their workplace and made decisions about which workers would be appropriate for different types of roles in the Capitol. Through a racial analysis of the congressional workplace, I show a connection between Congress as an institution and workplace and how racial domination is a thread that connects and animates both its formal and informal structures.

Discussion of the 2016 electorate has centered on two poles: results of public opinion and voter surveys that attempt to tease out whether racial, cultural, or economic grievances were the prime drivers behind the Trump vote and analyses that tie major shifts in the political economy to consequential shifts in the voting behavior of certain demographic and geographic groups. Both approaches render invisible a major development since the 1970s that has been transforming the political, social, and economic landscape of wide swaths of people who do not reside in major urban areas or their prosperous suburban rings: the emergence and consolidation of the carceral state. This chapter sketches out some key contours of the carceral state that have been transforming the polity and economy for poor and working-class people, with a particular focus on rural areas and the declining Rust Belt. It is meant as a correction to the stilted portrait of these groups that congealed in the aftermath of the 2016 election, thanks to their pivotal contribution to Trump's victory. This chapter is not an alternative causal explanation that identifies the carceral state as the key factor in the 2016 election. Rather, it is a call to aggressively widen the analytical lens of studies of the carceral state, which have tended to focus on communities of color in urban areas.

Legalists and social scientists have not been able to explain the expansion of gay rights in a conservative age because they refuse to respect the special qualities of judicial decision making. These qualities require the Supreme Court to look simultaneously at the past, present, and future, and, most importantly, to determine questions of individual rights through a consideration of how citizens are to live under a continuing rights regime. Unless scholars understand how and why Supreme Court decision making differs from that of more directly politically accountable institutions we can expect no greater success in explaining or predicting individual rights in the future.

Recent research has challenged traditional views of the 1920s-era Ku Klux Klan in the United States. Case studies have shown that the movement appealed to a broad middle-class constituency and advocated a range of popular reforms. These findings have stimulated a provocative debate over whether the movement represented a mainstream “civic populism” or a more racist reaction to change. Here, I review the recent debate and show how the new data are consistent with current sociological models of collective action. Comparing studies of Klan mobilization in several cities, I argue that the movement was both populist and racist, combining processes of contemporary urban racial and class formation. From this perspective, I suggest, the 1920s Klan highlights a critical moment in the development of racial and class identities in 20th century urban America.

From one angle, abortion law appears to confirm the regime politics account of the Supreme Court; after all, the Reagan/Bush coalition succeeded in significantly curtailing the constitutional protection of abortion rights. From another angle, however, it is puzzling that the Reagan/Bush Court repeatedly refused to overturn Roe v. Wade. We argue that time and again electoral considerations led Republican elites to back away from a forceful assertion of their agenda for constitutional change. As a result, the justices generally acted within the range of possibilities acceptable to the governing regime but still typically had multiple doctrinal options from which to choose.