Withering on the Vine: Political and Policy Lessons from Extractive Industry Decline in the United States

Abstract

Over the last several decades, macroeconomic forces have upended industries across advanced capitalist societies, displacing the workers and communities that once relied upon them. In the United States, places with ties to manufacturing and extractive industries have been hit particularly hard by these changes. As a result, many regions have experienced steep economic declines and major social disruptions. To weather these negative shocks, individuals in impacted communities have turned to the social safety net for help. Today, government transfers are a key source of income in many postindustrial areas. How do these trends shape the political behaviors of the people who call these places home? A growing body of evidence from the social sciences indicates that industrial decline is associated with shifts to the political right and rising support for right-wing populism, fueled by place-based grievances and feelings of resentment. However, existing accounts tend to overlook the role that the state has played in mediating the political consequences of industrial decline. How does widespread reliance on federal social policies affect individuals and communities in postindustrial contexts? And what are the consequences of these policy interventions for political participation? In this dissertation, I draw on theories of policy feedback to better understand how community-wide economic disruptions intersect with individual-level policy interventions to influence patterns of political participation. In Chapter 1, I advance a new model that reexamines the channels through which social programs generate feedback effects. I propose that social programs, even when they are targeted at the individual-level, can generate community-wide feedback effects that ultimately inform the political participation of beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries. I argue we are most likely to observe the effects of community-level mechanisms in contexts of high policy concentration, which we now typically find in postindustrial communities. I examine the theory through one social program in particular: Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). In Chapter 2, I introduce SSDI and draw on a longitudinal dataset of county-level administrative records to illustrate how the program has become highly concentrated in certain areas of the U.S., especially in the coal-producing counties of Appalachia. The data also reveal a puzzle: unlike other social insurance programs, high concentrations of SSDI beneficiaries fail to produce high levels of political participation. In the remaining chapters, I leverage my theoretical framework to explore why we observe this puzzling outcome. Chapter 3 reviews my approach to case selection and qualitative data collection, including archival research, interviews, and participant observation. Ultimately, I center my analysis on McDowell County, West Virginia. Chapter 4 relies on archival records and interviews in McDowell to document the local contextual factors that explain how SSDI became so highly concentrated in the county. In Chapters 5 and 6, I draw on interviews with SSDI beneficiaries, lawyers, and community members to show that community-level policy feedback effects emerge as a stronger explanation for the low political participation in McDowell than individual-level effects. Mechanisms at the community level, therefore, are crucial for understanding patterns of political behavior in contexts of high policy concentration. The study’s findings contribute new insights into the complex political and policy dynamics at play in postindustrial communities and underscore the importance of local-level factors in driving political outcomes.