Authoritarian innovation in the United States: the role of dual subnational systems of labor governance

Abstract

I apply Curato and Fossati's (2020) concept of “authoritarian innovation” to analyze historic changes in labor governance in the United States that have undermined democratic participation in the workplace and in the polity. Drawing from comparative political economy and welfare state theories, I argue that since the 1930s the U.S. has had not one unified, national labor regime but two competing, subnational regimes: the New Deal and its legacy in the industrialized North and West Coast, and a counter-regime based initially in the former Confederate Southern states. The more anti-union, anti-welfare, and anti-democratic Southern regime survived the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s, gained ascendance nationally with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, and expanded its boundaries in the 2010s into the deindustrialized Midwest. The “dual regime” analysis highlights critical transitions and divergent paths in the reshaping of American democracy.