About

Paul Frymer is a Professor of Politics at Princeton University with broad research and teaching interests in American politics and public policy. His work engages specifically with questions of law, civil rights and race, labor and employment, parties and social movements, and the historical-institutional development of political systems. Frymer has authored numerous articles and three books: 'Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America,' 'Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party,' and 'Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion.' His book 'Black and Blue' received the best book award from the American Political Science Association's Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section, and an article from this project earned multiple awards, including the Mary Parker Follett Award, the McGraw Hill Prize, and the Best Article award from the Law and Society Association. 'Building an American Empire' was honored with the J. David Greenstone Award and the best book awards from the American Sociological Association. Frymer holds a B.A. and J.D. from U.C. Berkeley and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. He has received multiple teaching awards, including the Stanley Kelley, Jr. Teaching Award from the Princeton Politics Department.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Political economy
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Engineering
• Labour economics
• Engineering ethics
• Anthropology
• Law and economics
• Economics

Selected publications

• Working At Will: The Political and Legal Limits of Workers' Rights

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Invisible Farmworker: Racial Political Economy, Policy Development, and the Second Dimension of Power

  Polity · 2026-02-12 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  The US agriculture industry has long been reliant on inequalities that intersect race and political economy. Farm policy further accentuates these inequalities as most farmworkers were excluded from New Deal labor and economic statutes due to pressure from Southern Congressmen and agricultural interests. Since then, the agricultural workforce has shifted from being overrepresented by southern Blacks and European immigrants to undocumented residents and migrant workers from Mexico and Central America. As with Black workers before the 1960s, most of these current farmworkers do not have civil or labor or voting rights. Our paper seeks to explain this inequality. We focus on policy development, emphasizing the intersecting roles of race and industrial agricultural interests as embedded within congressional and administrative institutions. We leverage theories of the second face of power and path dependency to highlight the agenda control of agricultural committees in Congress. We also highlight the role of the twentieth-century Bracero Programs and broader developments in the racial political economy to nuance the conventional narrative of the New Deal as a critical juncture for farmworker policy.

  PublisherDOI

• Right to Work or Right to Vote? Labor Policy and American Democracy

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-01-14 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  There is growing attention to the role of organized labor in maintaining and expanding democratic institutions in the United States. In this article, we investigate the effect of right-to-work laws on electoral democracy in the states. We theorize a series of mechanisms by which labor unions contribute to the maintenance and expansion of democratic institutions, including contributing money to campaigns and influencing the electorate. Right-to-work laws, by limiting labor unions’ ability to raise funds, reduce the strength of these mechanisms and send signals to political elites about the organizational balance of power in their states. Using recent advances in difference-in-differences analysis, we find that right-to-work laws had a substantial negative effect on state-level electoral democracy in recent decades, even net of Republican control of government. Although the difficulty of causal identification in this context warrants caution, the findings speak to the importance of organized labor in shaping democratic institutions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• American Political Development and the Crises in American Politics

  Studies in American Political Development · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Political economy

  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

• Unions Can Help White Workers Become More Racially Tolerant

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-01-20 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Labor unions are important organizations in shaping worker attitudes about their political world. In this chapter, we build and contextualize with recent work by Frymer and Grumbach (2020) that finds that being a union member leads workers to be more tolerant towards racial diversity and more supportive of civil rights policy. Here, we argue that for this dynamic to occur, unions need to be active in promoting greater racial diversity to its members. After examining the historical variation with regards to union advocacy, we focus on the recent era in which unions have increasingly promoted and prioritized civil rights causes, in part because of new leadership and in part because of an increasingly diverse workplace. Unions are critical organizations in the promotion of civil rights and greater racial tolerance in America.

  PublisherDOI

• Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy. By Suzanne Mettler and Robert C. Lieberman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020. 304p. $28.99 cloth, $17.99 paper.

  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

• Codebook.pdf

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-01

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Codebook

  PublisherDOI

• anes_racial_policy_replication.RDS

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-01

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  :unav

  PublisherDOI

• right_to_work_laws.tab

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-01

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  :unav

  PublisherDOI

• anes_racial_policy_replication.RDS

  Harvard Dataverse · 2020-01-01

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  :unav

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jacob M. Grumbach

  36 shared

• Michael Burger

  3 shared

• Marie Gottschalk

  2 shared

• Kimberley Johnson

  2 shared

• Thomas K. Ogorzalek

  The Graduate Center, CUNY

  1 shared

• Garth E. Pauley

  Calvin University

  1 shared

• Dorian T. Warren

  Center for Community Change

  1 shared

• Albert Yoon

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Best Book Award from the American Political Science Associat…
• Mary Parker Follett Award for best article in Politics and H…
• McGraw Hill Prize for best article in Law and Courts from th…
• Best Article award from the Law and Society Association
• J. David Greenstone Award for the best book in Politics and…