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 reconstruction of the rules that govern work that has 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 50 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 to press for accountable government. In doing so, the book opens up analytical space to understand the unprecedented threat to liberal democracy in the U.S.

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 20th century. It will appeal to scholars of American politics and American political development, labor and social movements, democracy and comparative politics.

Stephen Amberg is an associate professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He was a Fulbright Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the Copenhagen Business School (2009-10) and a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at the New School for Social Research (2004-05). His Ph.D. is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1987). Amberg studies American political development, comparative political economy of the advanced countries, labor and employment policy and political movements. He has authored a book on governing the automobile industry and published articles in such journals as Studies in American Political Development, Social Science History, Polity and the Socio-Economic Review.