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Financial Deregulation, Income Inequality, And Partisan Politics From The Great War To The Great Recession, Eric Reed Keller

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines how financial deregulation and partisan politics shaped American market-based income distribution from 1914 to 2012 through a process called market conditioning. By using time-series data analysis, I access the effect of legislative and bureaucratic financial deregulation on market-based income concentration for the very wealthy. Then, I use process-tracing to determine why both political parties converged in the 1980s to support financial deregulation. I find financial deregulation does increase market-based income for top income earners, especially the top .01 percent. In addition, I determine that both parties were captured by neoliberal economic ideology and through the bureaucracy, …