Research Areas and Books
Pacewicz’s research focuses on 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. Pacewicz has written about qualitative case selection and comparison, and he is the author of two books about American political development and federalism.
In his 2016 book Partisans and Partners: The Politics of the post-Keynesian Society, Pacewicz examines municipal and partisan politics in two Rust Belt cities during the 2008 and 2012 election cycles. The book shows how changes in American federalism—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. Partisans and Partners was a co-winner of the American Sociological Association’s Theory prize.
His 2027 book, Divided States: Doing Federalism in Red and Blue America, centers officials who interpret and administer federal rights and programs in the states and documents their ongoing efforts to make real the promises of flagship social programs and civil rights guarantees. In Republican states, this resulted in policies that were less extreme than legislators’ frontstage rhetoric, 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.
