For the Balkinization Symposium on Emily Zackin and Chloe Thurston, The Political Development of American Debt Relief (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Timothy P.R. Weaver
In this engaging
and authoritative account of the politics of debt relief in the United States,
Emily Zackin and Chloe Thurston make a major contribution to the burgeoning
work on American political development (APD) that emphasizes political economy
and that which views APD though a multi-scalar lens, thereby uncovering the different
tempos and registers of political development at the local, state, and national
levels.
In The Political Development of American Debt Relief Zackin and Thurston build upon their own influential work in these areas. While in Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places, Emily Zackin refined our understanding of positive rights in the American political tradition through a focus on state constitutions, Chloe Thuston located the politics of credit and homeownership in the political economy at the urban, state, and federal levels in At the Boundaries of Homeownership. Having combined forces, Zackin and Thurston offer a compelling account of a highly consequential but understudied area of APD. In so doing, they tell a story that not only casts its eye on multiple levels of government but also across the ideas, organized interests, and institutions that both created and were created by struggles over debt relief. While so much could be written about this wonderful book, here I will focus on three areas that particularly struck a chord with me: the meaning of development, the role of ideas, and the related shift in party ideology and policy in the late twentieth century.
With respect to “development,”
the APD scholarship has been heavily influenced by two of the field’s leading
lights, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, who memorably define
political development as “durable shifts in governing authority,” which is
revealed by the creation, expansion, or rearrangement of state institutions. By
contrast, or perhaps by friendly amendment, Zackin and Thurston make several
innovative moves. First, their emphasis on state capacity, alongside
authority, leads them to detect political development where others might miss
it: in the expansion of adminstrative capacity in the judicial branch with the expansion
of bankruptcy courts, especially in the aftermath of the 1898 Bankruptcy Act.
Second, by examining the shift in state-level bankruptcy laws during the
nineteenth century, which became more favorable to debtors over time, Zackin
and Thurston show that the key developments related to debt relief were found at
the state level. Were the sole analytical focus on federal institutions his consequential
trend might have been classified as a case of non-development, since the Supreme
Court routinely struck down state-level laws and Congress frequently repealed federal
legislation sympathetic to debtors. Third, for Zackin and Thurston, state-level
politics were a critical means by which debtors could reshape “constitutional
meanings.” This perspective opens up a further, more radical possibility: that
political development itself might be registered as a “discursive shift,” a
notion explored by Jospeh Lowndes
and Victoria Hattam in their account of language, culture, and APD.
In a related
example of intellectual innovation, Zackin and Thurston depart from the
mainstream tendency in political science, and in some quarters of APD
scholarship, by affording a central role to ideas. Following those such as Robert
Lieberman, Rogers Smith,
and Margaret
Weir, Zackin and Thurston take ideas seriously and make a persuasive
argument that the contestation over whether indebted people deserved the right
to discharge their debts in voluntary bankruptcy was critical important to the
ebb and flow of debtors’ protections. Ideas about desert, as so often in
American political development, interacted with dominant ideas about which social
groups were entitled to full social citizenship, with women and African
Americans usually excluded from expanded protection afforded to farmers and
other property owners. That said, Zackin and Thurston are quite clear about the
role of organized interests, be they farmers who organized collectively and often
won out during the nineteenth century or creditors who mobilized decisively in
the 1980s and 1990s to strip debtors of the protections secured during the
post-war period. Hence, their story is not purely ideational but one that
charts the interaction among ideas, interests, and institutions.
Still, when it
comes to reversal of bankruptcy protections for debtors in the late twentieth
century, the relative causal significance of ideas, as opposed to interests and
institutions, seems to fade a little, especially when compared with the account
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where ideas seemed central. It
may be that in both periods that ideas were “epiphenomenal,” that is
reflections of underlying interests that sought ideological buttress in support
of policies that promoted their material well-being. In that scenario ideas are
important only insofar as they offer political cover for material concerns. But
given the billing given to ideas—in the preface, where Zackin and Thurston
argue that “ideas about debt have…helped shape…economic and political
structures” and in the introduction where they maintain that “[t]he law came to
reflect…underlying ideas about who was entitled to material security and to the
government’s protection”—the authors clearly imply that ideas themselves have
motive force. Zackin and Thurston certainly show that “ideas mattered” in both
instances; how much ideas mattered, and where they fit into the causal story,
might be a fruitful avenue for future scholars to explore.
The question of the
relative impact of ideology is of particular moment for the late twentieth
century shift during which bankruptcy reform underwent a decisive turn to the
benefit of creditors. In keeping with work
on business mobilization and economic policy in the 1970s and 1980s, Zackin and
Thurston demonstrate that creditors expanded their political capacity to push
for change in Congress. But ideas in this stage of political development seem
to matter less here. It may be that egalitarian ideas were in short supply by
the 1980s as those institutions best placed to advance them, such as labor
unions, were themselves on the back foot, programmatically and ideologically. But
this raises a final question: where are the Democrats in Zackin and Thurston’s
account of the late twentieth century politics of debt relief?
In the fascinating
chapter on the erosion of debt relief, Zackin and Thurston connect only tenuously
this critical development to the internal shift in the Democratic Party towards
neoliberal economic and social policies. Unlike many APD scholars, they not
allergic to the concept of neoliberalism, but like Hacker
and Pierson’s work on the rise of economic inequality, most of the action happens
on the Republican side of the aisle. But what of the Democrats? Zackin and
Thurston mention in passing that the pro-creditor Bankruptcy Abuse Protection and
Consumer Protection Act enjoyed “sizable support from Democrats,” which was
opposed by those such as Elizabeth Warren before she became a Senator, but the
book only gives a limited sense of the extent to which elected Democrats embraced
pro-creditor positions. It may well be that that the Democrats sought to resist
the pro-creditor turn, but it would have been interesting, for example, to know
about the role of those such as the erstwhile Senator from Delaware, Joe Biden.
Were he and other congressional Democrats close to the credit card industry
supportive of their positions on bankruptcy reform? Did the neoliberal embrace
by the Democratic Party extend to the realm of bankruptcy? Were there any or
many holdouts? As with all great books, The Political Development of
American Debt Relief, answers many questions and raises others; these are a
few that came to mind as I read.
In The Political
Development of American Debt, Zackin and Thurston make several key
contributions: they locate political development in usual places, such as the
judicial branch; they offer a captivating account of multi-level political
development; and suggest that ideas are key drivers of American political
development. It will be widely read, cited, and assigned.
Timothy P.R. Weaver is Associate
Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Albany
(SUNY). He is the author of Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political
Development in the United States and the United Kingdom (2016) and
coeditor of How Ideas Shape Urban Political Development (2020). He
is coeditor of the Urban Affairs Review.