Introduction: America's Puzzling Semi-Democracy -- Rules for Representation and Participation at Work: How New York's Multi-Party Politics Created Collaborative Workplaces and Influenced the New Deal -- Extending New Deal Labor Policy to the South: The Struggle for Liberal Democracy in Texas -- How Having It Both Ways with Labor Rights During the New Deal Era Undermined U.S. Support for a Just Global Economy -- Liberals Labors Lost: How the Democrats Lost Control of Their Narrative of Liberal Democracy -- Reconfiguring Work and Politics in the Automobile Industry during the Obama Administration -- Beyond Liberal Oligarchy: The New Working-Class and Democratic Politics.
"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"--
Representative government and representation--United States. Political participation--United States--Case studies. Labor unions--Political activity--History.--United States Working class--Political activity--United States--Case studies. Social justice--United States--Case studies. POLITICAL SCIENCE / Labor & Industrial Relations POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Economic Policy