Rightward in the Rustbelt: How Conservatives Remade the GOP, 1947-2012

Lotesta, Johnnie Anne

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Year:: 2019
Contributor:: Lotesta, Johnnie Anne (creator); Chorev, Nitsan (Advisor); Pacewicz, Josh (Advisor); Itzigsohn, Jose (Reader); de Leon, Cedric (Reader); Brown University. Department of Sociology (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: United States; Politics and government; political parties; Conservatism; Business and politics--U.S. states; State governments; Labor unions; Labor laws and legislation--U.S. states
Extent:: xvii, 288 p.

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Abstract:: This dissertation examines the Republican Party’s shift to the libertarian right at the state level. It does so through a comparative-historical analysis of right-to-work (RTW) laws in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. As prohibitions of union security agreements, RTW laws occupied only the far right of Midwestern Republican politics into the 1990s. However, by the early 2010s Republicans were sponsoring and passing RTW laws in the industrial Midwest and in states across the country. Based on 147 stakeholder interviews and extensive archive research, I show how long-term transformations in “party ecologies” structured the possibilities for strategic political action surrounding RTW come 2010. The politicization of small business communities in Michigan and Indiana facilitated the establishment of unipolar party ecologies in which economic, social, and cultural capital concentrated among a small subset of actors on the Republican Party’s ideological right. This concentration of capital facilitated the passage of RTW laws in Michigan and Indiana in 2012 by affording Republican leaders access to sparsely-distributed resources that helped hold legislative caucus members to a party-line vote and forestalled repeal by labor unions. In Ohio, by contrast, nationally-connected policy entrepreneurs and conservative advocacy organizations met with a multipolar state Republican party ecology with a greater diffusion of power across labor and business groups. Contributing to an ethos of appeasement, this multipolar ecology undermined Republican leaders’ efforts to corral legislative votes. When Ohio Republican leaders introduced a RTW law for public employees in 2011, the initiative was thus met with greater internal division, and legislative leaders had to resort to extensive negotiating and strategic deployment of legislative rules to pass their bill. Party ecology again structured the ensuing labor-backed repeal referendum as Republicans and the state’s more multipolar business community shied in the face of a unified labor movement and their broad, bi-partisan campaign to repeal Republicans’ bill.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2019

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Lotesta, Johnnie Anne, "Rightward in the Rustbelt: How Conservatives Remade the GOP, 1947-2012" (2019). Sociology Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:1129496/

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Sociology Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Sociology department.
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