Corporate Power and Local Democracy in the Gilded Age(s): Essays on Extraction, Fragmentation, and Domination

Abstract

This dissertation explores how the institutional design of state and local governance has mediated the relationship between corporate power and local democracy in the United States. Across three historical essays, I document how populist reformers during our first Gilded Age used state constitutions and local government law to limit the democratic influence of local town bosses and the industrial titans who had captured state-level governing institutions. In a final co-authored chapter, I identify the consequences of specific changes in local government law that have facilitated the proliferation of corporate enclaves across American metropolitan areas. These four essays draw from the literatures and methodological approaches of legal analysis, historical institutionalism, comparative political economy, democratic theory, and empirical social science. They use the historical development of American industrial capitalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as a primary case to explore tensions between alternative conceptualizations of democratic self-governance: as (1) community-level decisionmaking (local self-determination), or (2) freedom from the exercise of arbitrary private power (anti-domination). I demonstrate that decentralization creates opportunities for private domination by powerful firms both indirectly (through the structural power of mobile capital and capture of public institutions) and also directly: through the facilitation of corporate fiefdoms. As an intervention in theories of self-determination, I conclude that the democratic valence of “local” control is contingent on the spatial concentration of taxable wealth and the institutional design of metropolitan governance.