About

Chloe Thurston is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. Her research focuses on American political development, political economy, and public policy, with particular interest in how politics and public policy influence market inequalities along the lines of race and gender. She has authored the book 'At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination and the American State' published by Cambridge University Press in 2018, and co-authored 'The Political Development of American Debt Relief' with Emily Zackin, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. Thurston's work has been published in several academic journals including Perspectives in Politics, Studies in American Political Development, Politics, Groups, and Identities, and the Journal of Public Policy, and her commentaries have appeared in outlets such as The Daily Beast, Ms., and The Monkey Cage (Washington Post). She holds a B.A. in economics and political science from Johns Hopkins University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores the intersections of race, gender, and economic policy, contributing to understanding how political processes shape inequalities in American society.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Political economy
• Law
• Economics
• Positive economics
• Economic system
• Finance
• Market economy
• Economy
• Law and economics

Selected publications

• Financial epidemiology: Linking financialization to population health

  Social Science & Medicine · 2026-01-07

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Building a Nation of Investors

  2026-02-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In recent years (particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic) many American households have seen their home values and stock portfolios increase at rates far outpacing wage gains. This chapter places this recent divergence between asset and wage growth into longer historical perspective. It argues that the rise of asset building was facilitated both by changes in policy, and by shifts in normative ideas about how citizens should link to the American political economy. These shifts accompanied the reorientation of the American political economy from the New Deal to a neoliberal order. The chapter describes how policymakers of both parties as well industry and some civil society actors came to embrace asset building as a non-labor path into the wealth stream and enabler of great social inclusion, as previous pathways became increasingly unavailable. It concludes by discussing the unintended consequences and unfulfilled promises of the 21st-century turn toward asset building.

  PublisherDOI

• The Political Economy of Racial Capitalism in the United States

  Annual Review of Political Science · 2025-04-29 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article summarizes recent scholarship on racial capitalism with an eye toward highlighting the opportunities the lens poses for the field of American political economy. It reviews the origins and evolution of the construct as well as its contemporary developments and critiques. It highlights three areas of generative dialogue between scholarship working at the intersection of racial capitalism and American political economy: first, surrounding the value of studying the political economy through a relational lens; second, involving how mid-range theoretical tools can generate more insights into specific institutional constraints and questions of agency, contingency, and change; and third, how deeper engagement between the two can productively reorient assessments of inequality in American democracy.

  PublisherDOI

• How Should We Govern Housing Markets in a Moral Political Economy?

  Daedalus · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Building on Debra Satz's argument that we can design our way out of noxious markets, this essay shifts toward questions of process, paying particular attention to the constraints posed when noxious markets generate supportive political constituencies. Using the case of U.S. housing policy, I make two claims. First, even intentional efforts at using market design to harness the capacities Satz identifies can produce cross-cutting effects, strengthening democracies on some dimensions and weakening them on others. Second, noxious markets can generate supportive constituencies that may undermine reform efforts. Ultimately, a moral housing market requires political supports that can help to broaden communities of fate, build political capacities of those who are persistently underrepresented in local deliberations, and encourage participants to reflect on the consequences of market design.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Political Development of American Debt Relief

  2023-09-04 · 2 citations

  bookSenior author

  "This book is about why debt relief was a salient political issue for so long and why it then ceased to be one. It is also about the United States' constitutional tradition, and the contradictions it embodies. Tracing the geographic, sectoral, and racial politics of debt relief over time--and examining the roles that social movements, interest groups, and constitutional interpretation played--Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston show how the politics of debt relief has interacted with race and other social hierarchies that have conditioned both state action and debtors' opportunities to mobilize. Although the twentieth and early twenty-first century saw the erosion of debt protection, history reminds us that Americans once mounted large-scale grassroots campaigns for debt relief. These activists made radical claims about economic justice, and they reshaped constitutional law and the American state"--

  PublisherDOI

• Race and Historical Political Economy

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-01-26 · 3 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract This chapter examines the study of race in historical political economy (HPE) research on the United States. Scholarship in race and HPE is wide-ranging, spanning the fields of political science, economics, history, and sociology, and featuring a diversity of theoretical and empirical methods. The chapter highlights key questions in the race and HPE literature, including democratization, the effects of slavery and segregation (both de jure and de facto), racial exclusion in the welfare state, and coercive state development. The chapter then circumscribes time periods under study: the antebellum, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, New Deal, civil rights, and post-civil rights periods. Finally, the article discusses limitations in the race and HPE literature and lessons that can be drawn from research in American political development and racial capitalism.

  PublisherDOI

• American Political Development as a Problem-Driven Enterprise

  Studies in American Political Development · 2022-07-14 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract We argue that American political development's (APD's) relentless preoccupation with the substantive problems that shape and animate American politics and how they emerge and develop over time has been a key source of the subfield's durability. We elaborate on three main payoffs to conceptualizing APD as a problem-driven enterprise: (1) it highlights APD's main comparative advantage within the American politics subfield, noting the tremendous agility APD's substantive breadth lends the enterprise; (2) it resolves the methodological debate, granting simply that the question chooses the method rather than the other way around; and (3) it reorients the critique: simply because a subfield considers itself to be problem-oriented does not mean that it is identifying the right problems to study.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Racial Inequality, Market Inequality, and the American Political Economy

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-11-11 · 7 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A study of Boston's racial wealth gap made headlines in late 2017 when it revealed that the median net worth of the city's Black households was only $8, compared to $247,000 among white households (Hill 2017; Johnson 2017; Muñoz et al. 2015). The gap in Boston may have been starker than in the nation as a whole, but the latter was also striking. In 2016, the median net worth of Black and Hispanic households nationwide was $17,000 and $20,700, respectively, compared to $171,000 for whites (Dettling et al. 2017). The disparities amongst households with children were even more pronounced. In 2016, Black households with children held 1 percent of the wealth of non-Hispanic white households with children (Percheski and Gibson-Davis 2020: 1).

  PublisherDOI

• America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State. By Ursula Hackett. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 304p. $99.99 cloth.

  Perspectives on Politics · 2021-05-21

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• The American Political Economy

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021 · 61 citations

  • Political Science
  • Political economy
  • Political Science

  This volume brings together leading political scientists to explore the distinctive features of the American political economy. The introductory chapter provides a comparatively informed framework for analyzing the interplay of markets and politics in the United States, focusing on three key factors: uniquely fragmented and decentralized political institutions; an interest group landscape characterized by weak labor organizations and powerful, parochial business groups; and an entrenched legacy of ethno-racial divisions embedded in both government and markets. Subsequent chapters look at the fundamental dynamics that result, including the place of the courts in multi-venue politics, the political economy of labor, sectional conflict within and across cities and regions, the consolidation of financial markets and corporate monopoly and monopsony power, and the ongoing rise of the knowledge economy. Together, the chapters provide a revealing new map of the politics of democratic capitalism in the United States.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michele F. Margolis

  University of Pennsylvania

  49 shared

• Fuzuo Wu

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  49 shared

• Spencer Piston

  Boston University

  49 shared

• Amelia Green

  University of Oxford

  49 shared

• Richard Arenberg

  Cornell University

  49 shared

• Candice Delmas

  49 shared

• Mehmet Gurses

  Florida Atlantic University

  49 shared

• Nicholas Carnes

  49 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science

  University of Chicago

  2010

• M.A., Political Science

  University of Chicago

  2006

• B.A., Political Science

  University of California, Berkeley

  2004

Awards & honors

• APSA Heinz Eulau Award for best article published in Perspec…
• Distinguished Teaching Award, Northwestern Weinberg College…