Explore the vast range of titles available.

Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about \"American exceptionalism\" is untenable. Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe. Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart--Australia. This comparison is particularly revealing, not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical, political, and social characteristics, but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century, just when American unions, against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression, came closest to doing something similar. Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome, and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions. He argues that prosperity, democracy, liberalism, and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed. And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party, but, rather, the powerful impact of repression, religion, and political sectarianism.

Voters check in to cast their ballots at a fire station that serves as a polling place on Nov. 4, 2014 in Climax, N.C. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center drew on its vast storehouse of national polls and released a survey of the state of Americans' party affiliations that is well worth looking at. Considering that Bill Clinton, in his two presidential races, lost these voters in one and tied them in the other, this move toward Democratic affiliation--in 2012, Mitt Romney lost Asian-Americans by 47 percentage points--is a substantial change.