A Democracy That Works: How Working-Class Power Defines Liberal Democracy in the United States

A Democracy That Works argues that rather than corporate donations, Republican gerrymandering, and media manipulation, the conservative ascendancy reflects the changes in how work is governed that have disempowered workers.

Using six historical case studies from the emergence of the New Deal, and its later overtaking by the conservative neoliberal agenda, to today’s intersectional social justice movements, Stephen Amberg deploys situated institutional analysis to show how real actors created the rules that empowered liberal democracy for fifty years and then how Democrats and Republicans undermined democracy by changing those rules, thereby organizing working-class people out of American politics. He draws on multidisciplinary studies to argue that when employees are organized to participate at work, they are also organized to participate in politics. In doing so the book opens up analytical space to understand the unprecedented threat to liberal democracy in the United States.

A Democracy That Works is a fresh account of the crisis of democracy that illuminates how historical choices about the role of workers in the polity shaped America’s liberal democracy during the twentieth century. It will appeal to scholars of American Politics and American Political Development, Labor and Social Movements, Democracy, and comparative politics.