Josh Pacewicz
Josh Pacewicz
Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies
Overview
Josh Pacewicz is a political sociologist with a substantive interest in American statecraft and subnational governance, especially the interplay between federal policy and party politics, municipal finance, political advocacy and expertise, and more generally the democratic process.
His research relies primarily on interviews with legislators, state agency employees, municipal officials, and other policy workers, and he has also written about case selection, qualitative comparisons, and commonalities between public administration in the United States and other national contexts. Pacewicz’s scholarship has appeared in journals like the American Journal of Sociology, Sociological Methods and Research, Social Problems, and City and Community and been recognized by multiple disciplinary awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
His first book, entitled Partisans and Partners: The Politics of the post-Keynesian Society, examined municipal and partisan politics in two Rust Belt cities during the 2008 and 2012 election cycles. It shows how changes in American federalism—especially the corporate merger waves that followed 1970s-era financial deregulation and changes in the prevailing logics of inter-governmental finance—eroded the traditional base of both political parties, thus creating an opening for activists to take over grassroots politics, especially within the GOP.
His second book, Divided States: Doing Federalism in Red and Blue America, centered officials who interpret and administer federal rights and programs in the states. It conceptualized American federalism as an ongoing project by documenting officials’ coordinated efforts to make real the promises of flagship social programs and civil rights guarantees. In red states, this resulted in policies that were less embattled than politicians’ frontstage rhetoric suggested, but also contributed to an extremist and antidemocratic reorientation among Republicans, who used the architecture of state government to decouple legislative initiatives from their street-level consequences.
