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Jake M. Grumbach Profile picture
Jake M. Grumbach
@JakeMGrumbach
policy, $, political economy of race // 70-80s soul, 90s hip hop // #DubNation // proud product of miscegenation // Berkeley prof. formerly: UW, Princeton CSDP
Brendo RN Profile picture Potato Of Reason Profile picture Niraj Pant Profile picture 3 subscribed
Oct 2, 2023 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
Here's my new working paper w/ @robmickey & @dziblatt.

tl;dr influxes of Black people during the Great Migration led Northern towns & cities to remove directly elected mayors & replace them with appointed city managers

ungated:

1/n dropbox.com/scl/fi/r54lw8s…
Image The 20th century saw the US democratize. Black people moved out of Jim Crow to states where they had voting rights. Eventually the South democratized with the Voting Rights Act.

But US democracy is decentralized. As I show in other work, state govts can constrain democracy.

2/n Image
Sep 4, 2023 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Labor Day thread on my new working paper with @pfrymer and @hill_charlotte

tl;dr it's really hard to study but state level right-to-work (RTW) laws weaken organized labor, and by extension, weaken democratic institutions

ungated:

1/n dropbox.com/scl/fi/1hze2p1…
Image Labor unions are mostly thought of as just about wages/benefits. But unions give workers political socialization, class identity, & racial solidarity. Historically, labor backed the Voting Rights Act. In recent years they've organized & spent to support democracy reforms.

2/n

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Mar 11, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
His last statement in this clip should be disqualifying for participation in public life. He could do 1000 "twitterfiles" things and it wouldn't come close to this. One of the most disturbing video clips I've ever seen. Let that sink in. Disturbingly accurate
Jan 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Where we’re at with policing is that BLM protests increased voting for Democrats.

But they also caused a police wildcat strike, and real policy change in blue states & cities (like Memphis) was minimal. And even the successful reforms mostly went unenforced.

Police still rule. Two blue states sort of reformed qualified immunity. Two more passed delicensing reforms that haven’t really been used in practice. Many blue cities passed reforms that they didn’t enforce, like chokehold bans. Blue cities couldn’t even get their police to obey COVID orders.
Dec 22, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
this has normie libs feeling like they just got done watching Hamilton I tease but this is good
Nov 18, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The contemporary American pseudopopulist right is people with extremely expensive educations telling people with medium expensive educations that people they assume have no education support the labor exploitation of people with medium expensive educations because they're too gay "It's insulting to ask a guy with a beard and no glasses have solidarity with a guy who looks like a nerd"
Nov 4, 2022 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
Here's my new working paper with @adam_bonica (maybe my last twitter paper ever???)

tl;dr money in politics is a big reason that US politicians are old as hell and young people have no influence

ungated: dropbox.com/s/tui5dkbnnfu7…

1/n The US public supports having younger politicians, and over 70% of the public supports maximum age limits for officeholding. But the US Congress is older than every legislature except Cambodia's!

2/n
Oct 24, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I know legal services are excessive and I'm no big city lawyer but $25 million in legal fees to your campaign director's firm to work on a single case does seem a bit excessive. There's so much money in politics, but kinda sad to see small donors wanting to contribute toward the goals of BLM, OccupyDems, voting rights, etc only to see big proportions of money going to manager rents
Oct 3, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
"At least 33 of those 50 companies have resumed donating to election objectors."

In capitalist societies, the business community is the pivot that decides whether democracy lives or dies. US business is ready to let democracy backslide in exchange for tax cuts and deregulation. one might even say it's a Conservative Dilemma Image
Jul 9, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Fascinating that Tough On Crime local politicians are trending Black. (Despite the public opinion debates on Defund, Black ppl are still least likely to hold Tough On Crime attitudes.) @LaFleurPhD's analysis suggests that Black politicians gain most from racial dogwhistle appeals Image Racially conservative voters really seem to like the moral cover that it gives them when it's a Black politician saying the racially conservative stuff
Jan 22, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The real shit is that there's not much Biden can do. He's not doing the wrong Messaging™ or "too close to activists." Problems facing center-left parties are long term & structural.

Best hope for Dems was to use policy--but we learned that 2 pivotal senators don't want that. Globalization, deindustrialization, destruction of labor, increased immigration, & conservative parties' use of racial/cultural resentment are putting center-left parties in a bind. It's extra bad in US due to geography of districts.
Nov 22, 2021 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
My @jonathanchait critique. Piece is A+ on centrists. Some good points on lib foundations. But

-most of the "left" funders' $ still goes to normie liberals
-unpopular funders abound, but Chait singles out race
-conflates race & class politics
-neglects goal of social mvmts 1) From reading the piece, you'd think that Democracy Alliance, Ford, Planned Parenthood, etc are out there giving most of their $ to radical justice protests and the left flank of Dems.

Vast majority of their campaign $ goes to normie Dems in swing districts like MJ Hegar in TX
Nov 21, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
It’s strange—the moderate Biden wing leads the party, vocally opposes defund, condemns property damage in protests, pursues Bidenist legislation, excludes the AOC wing in campaigning, and then still blame them for the party’s popularity problems. Seems weird. Maybe they weight a couple Cori Bush tweets more heavily than all the other things I just mentioned, I dunno
Nov 9, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
There are conservatives and libertarians in my department, and I spend a lot of time with them in seminars and meetings. I like them. But I don’t define those concepts in the narrowest of partisan terms. Here are more comprehensive thoughts. I hope people opining on this clarify their arguments. I think many argue from implicit #2, that academia should reflect the ideological distribution of the mass public. That’s fine but be clear that this eliminates free traders
Sep 22, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
More generally, labor markets in capitalist societies will not produce many jobs designed to change institutions (especially markets, themselves). So people invent ridiculous narratives of their wage labor or investments as politically revolutionary. There's variation across industries on this, but it applies to non-profit and public sector work, too (my own included). "Changing the world" on issues unsupported by markets (e.g., solving climate or civil rights) comes from collective political action, not our job descriptions
Aug 31, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Here's my new op-ed with Schickler on the crucial role of Congress in protecting & expanding democracy.

Historically it's been POTUS, SCOTUS, and especially the states who've attacked democracy. Congress decides whether to stop them or let it slide.

thehill.com/opinion/civil-… As state governments & SCOTUS threaten democratic institutions, will today's Congress live up to its historical role, or will its inaction enable further backsliding? There's still time (e.g., they can ban gerrymandering even after states draw districts). But the clock's ticking.
Jul 20, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Whenever one of these studies comes out--that giving kids food, or money to poor schools & families, or air conditioning to 100 degree areas has big effects on educational & economic outcomes--I get sadder that foundations keep searching for nonsense non-redistribution solutions "How do we make poor children do better in school? No, I mean how do we make them do better in school without taxing the rich? I guess all we can do is gamification, ed tech, nudges, criminalize poor parents..."
Jul 12, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Suppression, subversion, and structural bias are all urgent, & attention (legislative or in the mass public) to them is not zero sum.

Seems clear that the public debate's focus on suppression is because the public has more interest & understanding of suppression than districting I too am somewhat interested in discussing the relative differences in urgency between these things (I'm a social scientist), but it's unclear how this discussion helps democracy given the non-zero sum nature of attention to these threats.
May 12, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Very sorry to say that the only time in US history when "moderates" ruled and things weren't polarized involved excluding Black people from politics, and that this indeed calls into question many contemporary appeals from scholars and pundits to reduce polarization The United States just hasn't experienced non-polarized multiracial democracy. And that's why, absent some serious context, calls to reduce polarization and encourage moderates to run just doesn't really hit.
Apr 28, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
🚨🚨🚨 FREE DISSERTATION IDEA 🚨🚨🚨

Why are there so few local politicians off of this diagonal dimension? More specifically, why are so many local politicians either YIMBY or committed to changing policing--and so few are both? Image When my family friend was murdered unarmed by police, which local politicians showed up? Not the YIMBYs!

When we're trying to build more housing, who shows up? Not the police defund/abolish (or even the policing reform) ones!

It's a puzzle for which I don't have a great answer.
Apr 27, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Amazing reporting from @AsteadWesley on a depressing reality: Black members of Congress are often from districts that the GOP gerrymandered into existence by packing Black voters--and some of these legislators oppose HR1 because they want to keep their gerrymandered districts. This is the latest demonstration that single member districts were a mistake.