In August, the Trump administration announced it would increase economic pressure towards Iran, implementing measures “like have never been seen” to force a favourable settlement to its conflict with the Islamic Republic. On 23 August, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced what he termed an “economic D-Day”, in the form of the “Operation Economic Outcast” sanctions package, which would sustain the existing US blockade of Iranian ports and add secondary sanctions towards entities in third countries doing business with Iran.

The campaign is already inflicting damage, as Iran’s oil exports have collapsed, its monetary position has deteriorated, and shortages have worsened. Yet this alone is unlikely to produce a decisive victory for the US, given the country’s historic capacity to endure economic pressure, a lack of full cooperation by other states in the region, and the limited ability of economic coercion on its own to produce major political concessions. Washington may be able to inflict additional costs on the already-battered Iranian economy, but this alone will not necessarily create the diplomatic leverage necessary to end the war on favourable terms.

Iran has adapted to economic pressure before

Several episodes in modern Iranian history demonstrate the difficulty in compelling political outcomes through economic pressure. Perhaps the most significant example came during the oil nationalisation crisis of 1951-53. After Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Britain mounted an intensive campaign to prevent Iran from selling its oil abroad. Through legal action, pressure on oil companies, and control over critical infrastructure and expertise, Britain effectively implemented an embargo on Iran. The result was an enormous loss of government revenue and debilitating economic difficulties.

Nevertheless, this pressure did not force Mossadegh to reverse nationalisation or accept a settlement favourable to Britain. His government lasted for two more years while oil exports collapsed. Iran attempted to seek alternative buyers and to operate its oil industry independently, but with little success. Nevertheless, the Iranian economy survived through deficit spending, the liquidation of foreign currency reserves, and other emergency measures, in addition to a reliance on other sectors such as agriculture. Mossadegh even negotiated a barter trade agreement with the Soviet Union toward the end of his tenure. While economic isolation weakened the prime minister politically, it failed to produce capitulation. The crisis concluded with his removal in a US- and UK-backed August 1953 coup, rather than with Britain successfully coercing his government into abandoning its position on nationalisation through economic pressure.

Iran demonstrated a different form of adaptation during the 1960s. Although Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was one of Washington’s closest regional allies, he consistently sought to reduce Iran’s economic and political dependence on the US – particularly after US officials attempted to use that dependence as leverage to influence policymaking in Tehran. Under the Shah, Iran expanded economic relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, most prominently through Soviet-backed industrial projects. The possibility of acquiring military equipment from Moscow likewise gave the Shah an alternative option as the Kennedy and Johnson administrations attempted to constrain Iranian regional ambitions. Forming these ties proved successful in providing Iran with the counter-leverage necessary to produce a more equal partnership with the United States and greater freedom of action by the 1970s.

The Islamic Republic operates in a different international environment and from a radically different ideological perspective than Mossadegh or the Shah. It is a far more repressive regime, and its corruption, mismanagement, and strategic choices have contributed immensely to Iran’s economic challenges. However, the underlying problem for US policymakers remains comparable. Iran’s current political order has managed to survive amid long-term international isolation, and monetary and economic malaise. A further intensification of this pressure is unlikely to be effective now, after Iran has spent decades learning to operate under such conditions.

Ultimately, the country has proven adaptable across domestic and geopolitical contexts. It has absorbed economic damage or sought alternative relations while facing significant pressure, in the pursuit of its political and strategic aims.

Source: USS Rafael Peralta enforces Maritime Blockade, Public Domain. The appearance of U.S. Department of War (DoW) visual information does not imply or constitute DoW endorsement.”

Trade and finance links give Iran room to manoeuvre

As during the 1960s, contemporary Iran has economic alternatives. Even if Washington were to sustain its blockade of Iranian ports for the foreseeable future, the country still retains channels for international trade. Though some states, such as the United Arab Emirates, have cut trade with Iran, not all of Iran’s neighbours have followed suit. Iraq and Azerbaijan, for instance, have maintained cross-border trade, and the Islamic Republic has redoubled its efforts to expand commercial ties with Turkey and gain access to Pakistani ports. Despite the implementation of new secondary sanctions by the US, neither Turkey nor Pakistan seem likely to abandon trade relations with Iran.

Additionally, the Islamic Republic has found innovative means to resolve some of its monetary challenges through cooperation with its neighbours. This includes seeking to join the BRICS development bank or to secure agreements to access foreign exchange resources held elsewhere in the Middle East. Additionally, the Central Bank of Iran claims to be finalising the integration of the Iranian and Russian banking networks. While these measures are impractical and may not radically alleviate Iran’s financial challenges, they offer crucial lifelines for regime survival. 

Some have speculated the US could pursue a large-scale “land blockade” to counter these adaptations. Such a policy would be extraordinarily difficult to implement, in great part because it would require coordination with several states, each with divergent interests and policies.

Unilaterally raising costs on partners that maintain trade with Iran could also backfire, particularly if Washington asks governments to sacrifice economically important relationships in pursuit of a policy they do not support. Rather than tightening Tehran’s isolation, aggressive secondary pressure could encourage neighbouring states to seek their own workarounds or resist Washington’s demands altogether. This over-extension could further diminish US leverage in the region over time. US policymakers are aware of this dilemma, as evidenced by efforts to minimise diplomatic repercussions caused by the implementation of punitive measures on Egyptian and Turkish banks.

The reality is that Iran’s extensive land borders, evasion networks, and decades of experience circumventing sanctions and managing a “resistance economy” will prove difficult to overcome. The necessary buy-in from other states in the region does not seem to be forthcoming and will be challenging to secure.

Punishment vs leverage

The distinction between punishment and diplomatic leverage is also significant. A sustained blockade and expanded sanctions could certainly make rejecting US terms for a settlement more materially costly for the Islamic Republic. However, they cannot make accepting those terms politically acceptable. If Washington demands concessions that Iranian leaders believe could threaten the sovereignty or survival of their regime, as they perceive it, they are likely to refuse despite ever-worsening economic conditions.

To this point, Iran has already set itself up for a long-term war of attrition against the US. If the Islamic Republic expects time to work in its favour or believes that its adaptations can keep the regime functioning, then even severe pressure may strengthen its determination to wait Washington out or continue fighting rather than compromise. In such circumstances, the US risks accumulating punishment without gaining any meaningful leverage.

Washington should therefore judge its new measures by whether they change Iran’s calculations, rather than by the level of damage they inflict, even if that damage is “unprecedented.” Iranian history suggests the two do not necessarily correlate. From Mossadegh’s resistance to the British oil embargo to the Shah’s cultivation of alternative Eastern bloc ties, various Iranian political regimes have repeatedly responded to external economic pressure by searching for workarounds to achieve their strategic aims while at the same time accepting substantial costs.

The Trump administration should not abandon economic pressure entirely. Properly employed, it can constrain Iran’s ability to sustain military operations and create incentives for further negotiations. However, “Operation Economic Outcast” carries clear risks. Continually expanding sanctions without changing Iran’s calculations could serve to alienate the regional partners whose cooperation the US needs, without producing strategic payoff. If Iran continues to resist despite mounting economic damage, the US may then face growing pressure to escalate militarily simply because its intensified economic strategy has failed to deliver the desired outcome. Punitive economic measures should therefore be judged by whether imposed costs actually increase the ability of the US to achieve its political objectives, rather than by the scale of punishment.

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The post Why more US economic pressure may not force Iran to concede first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

When major metropolitan areas expand, local governments often justify multi-million-dollar highway and road projects under a straightforward promise: infrastructure keeps traffic moving and pays for itself through economic development. This common-sense logic suggests a balanced partnership; public roads enable local development, and that new development, in turn, generates the tax revenue and impact fees (charges levied on new developments) needed to expand road capacity as the population grows. 

However, new research analyzing satellite data across more than 3,200 census tracts between 2010-2024 in the fast-growing “Texas Triangle” of Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio shows that this relationship is deeply unbalanced. While public road construction aggressively drives private land development, newly developed land contributes back far less to future road expansion. The result is a lopsided cycle: public tax dollars heavily subsidize the infrastructure that enriches private real estate development, while leaving the public stuck with worsening traffic congestion. 

The growing infrastructure mismatch

Between 2010 and 2024, the population in Texas’s four largest metro areas grew by over 30 percent, more than four times the national average. Yet, road expansion has failed to keep pace with the sheer volume of new vehicles. State transportation data reveals that while the number of registered vehicles in Texas grew by 172 percent over recent decades, highway capacity increased by just 19 percent. Today, 94 of the 100 most congested road segments in Texas are located within the Texas Triangle.

The practical impact of this 172-to-19 percent gap isn’t just a statistical abstraction; it shapes daily life across the metroplexes. A May 2025 KENS 5 news report from San Antonio’s Alamo Ranch neighborhood highlighted what happens when subdivisions outpace arterial design: a routine three-mile drive to daycare was taking residents over 45 minutes, with gridlock so severe that emergency vehicles are routinely forced into oncoming traffic.

The satellite record shows why. As seen in the imagery below, while a dense network of rooflines, suburban cul-de-sacs, and commercial strips expanded across the Alamo Ranch area between 2010 and 2024, Wiseman Boulevard remained unchanged as the area’s sole traffic artery, funnelling a decade and a half of massive private growth through the exact same two-lane boulevard. 

Figure 1 – Wiseman Blvd, Alamo Ranch, San Antonio, Texas, 2010

Map Data: Google Earth Pro / Texas Orthoimagery Program, Maxar Technologies.

Figure 2 – Wiseman Blvd, Alamo Ranch, San Antonio, Texas, 2024

Map Data: Google Earth Pro / Airbus.

Whether it is Alamo Ranch in San Antonio, Williamson County along the I-35 corridor, or outer Harris County, the pattern is identical: local infrastructure routinely buckles under the weight of rapid residential infill.

To understand why highway networks constantly lag demand, and why local upgrades fail to solve the bottleneck, we analyzed satellite imagery provided by the US Geological Survey. By measuring physical changes in land cover across 15 years, we tracked the distinct physical footprints of road construction and land development, including housing subdivisions, shopping centers, and commercial hubs.

Do new roads spur development or does development increase pressure for new roads?

To determine whether road building causes development or development forces road building, we faced a classic “chicken-and-egg” problem. Does new asphalt push urban development into rural fields, or does suburban growth force local governments to pave new lanes? 

To solve this, we used an advanced statistical technique. Instead of looking at roads and buildings at the exact same moment, we examined time lags. We asked: does road construction built between 2010 and 2015 predict new land development between 2015 and 2019? And vice versa: does land developed between 2010 and 2015 predict new roads built between 2015 and 2019? By staggering the timeline, we can isolate which factor is actively pulling the trigger. 

Neighborhoods change at different rates, and sprawl in one area naturally bleeds into the next census tract. Our model controlled for local demographics, income levels, population density, and neighboring development patterns to isolate the true, direct effect that roads and buildings have on one another over time. 

The data reveals a lopsided growth loop

The analysis confirmed that road construction and land development do indeed feed into each other, but they do not act as equal partners. The relationship is asymmetric, meaning the force operating in one direction is far stronger than the feedback coming back. Across every period analyzed, the impact of road construction on future land development was significantly larger than the reciprocal impact of development on road construction. 

The satellite record shows why. As seen in the imagery below, while a dense network of rooflines, suburban cul-de-sacs, and commercial strips expanded across the Alamo Ranch area between 2010 and 2024, Wiseman Boulevard remained unchanged as the area’s sole traffic artery, funnelling a decade and a half of massive private growth through the exact same two-lane boulevard. 

Photo by Katie Montgomery on Unsplash

In simple terms, building roads acts as a powerful accelerator. Constructing new roads creates arterial corridors that aggressively trigger rapid, widespread private development.  But private development yields a weak return for local government. While new subdivisions and commercial centres do generate some funding for roads (through local property taxes and developer impact fees), this feedback is tiny compared to the massive public investment that started the process. 

Public risk means private profit, and permanent traffic

This lopsided dynamic exposes a major policy flaw in how we grow our cities. Local governments and public agencies absorb the massive upfront financial risk of building car-centric infrastructure. That public investment immediately unlocks raw land, lowering barriers for private developers and driving up real estate values. 

However, because private developers pay back only a fraction of the full infrastructure footprint through impact fees or localized tax incentives, the broader public ends up subsidizing private real estate profits. The tax revenues generated by new developments are simply insufficient to build and maintain the road capacity needed to support the traffic that those very developments produce. 

By continuously prioritizing road construction as the primary way of spurring economic growth, public policy socializes the risk of suburban sprawl while privatizing the financial gain. Until infrastructure planning accounts for this uneven economic loop, public spending will continue to fuel rapid sprawl, leave local budgets strained, and keep drivers stuck in chronic traffic congestion. This is the infrastructure trap we see in the Texas Triangle.

• This article is based on the paper, “Infrastructure-Led Development: The Reciprocal Asymmetry of the Urban Growth Machine” in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World.
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The post In Texas, building roads leads to private profit and traffic, at the expense of local budgets first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

Saturday 22 August 2026 marked the 30^th anniversary of welfare reform, signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The legislation terminated cash assistance as an entitlement for poor single-parent families. States are required to have 50 percent of all families and 90 percent of two-parent families engaged in work but can meet the work standard by reducing the number of families receiving assistance. The result: the caseload decreased from 4.4 million families in 1996 to one million today, a reduction of 77 percent over three decades. Gone, too, is the welfare cheque: according to the Government Accountability Office, more than 75 per cent of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds went directly to families as cash in the late 1990s; today, states spend the bulk on programmes and organisations providing education and training, child care and parenting services.

Welfare assistance since the 1990s: success or slush fund?

Despite notions that welfare fraud by recipients is widespread, fraud is more likely to take place where the money is: at the state and organisational level, when an organisation overcharges for services or bills the state for services never provided. Mississippi has been a case in point.

As Anna Wolfe, the Mississippi Today reporter who uncovered fraud at the hands of state officials, has shown, TANF worked as a state slush fund. Starting in the 2010s, the Mississippi Department of Human Services rejected almost 99 per cent of applicants for TANF. It had spare cash to spend, which the head of the state welfare agency, John Davis, did, but not on families. Instead, funds were redirected to organizations with fake contracts that did not provide any services. In 2022, Davis pleaded guilty to defrauding the state of Mississippi of millions of dollars. This was a sophisticated welfare fraud scheme, involving the rich and powerful stealing from the poor, in a state where TANF reaches two of every 100 families in poverty.

And yet, the programme is portrayed as a success. Here is what Donald Trump wrote in 2011, in Time to Get Tough: “The secret to the 1996 Welfare Reform success was that it tied welfare to work. To get your check, you had to prove that you were enrolled in job-training or trying to find work.”

For conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, TANF has been a success story, worth defending against “revisionist” narratives. In truth, Democrats have lost interest in a programme that is now virtually extinct. They have preferred to expand other means-tested programmes: Food Stamps, renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which reached a peak of over 47 million recipients in 2013 and still served 42 million in 2025. Medicaid, together with the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) covers almost 74 million Americans in 2026. As a result, child poverty rates following receiving assistance have remained stable: there has been no poverty explosion.

Trump has gotten tough on welfare

But this status quo, however unsatisfactory, has unravelled again. The second Trump administration has unleashed a second wave of welfare reform, which consists of cuts to all means-tested programmes under the guise of strengthening work efforts and combatting welfare fraud. Trump again, in Time to Get Tough: “But here’s the rub: the Welfare Reform Act dealt only with one program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, not the other seventy-six welfare programs which today cost taxpayers more than $900 billion annually. We need to take a page from the 1996 reform and do the same for other welfare programs.”

“P20250704MR-0425” by The White House, United States Government Work

So, Trump was following the Heritage Foundation blueprint when, in his first term, he signed executive orders strengthening work requirements for SNAP recipients, reversing the maximum-accessibility, no-fuss policies implemented under his predecessor, Barack Obama. But work requirements for Medicaid were absent from the conservative agenda.

This changed in the mid-2010s, when the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act allowed states to provide coverage for working-age adults with annual incomes below 138 per cent of the poverty line. Republicans protested the expansion of Medicaid to the “non-deserving” poor. But it was the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), that first came up with work requirement ideas for Medicaid recipients. The FGA praised the experiments “driving the nation into a new welfare reform frontier“. In 2017, the Trump administration encouraged states to experiment with community engagement programmes for newly eligible populations, with disappointing results: 18,000 people lost coverage in Arkansas in 2018–2019, without any increase in employment. In 2021 the Biden administration rescinded these work requirements.

Work requirements are back

Fast-forward to 2025: work requirements for able-bodied Medicaid recipients have become a standard recommendation across conservative think tanks. In May 2025, four Trump officials — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mehmet Oz, Brooke Rollins and Scott Turner penned an op-ed in the New York Times justifying work requirements, old and new, for able-bodied recipients of SNAP, Medicaid and housing assistance.

Meanwhile, the stigmatisation of benefit recipients — depicted as fraudsters and idle — has returned in force. The “welfare queen” of the 1980s, loosely based on the story of Linda Taylor, a serial scammer and criminal in 1970s Chicago, has been replaced by a new figure: a 29-year-old male playing video games on the couch.

Work requirements for most working age adult benefit recipients are now back in full swing with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law in July 2025 by President Trump. Its supporters argue that millions of ‘able-bodied individuals’ will get to work as a result, completing welfare reform’s unfinished success story. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. In 1996, welfare reform was not entirely about benefit cuts: it was also about getting single mothers into the fast-expanding service economy of the 1990s.

Welfare reform is about cutting spending

In 2026, there is no such pretence: adults aged 19–64 must log a minimum of 80 hours a month of work-related activity or lose eligibility for Medicaid, without any support. How these requirements will get the non-working Medicaid recipients “off the couch” is unclear—particularly when the administration’s FY2026 budget proposes cuts to Department of Labor workforce programmes, including the elimination of Job Corps. 

While welfare reform restricted federal means benefits to many legal immigrants during their first five years of residency, the Beautiful Bill goes further by making access to health, nutrition, housing, childcare and other services more difficult for many immigrant and mixed-status families.

The real point of the OBBBA is not to get people into work: it is to cut federal spending to pay for tax cuts that benefit billionaires and millionaires alike. Where work enters the picture, it is solely on the business side of the equation. Four days after the law was signed, with farm labour shortages worsened by mass deportations, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins pointed to the “34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program” as potential replacements for deported farm workers. In 1996, welfare reform at least claimed to be about helping the poor. In 2026, the Trump administration makes no bones about starving people into work.

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The post Thirty years after welfare reform, the Trump administration is starving the poor into work first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

For this episode of our AI mini-series, the Phelan US Centre spoke to Mona Sloane about the societal dimensions of AI’s influence, how these relate to AI accountability and transparency, and the current challenges facing AI regulators.

Mona Sloane is an Assistant Professor of Data Science and Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She heads the Sloane Lab, a growing research group which focuses on social science leadership on AI in professions and responsible AI governance.

Further reading and resources

• Predicted: How AI is Restructuring Social Life – Mona Sloane – 2026, University of California Press
• Co-Opting AI: Public Conversations About Artificial Intelligence and Society – virtual public speaker series at the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia
• Sloane, Mona. 2022. “To Make AI Fair, Here’s What We Must Learn to Do.” Nature 605 (7908): 9–9.
• Calhoun, C., Duus, E., Ho, D., Kitzmann, O., and Sloane, M. (2025): ‘Students in the Driver’s Seat: Establishing Collaborative Cultures of Technology Governance at Universities.’ In: Reimagining AI: For Environmental Justice and Creativity. University of Virginia: Digital Technology for Democracy Lab.
• Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. 2018. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.

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We’d love to hear what you think – you can send us a message on Twitter @LSE_US, or email us at uscentre@lse.ac.uk.

This podcast was produced by Chris Gilson and Avan Fata.

• Featured image: Photo by Sarah Sheedy on Unsplash
• Note:  This podcast gives the views of the interviewee and host, and is not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, the LSE Phelan US Centre, nor the London School of Economics.

The post How AI is influencing society with Dr Mona Sloane | The Ballpark podcast first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

Seizing on a pre-existing trend toward precarious work, platform firms – businesses like Uber and Airbnb which connect consumers with services provided by others – built their business model around classifying workers as independent contractors—avoiding the costs of benefits and protections owed to employees. This, together with large amounts of capital, funded years of unprofitable growth for these corporations. With this in mind, we would expect platform firms to uniformly oppose government regulations that classify workers as employees. But that is not what happens. Platform firms vary in their responses to employment regulations and, crucially, some embrace them in pursuit of a competitive advantage.

Platform firms are responding differently to government regulation

While in the past platform firms operated in a grey regulatory environment, ignored the rules that did exist, and dared governments and courts to catch up, we are now in a new era in which governments are increasingly regulating these firms, and firms are embracing regulations in turn. This includes employment regulations. In California, Spain, and Denmark, there have been initiatives to regulate the employment status of platform workers and firms have responded not with uniform resistance, but with a range of strategies, including, in some cases, voluntarily extending workers’ employee status.

What explains this variation? In new work I argue that regulatory outcomes in platform work result from the interaction between welfare state structures and firm strategies. How countries fund social protection determines what type of conflicts firms will have to face. In “contribution-based” welfare states such as the United States and Spain, employers and employees jointly pay into pensions, unemployment insurance, and healthcare, and access to these benefits is tied to employment status. Misclassifying a worker as a contractor therefore triggers conflict on multiple fronts: workers lose benefits, social security agencies lose revenue, and compliant employers face unfair competition from firms that do not pay in.

In “tax-based” welfare states such as Denmark, most benefits are funded through general taxation and are available regardless of employment status. Here, employment classification is a lower-stakes issue for the state and regulatory pressure instead centres on making sure platforms and workers report income accurately for tax purposes.

Platform firms respond to these regulatory environments strategically, taking into consideration competitive calculations. Their response—whether to oppose or embrace regulations—depends on two interrelated factors. First, firms assess whether they can disregard legislation without losing competitive ground. As mentioned, the era of no regulation or ignoring regulations without costs altogether might be over. As enforcement tightens or legal avenues close, non-compliance becomes riskier than adaptation.

Second, firms consider whether embrace of tougher rules itself offers competitive advantages over rivals. Even when firms could potentially disregard rules, they might embrace stricter standards if they anticipate lower adjustment costs than their competitors—because of their business model, their size, or their need to attract workers. Thus, the competitive implications of compliance, and not just a straightforward preference to avoid costs, drive firm responses to regulatory environments.

Photo by Kenjiro Yagi on Unsplash

Platform firm regulation in California, Spain, and Denmark

California has a welfare system based on contributions. This created a regulatory environment characterized by multiple conflicts around employment status. Following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, the state government issued legislation that would have categorized workers in platform firms as employees, but firms in ride-hailing and food delivery responded by spending over $200 million on Proposition 22, a direct-democracy initiative that categorized their workers in a new hybrid employment category. Crucially, this was a collective strategy. Because every major platform firm in the sector faced the same threat and had access to the same override mechanism, none had an incentive to comply individually if rivals did not. The result is that in California no platform worker became employee.

In Spain, the contribution-based nature of the welfare system similarly generated conflicts around employment status, and the government enacted legislation categorizing delivery workers as employees (Rider Law). But Spanish firms lacked any equivalent to a ballot initiative, so collective resistance was not an option. Instead, each firm calculated its own costs and benefits and responded accordingly. Two firms complied with the legislation, due to lower adjustment costs, while the market leader held out the longest in defiance. The compliant rivals pushed hard for the government to enforce the law uniformly in the sector—precisely because that one firm’s non-compliance was undercutting them competitively. The result has ultimately been that all workers in the delivery sector are categorized as employees.

Denmark shows that firms can choose to extend employee status even when governments never ask them to. In this country, with a welfare system financed primarily through taxes, employment classification was not as conflictual, meaning that public authorities did not need to advance specific initiatives regarding employment status and instead focused on taxation. Still, following competitive calculations, some firms gave workers the option to become employees.

Table 1 below shows the welfare state structures, firms’ responses and the outcomes in terms of employment status for platform workers.

Table 1 – Regulatory Outcomes

What this means for regulation

These three cases show that platform firms are not a single bloc with a fixed preference against regulation. Whether firms resist or embrace employee status depends on the welfare institutions structuring their environment and on their competitive position relative to rivals. Firms with lower adjustment costs can turn compliance into an advantage over competitors, and once they do, they often push regulators to enforce the same rules on everyone else.

This matters for how governments approach enforcement. Uneven enforcement does not just create unfairness for workers; it also creates unfairness between firms, and if left unaddressed, it can even push compliant firms back towards non-compliance. The Spanish case, where two firms pressed the government to punish the market leader’ non-compliance, suggests that firms that comply can become unlikely allies of regulators seeking to close protection gaps for platform workers—a dynamic worth keeping in mind as more governments move to regulate the platform economy.

• This article is based on the paper, “To Be or Not to Be an Employee: The Responses of Governments and Firms to Platform Work,” in Perspectives on Politics.
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• Featured image credit: Photo by Kenjiro Yagi on Unsplash
• Please read our comments policy before commenting. 
• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.

The post Platform companies embrace labour regulations to beat their rivals first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

He argues that medical education needs to teach students to listen to patients’ narratives and to understand the wider environmental and socio-economic factors that are shaping their lives.

Selective listening in US medicine

From the exclusion of Black physicians’ voices from medical school curriculums to the dismissal of patient narratives in favour of technological measurement, the medical history of the US is in part a history of selective listening: deciding, institutionally and individually, whose voices are heard and whose are not. The consequences of this selectivity are present today. In an era of deepening scepticism toward medical institutions—scepticism that is often historically grounded rather than just irrational—the relationship between physicians and the communities they serve has become frayed. This is evident where physician shortages are most acute, where patients are monitored rather than listened to, and in policy conversations where solutions are driven more by data than dialogue.

Medical training equips future physicians with diagnostic, medical, and therapeutic tools to treat illness, but another important and potentially powerful tool is underappreciated. While discussions of listening appear in the medical literature, it is rarely framed as a necessity, or as anything beyond the interpersonal. Generous listening—broadly, listening to self, others, and nature, but more specifically listening to understand the humanity behind another’s words—can be a new framework for analysing public health and patient care alike.

In order to better understand the health contexts of patients, as well as the needs of our wider communities, medical education must create a fundamentally different framing of what medicine is for and who it is responsible to. Practices such as Rita Charon’s narrative medicine approach—which involves listening closely to patients’ narratives—point in this direction, but listening must extend further still, beyond the exam room and into the civic and structural world patients inhabit. Medical education must ensure a holistic approach that centres not only the socio-economic factors affecting patients, but also listening to patients, stakeholders, and the environments they inhabit.

How listening can be both a civic and clinical act

Health goes beyond the individual. A holistic public health approach must ensure not just recovery from illness but a community- and environment-oriented medicine. Generous listening provides exactly this framework, accounting for the need of physicians and policymakers alike to attend to the internal (self), external (others), and environmental (nature) factors shaping their patients’ and stakeholders’ lives.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Generous listening is therefore both a civic and a clinical skill. As the political philosopher Peter Levine reminds us, societies are already inherently civic: “deliberation, problem-solving, learning, the formation of social capital, and social movement activism constantly occur around us”, and medicine, as a civic institution, is no exception. Listening generously within and across these spaces is not an idealistic addition to clinical practice; it is a recognition of the world physicians already inhabit and are responsible to.

One concrete expression of this is what we might call listening to nature: paying close attention to the local environment and the global factors that affect it and, therefore, the patient’s life. Attentiveness to these conditions allows medical professionals to understand how climate change and the distinctive environmental context of their area shape long-term health outcomes. The water crises in Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi are instructive here: both represented not only infrastructure failures but failures of civic listening—of institutions systematically not hearing the communities most affected until the damage was done. As I have argued elsewhere, improving access to and quality of water is not peripheral to public health; it is foundational to it. Through listening to people’s basic needs within their lived contexts, generous listening offers physicians and policymakers alike a way to start from a public health perspective.

How listening in public health is underdeveloped

In teaching a recent Civic Studies course at Tufts University, I framed discussion around historian and activist Walter Rodney’s concept of underdevelopment, meaning “not the absence of development”, but rather the comparative analysis of a context factoring in the historical exploitation of that context by other forces, arguing that poverty is not a natural condition but a produced one, especially in public health. The same, this article contends, is true of medical neglect to listening.

One particularly instructive case is the history of the foetal heartbeat monitor. As historian Jacqueline Wolf has shown, its widespread adoption did not measurably expand clinical judgment, but rather gradually displaced it and the nurses who’d been instrumental in monitoring previously, contributing to a dramatic rise in medically unnecessary caesarean sections. The monitor gave physicians something to watch, and in watching, they stopped listening: to the patient, to the nursing staff, and to the broader question of what the intervention was for. This is underdevelopment through technology: the substitution of a tool for a human relationship, with costs borne disproportionately by patients.

The same pattern is visible in how American policymakers have responded to the shortage of physicians in rural and underserved communities—a shortage driven in part by decades of underinvestment and by the erosion of trust between medical institutions and the communities they are meant to serve. Rather than addressing these structural conditions, proposed solutions have increasingly turned to AI systems as a substitute for human clinicians. Bills introduced in several state legislatures, as well as federal discussions around expanding AI triage in underserved areas, reflect a growing institutional preference for technological reach over human interaction. Just as the foetal heartbeat monitor gave physicians something to watch in place of listening, AI systems risk giving policymakers something to deploy in place of something to repair. A shortage of physicians is a genuine problem; but removing the human listener from the clinical encounter does not solve the underdevelopment of health but rather deepens it. Understanding whose voices have been systematically discounted in health systems, and why, is not background knowledge for physicians; it is clinical knowledge.

Listening is the missing centre of medical education

Training the next generation of physicians to listen generously to patients, to communities, and to the structural conditions shaping health is not an add-on to medical education; it is its missing centre.

Michael Westerhaus and colleagues make this case compellingly in their argument for social medicine as a core component of medical training. Drawing in part on the tradition of the medical anthropologist Paul Farmer, they contend that physicians cannot adequately care for patients without understanding the socio-economic conditions shaping their health, and that this understanding must be built into curricula rather than left to individual decision-making. Generous listening and dialogue are the practical expression of this commitment—they are how social medicine is done, encounter by encounter, community by community.

A medical education that takes listening seriously as in these contexts will produce not only better clinicians, but more just institutions, and ultimately a healthier civic life.

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The recent trial and sentencing of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan in federal court raises significant issues regarding the independence of the judiciary in the United States and the Trump Administration’s continued efforts to maintain power and expand executive authority through the intimidation of judges.

Judge Dugan’s arrest for obstructing ICE enforcement

Judge Dugan was arrested in late April 2025 after directing agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from her courtroom to the chief judge’s office. The agents had come to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who was due to appear before her court on charges of domestic-abuse battery, under an Administrative Warrant for immigration charges. At the same time Judge Dugan cancelled the in-person hearing and instructed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney to leave.

Judge Dugan was charged with obstruction of justice and concealing a person from arrest. Subsequently Judge Dugan was convicted of obstructing an immigration arrest outside her courtroom. The federal court, noting her life-long public service, fined Dugan $5,000. Dugan’s arrest and trial was noteworthy because it violated a longstanding norm in American politics that federal law enforcement would not interfere with state courts.

How Trump is ignoring the judiciary, broadening executive authority, and undermining the rule of law

While the circumstances in Dugan’s case are more nuanced that opponents of the Administration’s policy suggest – the jury was convinced that the facts warranted an obstruction of justice conviction – the arrest of a sitting state court judge is seemingly part of an effort to cow the state and federal judiciary. President Trump and Vice-President Vance have indicated that the courts have no role checking executive and congressional authority, and executive defiance of judicial orders and processes has become customary. These problems not only make real fears about the Administration’s authoritarian tendencies but underline longstanding concerns in many circles regarding the anti-democratic aspects of the “Imperial Presidency” and the willingness of Congress in recent decades to cede too much authority and discretion to the President.

American politics and society have always been chaotic. Nevertheless, the continual policy fluctuations, demonization of political opponents, moral panics, bombast, untruths and rhetoric show that the United States is not experiencing politics as usual but has entered a period of extreme polarisation and partisan discord. Despite the urge to tune out or become impassive to the daily patterns of the political arena, one should be concerned about the efforts to broaden executive authority and undermine rule of law in the face of a compliant GOP-controlled Congress.

For two hundred years, despite its faults and failure to extend many Constitutional protections and voting rights to all Americans equally, the United States has been a constitutional democratic government committed to the rule of law and aspiring to match the promise of the Declaration of Independence. This promise, Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in 1963, was an undertaking that all people “would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The recent attempts to intimidate the courts in this context is troubling. Judge Dugan’s sentencing, the 2019 arrest of Massachusetts state district court judge Shelley Joseph, President Trump showing up at oral arguments in the birthright citizenship 14^th amendment case, impeachment threats against judges who do not agree with Administration policy such as those threatened in 2025 against Justice Coney-Barrett, attempts to limit nationwide injunctions and ignoring judicial orders, such as ignoring Judge James Boasberg, who admonished the administration for “willful disobedience of judicial orders” after they did not comply with his order to turn around planes carrying dozens of people to a prison in El Salvador demonstrate a deliberate policy intended to circumscribe the independent authority of judges and threaten the underlying balance between Congress, the Presidency and the Courts set forth in the Constitution.

Image credit: The U.S. Courthouse & Federal Office Building in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is a post office, Federal office, and courthouse building located at Milwaukee in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. Wisconsin Milwaukee Milwaukee County United States, 2021. -11-18. Source: Library of Congress.

The history and importance of judicial independence

As recognised by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 78, an independent judiciary has neither the “purse nor the sword” but instead relies on judgement, (independent, impartial, public and rationally grounded) for its authority to enforce the law while protecting individual rights and constitutional governance. The independence of the judiciary in practice means that the judicial branch has budgetary certainty, judges are entitled to secure tenure (life or dismissal for cause and have absolute immunity for discretionary acts and judgements). It includes an adherence, as the Supreme Court explained in 1975, to the “basic proposition that all orders and judgments of courts must be complied with promptly” as fundamental to American constitutionalism and liberal democracy across the globe.

In the case United States v. Peters, 9 U.S. 115, 136 (1809) Chief Justice Marshall stated that permitting political officials freely to “annul the judgments of the courts of the United States” would not just “destroy the rights acquired under those judgments”; it would make “a solemn mockery” of “the constitution itself.” Judicial independence also means that judges are to hold no political affiliation but are required to use their best efforts to discern the meaning and limitations of statutory language as it applies to the hurly-burly of the real world against the backdrop of constitutional mandates and principles.

How Trump is undermining the independence of the American judiciary

The Trump Administration’s has used several devices to undermine the independence of the American judiciary, intimidate judges and manipulate the judicial process. First, the Administration has continued to defy judicial orders. In an analysis of 165 court orders filed against the Trump administration, the Washington Post found that the Administration has been accused of resisting court orders in at least 57 of those cases – approximately 34 percent. These cases included issues such as mass layoffs, deportations, spending cuts and immigration practices. Related to this has been the increasing misrepresentation by government lawyers. Many federal courts have observed that lawyers in the Trump Department of Justice have provided incomplete or misleading information. While raising significant ethical issues for the lawyers who take part, such practices undermine the traditional deference courts have given the government and the validity of judicial decision-making.

Second, the Administration has sought to manipulate the judicial process through positioning themselves of both sides of an issues or by creating feigned legal challenges that disguise already decided and implemented policy choices as where the IRS granted Trump immunity for federal audits as part of its action dismissing it action against him.

Third, members of the Administration and President Trump have castigated the judiciary and individual judges when the courts have ruled against him. After the loss on birthright citizenship in the Trump v. Barbara case for example, Trump stated “This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision.”. At the same time Trump has crowed about how his judicial appointments approved by the passive GOP Senate majority are, or should be, loyal to him and his policies. This has drawn a rebuke from Chief Justice Roberts. Such personal attacks and allegations of (failed) partisanship or incompetence create distrust in the neutrality of judiciary.

Fourth, He and his supporters have increasingly called for the impeachment of judges who had ruled against their preferred outcomes. This is a deliberate attempt to undermine a longstanding norm established during the Jefferson Administration where it was accepted that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”  

Finally, the Administration has used legal sleight of hand to work around adverse judicial decisions that it finds contrary to its policy objectives and political rhetoric. For example, after the Supreme Court invalidated its general tariffs in April, the Administration has used the forced labour legislation to resurrect its tariff policy without any examination of foreign labour practices and has used the infamous depression era 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act to impose a 50 percent tariff against major trading partner Canada. This degrades political and legal discourse, undermines the rule of law and creates cynicism over the effectiveness of court action.

What Trump’s attacks on judicial independence mean

These attempts are particularly problematic in the United States as judicial power extends over a broad range of public issues. The 19^th century French diplomat, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked in a much-quoted passage, “Hardly any question arises in the United States that is not resolved sooner or later into a judicial question.” In the American context this lends urgency to the need to preserve judicial independence. The Trump Administration’s efforts to expand Presidential power is deliberate and well thought out. It is evident that the judiciary is seen by the Administration as an obstacle that must be overcome. Trump’s policies may be the result of moral panic, scrambled thinking, dime store ideology or legitimate problems, but legal professionals and the public one should not allow policy chaos as a cover for attacks against the judiciary and rule of law.

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• Featured image credit: The U.S. Courthouse & Federal Office Building in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is a post office, Federal office, and courthouse building located at Milwaukee in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. Wisconsin Milwaukee Milwaukee County United States, 2021. -11-18. Source: Library of Congress.
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The post Undermining the judiciary and rule of law is a key policy of the Trump administration first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

The Roberts Court (the period of the Supreme Court since John Roberts became Chief Justice in 2005) is one of the most unpopular Supreme Courts in modern American history. Its controversial decisions have eroded landmark legislation, such as the Voting Rights Act and Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, empowered President Trump to take legally suspect actions, and rescinded the constitutional right to abortion. The Court’s eagerness to transform American politics and public policy has elicited growing public backlash and arguments that the Court’s actions are anti-democratic.

These concerns about the Court’s anti-democratic role echo the longstanding worry about what is known as “countermajoritarian difficulty”, a pattern where the judicial branch can overrule laws and policies that have been put in place by legislators who have been elected by a majority of the public. A group of political scientists and legal scholars sometimes known as “regime theorists” explored this concern and largely dismissed it, finding that even an active Court was generally aligned with, and drew legitimacy from, the elected branches. In new work, we revisit this concern and argue that developments in party politics have reshaped the role of the Supreme Court in American democracy, unlocking its potential to act against majoritarian governance.

The countermajoritarian difficulty and the regime theory response

The “countermajoritarian difficulty” describes a fundamental tension between representative democracy and a robust judiciary. On one hand, democratic governance is based on majority rule, which can be undermined by an unelected judiciary that is not accountable to public majorities. On the other hand, a powerful judiciary can protect minority rights and ensure elected officials abide by the “rules of the game”. In the mid-20^th century, critics of the Warren Court argued the Court had become too active as a national policymaker and argued that it should defer to elected lawmakers.

In political science and legal studies, a prominent response to the countermajoritarian difficulty has come from “regime theory”, which examined cases of significant policymaking by the Supreme Court in the 20th century and earlier. Regime theorists showed that the Court has typically worked alongside a dominant governing coalition or “regime” in the elected branches. For much of American history, large and ideologically diverse political coalitions have dominated control of the presidency and Congress for long stretches of time, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 – Competitiveness and Party Control in National Government, 1860-2025

Source

Through judicial appointments and other coalition building efforts, these dominant coalitions built a Supreme Court that is broadly aligned with them. Under these circumstances, the Court supported majorities in government by legitimating legislative achievements of the national government, disciplining state and local outliers who are out of sync with national standards and addressing issues that may internally divide the dominant coalition in government. Through these functions, the Court supported a coalition that is backed by electoral majorities and tended to rule in alignment with what the public wants. According to regime theorists, fears of a countermajoritarian court may be theoretically compelling, but were not reflected in reality.

Contemporary party dynamics 

The Roberts Court operates in a far more different political environment than previous Supreme Courts, however. Compared to past Courts, the Roberts Court serves in an era of unusually high levels of competition between the parties, where neither party has been able to dominate control of government and divided government – where no-one party controls the White House, House and Senate – is often the norm (see Figure 1). Cohesion within the parties has also increased, with both parties becoming more ideologically united.

As with past Courts, the Roberts Court maintains an alignment with a party coalition. But in today’s context, this means the Court is aligned with one of two competitive coalitions rather than a dominant one. For the Republican Party, this means they can rely on the Court to consistently advance their agenda even as they are in tight competition with Democrats for control of the elected branches.  

““Equal Justice Under Law”” by John Brighenti, CC BY 2.0

It is these dynamics that mean that the judiciary has become able to operate in a counter-majoritarian way. Instead of legitimatizing legislation, disciplining outliers, and addressing splits within political parties, the Supreme Court supports the party coalition it is aligned with by curtailing policy implementation by the opposing party and advancing controversial issues that would be risky to pursue by the elected branches.

Closer national election results make it increasingly difficult for Congress to enact legislation for the Court to legitimate as narrow majorities struggle to overcome a veto-riddled legislative process. Meanwhile, ideological unity within the parties means there are fewer internally divisive issues for the Court to address, with some exceptions. Instead, the Court more routinely advances the agenda of one competitive, unified political coalition at the expense of the other competitive political coalition.

The Roberts Court in action

Major rulings from the Roberts Court show that in periods of close electoral competition and unified parties, the Supreme Court can advance controversial and unpopular aspects of a party’s agenda. For example, the Roberts Court has struck down provisions of the Voting Rights Act and Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. Elected Republicans could have pursued these changes through legislation, but that would have posed political risks and cost valuable resources that they can now avoid.

The Roberts Court has also supported the Republican Party by curtailing the Democratic Party’s ability to enact and implement its own policy agenda. For example, the Roberts Court nullified the mandatory Medicaid expansion provisions from the Affordable Care Act and blocked major executive initiatives taken by the Biden Administration, including student debt relief and vaccine-or-test mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the Court has largely been permissive of Republican presidents’ executive actions.

What this means for American democracy

The current state of American politics sees two largely unified parties competing to win narrow majorities in the national government. This will position the Supreme Court to be a countermajoritarian institution for the foreseeable future. Even with consistent turnover in the elected branches, one party coalition can seize long lasting control of the US Supreme Court, which in turn helps it to implement its most controversial policy preferences and blocks policy implementation by their rival party.

These concerns are magnified by the ideological distance between the Republican and Democratic parties, which means the Court is delivering on a policy agenda that is often highly polarized and contentious. The current competitive and polarized environment also makes it difficult for Congress to discipline or override the Court, eroding the mechanisms of accountability that previously curbed judicial power.

Today, these dynamics favor the Republican Party. But regardless of the coalition with which the Court is aligned, under periods of high party cohesion and high electoral competition, the Supreme Court can be a counter-majoritarian force in American politics.

• This article is based on the paper, “The Countermajoritarian Difficulty Revisited: Theorizing Court–Party Relations in the United States”, in Perspectives on Politics.
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The post Changing American politics have given the Supreme Court unprecedented power to support one party’s agenda over another first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

• This article is part of our ‘The 2026 Midterms‘ series curated by Peter Finn (University of Greenwich). The series explores the run-up to the 2026 US midterm elections at the state and national levels. If you are interested in contributing to the series, contact Peter Finn (P.D.Finn@greenwich.ac.uk).

“The Democratic Party is at a crossroads,” wrote Bernie Sanders in 2025 following Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in the New York City mayoral race. As the United States looks ahead to the 2026 midterm elections, that assessment appears more prescient than ever, particularly in light of a series of progressive victories in Democratic primaries this summer.

While some commentators may have dismissed Mamdani’s win last year as a uniquely New York phenomenon, Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary earlier this month suggests that progressive candidates are capable of mobilising significant support well beyond blue urban strongholds, including in key swing states.

But crossroads are nothing new for the Democratic Party. Rewind four decades to the eve of the 1986 midterm elections, for example, and the party was similarly confronting fundamental questions about its future – grappling with ideological divisions, debating how best to challenge a dominant Republican in the White House, and searching for a winning formula in a rapidly changing political landscape.

Indeed, the Reagan era may offer important lessons for Democrats navigating the Trump era. To be clear, any attempt to draw historical parallels is fraught with danger: it risks flattening distinct political contexts and imposing false equivalences on fundamentally different moments. But while history never repeats itself exactly, it can illuminate interesting comparisons – and the choices made by the Democrats in the mid-1980s may shed light on the challenges they face today.

The Reagan Era: The 1986 midterms and the limits of moderation

Following Walter Mondale’s heavy defeat in the 1984 presidential election, many Democratic leaders concluded that the party had become too closely associated with liberalism to remain electorally competitive. In response, prominent figures established the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in 1985, a top-down organisation dedicated to steering the party towards the political centre through a greater emphasis on market-oriented policies, fiscal restraint, and moderation on social issues. To the DLC, the lesson of 1984 was clear: Democrats would only return to power by moving rightwards and appealing to centrist voters who had drifted towards Ronald Reagan.

Yet the 1986 midterm elections complicated that diagnosis. After a sustained period of grassroots organising, liberal activists helped mobilise key Democratic constituencies, particularly women and minoritised voters, to drive the party to recapture of the Senate and secure unified control of Congress for the first time in the Reagan era. Rather than confirming the DLC’s argument that Democrats needed to moderate their message, the election suggested that the party’s progressive coalition remained a potent electoral force when effectively organised and energised.

Significantly, many of the Democratic candidates elected in 1986 did not run as centrists or “Republican-lite” alternatives. While their campaigns varied in emphasis, they often focused on issues associated with the party’s liberal wing, including social welfare, economic fairness, and the growing importance of identity-based political concerns. As Boston Globe journalist Martin Nolan observed at the time, the election represented a “defeat for Me-Tooism” – a rejection of the view that Democrats could prosper only by moving right.

The consequences of the 1986 elections extended far beyond the immediate electoral cycle. By securing a liberal-leaning congressional majority, Democrats gained the institutional power to place meaningful checks on Reagan and his eponymous revolution. Over the next two years, the Democratic-majority Congress passed a series of significant pieces of legislation, defeated one of Reagan’s Supreme Court nominees, and frustrated much of the administration’s domestic agenda. Indeed, Reagan’s legislative success rate during the final years of his presidency fell to the lowest level recorded since Congressional Quarterly began tracking in 1953.

The 1986 experience therefore offers a broader lesson about the relationship between party leaders and their grassroots supporters. At a moment when much of the Democratic establishment had concluded that the party’s future depended upon moving to the centre, it was the mobilisation of liberal constituencies that delivered one of the party’s most consequential victories of the decade. In doing so, the election not only reshaped the balance of power in Washington but also demonstrated the risks of ignoring a party base whose priorities and energy can, at crucial moments, prove decisive.

“A roll of “I Voted” stickers in Aitkin Public Library on Primary Election Day, Aug. 11, 2026. in Aitkin” by Lorie Shaull, CC BY 4.0

The Trump Era: The 2026 midterms and the debate over Democratic direction

Forty years later, Democrats once again find themselves engaged in a debate over whether electoral success lies in moderation or mobilisation. Recent progressive primary victories have reignited tensions between the party’s moderate and progressive wings, with centrists warning that the left’s gains could damage Democratic prospects in competitive races and reshape the party’s ideological direction. The debate bears a clear resemblance to that which emerged after 1984, when the DLC argued that the party needed to move beyond its traditional liberal coalition.

Yet recent contests suggest that many Democratic voters are drawing a different conclusion, with increasing numbers rallying behind candidates advocating more ambitious economic and social reforms. Responding to criticisms from centrist Democrats following a string of progressive victories in congressional primaries this summer, Mamdani posed a simple but politically significant question: “What’s a party if not its voters?”

His remark captures a growing sentiment among progressive activists that the party’s future should be shaped from the bottom up rather than imposed from the top down. Mamdani’s victory in New York and El-Sayed’s success in Michigan, among others, do not, in themselves, prove that the Democratic electorate has moved leftwards. They do, however, indicate that a growing segment of the party’s base is seeking a more confrontational alternative to both Trumpism and establishment caution.

To be sure, the circumstances of 2026 differ substantially from those of 1986. Reagan entered the latter half of his presidency with approval ratings and electoral successes that Trump has yet to replicate, while today’s political environment is considerably more polarised and marked by deeper divisions over both domestic and foreign policy.

Mobilising grassroots liberal support may be the key to a Democratic electoral victory

Nevertheless, the underlying question remains strikingly familiar: should party leaders prioritise persuading swing voters through ideological moderation, or by mobilising the base through a clearer articulation of Democratic values? The lesson of 1986 is not that the Democratic Party should automatically embrace every demand of its progressive wing. Rather, it is that party elites ignore their grassroots supporters at their peril.

Towards the end of his 2025 article, Sanders questioned whether the Democratic Party’s leadership would learn the lessons of the Mamdani campaign, concluding pessimistically that too many of them would rather be “the captains on a sinking Titanic” than change course. Yet he also argued that the party’s future would ultimately be shaped by its base, not its leaders.

The history of 1986 lends weight to that argument. At a moment when many Democratic elites believed the party’s path back to power lay in ideological moderation, it was the mobilisation of liberal constituencies that helped deliver one of the most consequential victories of the Reagan era.

If this summer’s primaries are any indication, that grassroots energy is once again becoming a significant force in Democratic politics. Whether that energy translates into electoral success in November remains uncertain. Nevertheless, forty years after the 1986 midterms challenged assumptions about the limits of liberal politics, Democrats are once again at a crossroads. What happens next may well shape who leads the party into 2028.

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The post The 2026 Midterms: What the Democratic Party can learn from the 1986 Midterms first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

To discuss the issues surrounding AI in the gig economy, for the second episode of our mini-series on AI and the US, in June 2026 the Phelan US Centre spoke with Lindsey Cameron, Assistant Professor of Management and the Dorinda and Mark Winkelmann Distinguished Faculty Scholar at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Further reading and resources

• O’Neil, C. 2017. Weapons of math destruction. Penguin Books.
• Luca, and Dan Svirsky. 2017. “Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 9 (2): 1–22.
• Hannák, Anikó, Claudia Wagner, David Garcia, Alan Mislove, Markus Strohmaier, and Christo Wilson. 2017. “Bias in Online Freelance Marketplaces.” Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing – CSCW ’17.
• Fast, Nathanael J, and Arthur S Jago. 2020. “Privacy Matters… or Does It? Algorithms, Rationalization, and the Erosion of Concern for Privacy.” Current Opinion in Psychology 31 (February): 44–48.‌
• ‌Doorn, Niels van, and Darsana Vijay. 2021. “Gig Work as Migrant Work: The Platformization of Migration Infrastructure.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 56 (4): 0308518X2110650.
• ‌Dubal, Veena, On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination (January 19, 2023). UC San Francisco Research Paper
• Edelman, Benjamin, Michael Weigel, Moira. 2025. “Notes Toward a World Systems Theory of Platforms: Made in China and India on Amazon.Com.” Social Media + Society 11 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251340863.
• ‌‌Rosenblat, Alex. 2026. “The Form Asked My Permission to Share My Health Data. Then It Wouldn’t Let Me Say No.” CalMatters. May 27, 2026.

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The post AI and the gig economy with Dr Lindsey Cameron | The Ballpark podcast first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.