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How did Republicans manage to hold the White House through much of the past half century even as the Democratic Party held the hearts of most American voters? The authors of this groundbreaking study argue that they did so by doing what Democrats have also excelled at: triggering psychological mechanisms that deepen cultural divisions in the other party's coalition, thereby leading many of its voters either to choose the opposing ticket or to stay home. The Politics of Cultural Differencesis the first book to develop and carefully test a general theory of cultural politics in the United States, one that offers a compelling new perspective on America's changing political order and political conflict in the post-New Deal period (1960-1996). David Leege, Kenneth Wald, Brian Krueger, and Paul Mueller move beyond existing scholarship by formulating a theory of campaign strategies that emphasizes cultural conflict regarding patriotism, race, gender, and religion. Drawing on National Election Studies data, they find that Republican politicians deployed powerful symbols (e.g., \"tax and spend liberals\") to channel targeted voters toward the minority party. And as partisanship approached parity in the 1990s, Democratic leaders proved as adept at deploying their own symbols, such as \"a woman's right to choose,\" to disassemble the Republican coalition. A blend of sophisticated theory and advanced empirical tools, this book lays bare the cultural dimensions of American political life.

Adam Smith claims that humans naturally sympathize with others and seek their approval. The process of matching our sentiments with others' sentiments forms the basis of our moral judgment. But what do we do when sentiments conflict? Smith saw that we need to move beyond literal impartial spectators to reach some ideal by which we can judge others' sentiments and our own. That ideal is a category that we develop inductively. The category then allows us to construct imaginary representations of a perfect impartial spectator to arbitrate conflicts between the views of literal impartial spectators and our own.

The mix of public and private governance in the Federal Reserve System makes it an interesting case of entangled political economy. Does the governance of the Board of Governors differ significantly from that of the district banks? I argue that it does. Besides their significantly different organizational and accountability structures, I show two distinct trajectories of growth for the district banks versus the Board of Governors using budget and employment data from 1987 through 2014. The Board of Governors seems to be purely a government agency, while the district banks are much more like private entities. If district banks face incentives and have institutional features that make them act like private entities- constraining growth in budget and employment, developing and implementing new technology, and being responsive to market feedback- then we can expect them to implement better monetary policy and financial oversight than the bureaucratic Board of Governors does.

Austrian economists have contributed several important concepts to business cycle theory including: inter-temporal coordination of production and consumption, heterogeneous specificity of capital, non-neutrality of money, and the capital structure of production. Noticeably lacking, however, is a clear theory of expectations. Recent Austrian responses to rational expectations critiques—such as positing a prisoner’s dilemma, heterogeneous entrepreneurs, and adverse selection—try to fill this gap. But much work remains to be done developing an Austrian theory of expectations, one where they are endogenous to the market process and market institutions. This paper explores how people adapt their expectations to changing market phenomena based upon their perceived costs and benefits of doing so. It then applies endogenous expectations to the 2008 financial crisis.

The Federal Reserve's interest rate policy was insufficient, on its own, to achieve the Federal Reserve's goals during the recent financial crisis. Acquiring the legal authority to pay interest on reserves allowed the Federal Reserve to implement monetary policy using a floor system and thereby divorce interest rate policy from balance sheet policy. Although the floor system entails immediate benefits, such as eliminating the implicit tax on reserves and reducing the credit risk associated with daylight overdrafts, the remote effects include potentially large costs. More specifically, the Federal Reserve's balance sheet policies may reduce longer-run economic growth and risk the institution's independence. To maintain the floor system's present benefits, the Federal Reserve should therefore continue to implement interest rate policy through interest on reserves. To protect against the floor system's future costs, the Federal Reserve should, however, restrict its balance sheet policy to Bagehot's principles for lastresort lending.

Over the past forty years several scholars have claimed that Adam Smith thought government intervention was a good and natural aspect of civil society. They argue that Smith often portrays politicians and government intervention as being benevolent. But there are many more passages from Smith's major works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, that suggest that he did not view government actors or government intervention as being particularly benevolent. Instead, Smith thought that government laws, on the whole, were at best a necessary evil because they encroached upon his ideal of the \"obvious and simple system of natural liberty.\"

Although most economists model individual behavior using comparative statics, that approach ignores several important aspects of human action. How do we account for people having opposite responses to the same price change? How do changes in the market or other institutions affect what people believe and how they act? The caveat of ceteris paribus gives economists the ability to bypass problems of complex individual cognition and motivations. This paper examines how people make choices outside the assumption of \"all else equal.\" The issue is often one of asymmetric interpretation, not asymmetric information. Many phenomena defy the logic of comparative statics because people have differing interpretive frameworks. An interpretive framework method of analysis, therefore, will give better explanations of emergent economic outcomes. For example, interpretive frameworks offer better analysis of the effects of recent Federal Reserve policy than comparative statics do. The method relies upon the costs and benefits of gaining knowledge, institutional change, and recent historical context.

How did Republicans manage to hold the White House through much of the past half century even as the Democratic Party held the hearts of most American voters? The authors of this groundbreaking study argue that they did so by doing what Democrats have also excelled at: triggering psychological mechanisms that deepen cultural divisions in the other party’s coalition, thereby leading many of its voters either to choose the opposing ticket or to stay home.

The Federal Reserve's interest rate policy was insufficient, on its own, to achieve the Federal Reserve's goals during the recent financial crisis. Acquiring the legal authority to pay interest on reserves allowed the Federal Reserve to implement monetary policy using a floor system and thereby divorce interest rate policy from balance sheet policy. Although the floor system entails immediate benefits, such as eliminating the implicit tax on reserves and reducing the credit risk associated with daylight overdrafts, the remote effects include potentially large costs. More specifically, the Federal Reserve's balance sheet policies may reduce longer-run economic growth and risk the institution's independence. To maintain the floor system's present benefits, the Federal Reserve should therefore continue to implement interest rate policy through interest on reserves. To protect against the floor system's future costs, the Federal Reserve should, however, restrict its balance sheet policy to Bagehot's principles for lastresort lending.