Winner of the C. Herman Pritchett Book Award from the American Political Science Association

Winner of the Virginia Gray Book Award from the State Politics and Policy Section of the American Political Science Association

“Judging Inequality is an extraordinary achievement. In this empirical tour de force of exceptional transparency using massive new data sets, Gibson and Nelson have produced a seminal and indispensable work on state supreme courts replete with nuanced, compelling, and sometimes surprising results. Bravo!”
—Melinda Gann Hall, Professor of Political Science, MSU Distinguished Faculty Award Winner, and College of Law Faculty Affiliate, Michigan State University

“For too long, political scientists have paid little attention to the state courts relative to their importance in U.S. politics and policy. This pathbreaking book and data by James Gibson and Michael Nelson should ignite such attention. In Judging Inequality, the authors analyze six thousand cases to present compelling evidence on how judicial institutions and judges’ back-grounds shape inequality in the United States today.”
—Brandice Canes-Wrone, Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs and Professor of Politics, Princeton University

“A pathbreaking, first-of-its-kind study of how U.S. state law and courts—purportedly closer to the people themselves than the U.S. Supreme Court—effectively shield powerful economic interests from popular calls for equality and redistribution, Judging Inequality is an exemplary work of social science. James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson’s masterful yet sobering account is a must-read for anyone who harbors hopes for addressing inequality challenges that have plagued American society for generations through strategic litigation at the state court level.”
—Ran Hirschl, Professor of Government and Earl E. Sheffield Regents Chair in Law, University of Texas at Austin

Social scientists have convincingly documented soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality in the United States. Missing from this picture of rampant inequality, however, is any attention to the significant role of state law and courts in establishing policies that either ameliorate or exacerbate inequality. In Judging Inequality, political scientists James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson demonstrate the influential role of the fifty state supreme courts in shaping the widespread inequalities that define America today, focusing on court-made public policy on issues ranging from educational equity and adequacy to LGBT rights to access to justice to worker’s rights.

Drawing on an analysis of an original database of nearly 6,000 decisions made by over 900 judges on 50 state supreme courts over a quarter century, Judging Inequality documents two ways that state high courts have crafted policies relevant to inequality: through substantive policy decisions that fail to advance equality and by rulings favoring more privileged litigants (typically known as “upperdogs”). The authors discover that whether court-sanctioned policies lead to greater or lesser inequality depends on the ideologies of the justices serving on these high benches, the policy preferences of their constituents (the people of their state), and the institutional structures that determine who becomes a judge as well as who decides whether those individuals remain in office.

Gibson and Nelson decisively reject the conventional theory that state supreme courts tend to protect underdog litigants from the wrath of majorities. Instead, the authors demonstrate that the ideological compositions of state supreme courts most often mirror the dominant political coalition in their state at a given point in time. As a result, state supreme courts are unlikely to stand as an independent force against the rise of inequality in the United States, instead making decisions compatible with the preferences of political elites already in power. At least at the state high court level, the myth of judicial independence truly is a myth.

Judging Inequality offers a comprehensive examination of the powerful role that state supreme courts play in shaping public policies pertinent to inequality. This volume is a landmark contribution to scholarly work on the intersection of American jurisprudence and inequality, one that essentially rewrites the “conventional wisdom” on the role of courts in America’s democracy.

JAMES L. GIBSON is Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government at Washington University in St. Louis and Professor Extraordinary in Political Science, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

MICHAEL J. NELSON is Jeffery L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor in Political Science and associate professor of political science at the Pennsylvania State University.

Winner of the 2022 Gladys M. Kammerer Award from the American Political Science Association

“Hijacking the Agenda should have a big impact on how we think about Congress, policymaking, and political inequality. It provides an ambitious and creative analysis of an often-overlooked dimension of political power—the outsized role of the wealthy and well-organized in determining whose problems get addressed and whose get ignored.”
—Larry M. Bartels, May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science, Vanderbilt University

“To know who governs, we must know who controls the governing agenda. In this innovative book, four top political scientists show that the congressional agenda is disproportionately shaped by economic elites and the politicians most friendly to and funded by them. Combining sophisticated quantitative analysis and compelling case studies, Hijacking the Agenda sets a new standard for research on inequality and American democracy—and sounds a loud warning that all scholars and citizens should hear.”
—Jacob Hacker, Stanley Resor Professor of Political Science, Yale University

Why are the economic concerns of lower- and middle-class Americans so often ignored by Congress, while the economic goals of the wealthiest are prioritized, often resulting in policies promoting their interests? In Hijacking the Agenda, political scientists Christopher Witko, Jana Morgan, Nathan J. Kelly, and Peter K. Enns examine why Congress privileges the concerns of businesses and the wealthy over those of average Americans. They go beyond demonstrating this bias to document how and why economic policy is skewed in favor of the rich.

The authors analyze over 20 years of floor speeches by thousands of members of Congress to examine how campaign contributions and independent expenditures on behalf of candidates help set the national economic agenda. They find that legislators receiving more support from business and other wealthy interests were more likely to discuss the deficit and other upper-class priorities, while those receiving more assistance from unions were more likely to discuss issues important to the lower and middle class, such as economic inequality and wages. This attention imbalance matters because when members of Congress talk about certain issues, their speech is often followed by legislative action. While unions use their resources to push back against wealthy interests, spending by the wealthy dwarfs that of unions, often giving the upper class the upper hand.

The authors use case studies analyzing financial regulation and the minimum wage to demonstrate how the economic power of the wealthy enables them to advance their agenda. In each case, the authors examine structural power, or the power that comes from a group’s economic position, and kinetic power, the power that comes from the ability to mobilize organizational and financial resources in the policy process. They show how business uses its structural power and resources to effect policy change in Congress, as when the financial industry in the late 1990s promoted passage of a bill that eviscerated financial regulations put in place after the Great Depression. Likewise, when business wants to preserve the status quo, it uses its power to keep issues off of the legislative agenda, as when inflation erodes the value of the minimum wage and its declining purchasing power leaves minimum-wage workers in poverty. Although groups representing lower- and middle-class interests, particularly unions, are sometimes able to shape policy if conditions are right, they lack structural power and have limited financial resources. As a result, the wealthy have considerable advantages in the policy process, advantages that only intensify as their economic power becomes more concentrated and policymakers continue to see policies beneficial to business as beneficial for all.

Hijacking the Agenda is an illuminating account of the way economic power influences the congressional agenda and policy process to privilege the wealthy and marks a major step forward in understanding the politics of inequality.

CHRISTOPHER WITKO is professor of public policy and political science and associate director of the School of Public Policy at Pennsylvania State University.

JANA MORGAN is professor of political science at the University of Tennessee.

NATHAN J. KELLY is professor of political science at the University of Tennessee.

PETER K. ENNS is professor of government at Cornell University and executive director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.