Link to CV
Environmental Politics
Daneri, Daniel R, Marianne E. Krasny, and Richard C. Stedman. "Place-based Identity and Framing in Local Environmental Politics." Review of Policy Research 38. (2021): 180-2021.
Framing has long been a central construct in scholarship on the role of rhetoric and discourse in the policy process. Research on policy framing and identity thus far has neglected the role of place-based identity, focusing instead on identity constructs such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Through a mixed methods analysis of transcripts of City Council meetings in Philadelphia from 2007 to 2017, we analyze how policy makers, local interest groups, and national/regional interest groups employ place-based framing to define, explain, and propose solutions to environmental problems. We contrast local place-based frames with more abstract global frames that center arguments for policy change on the national or global implications of environmental problems. Our results reveal that place-based framing is a dominant mode of discourse in Philadelphia environmental policy discussions and that actors may employ frames strategically so as to appeal to place-based identities and to further political goals..
Labor, Inequality, and Interest Groups
Daneri, Daniel R. "Labor vs. Big Business: Cue-taking and Voting Behavior." Under review. Link to working paper.
How do individuals interpret interest group cues to make informed voting decisions that are aligned with their ideology and interests? In the 2020 election cycle, Californians voted on a referendum that concerned the employment status of gig economy workers such as Uber and Lyft drivers. In a manner uncharacteristic of most policy issues, votes for and against the measure did not neatly align with partisan identities. To better understand this, we conduct a content analysis of newspaper coverage and paid social media advertising and find that voters received potentially imbalanced exposure that favored arguments by app-based companies and their allies. We also conduct an experiment among self-identifying Democrats in which we expose them to a series of cue-taking treatments from businesses and labor unions regarding legislation on independent contractor status or a paid family/medical leave program. Our results strongly suggest that, despite a half-century of decline, labor unions’ endorsements continue to serve as a compass to guide individual voter decision-making towards progressive positions. Taken together with our content analysis, the results also suggest that business groups wielded significant influence in the campaign and that Democratic voters in 2020 may have been unaware of endorsements or arguments from progressive groups regarding Proposition 22.
Daneri, Daniel R. "Corporate Influence on Labor Politics: Politicization and Polarization at the NLRB." Link to working paper.
Through an analysis of nearly one hundred years of archival and administrative data, I show how the changes in the kinds of individuals who serve in top posts at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have transformed how the state regulates labor. First, I contribute an original data-set on the employment histories of presidentially appointed officials at the NLRB since the founding of the agency in 1935. I code for backgrounds in management, labor unions, government and/or academia and find that the preponderance of appointees with backgrounds in management has increased substantially since the early 20th century. Second, I provide a causally identified model showing that Board decisions influence on-the-ground union organizing by applying a difference-in-differences design to a dataset of union election results. Finally, I test a theory about how employment background shapes Board decision-making beyond what can be captured by just partisanship using two original data-sets of Board decisions. I find that appointees with management backgrounds are more likely to make pro-business decisions while those with union backgrounds are more more likely to make pro-labor decisions; although those with union backgrounds only appear in the last two decades. In sum, the evidence reveals that the agency has undergone dramatic shifts in staffing that have had negative consequences for the labor movement.
Daneri, Daniel R. "Republicans for Labor? State-level Labor Power and Senate Policymaking." Email for Draft.
Despite a half-century of decline in membership and political influence, unions still play a prominent role in lobbying for congressional policy. For much of post-war history, positions on labor and employment policies have divided along partisan lines, seemingly confining labor’s influence to the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, conventional wisdom attests to a time in the mid-late 20th century when there were a number of moderate Republicans in Congress that would sometimes cross party lines to vote for legislation supported by labor unions. We construct a dataset of employment legislation from 1970 to 2021 to examine the influence of state-level unionization rates on Republican Senators’ votes. We use an instrumental variable design to provide causal estimates of this influence, the results of which suggest that unionization is strongly predictive of whether Republicans will side with Democrats in favor of more progressive employment policies
Daneri, Daniel R, and Paul Frymer. "Invisibilizing Farmworkers: Agricultural Interests, Path Dependency, and the Second Face of Power." Under Review. Email for Draft.
The U.S. agriculture industry has long been reliant on inequalities that intersect race and political economy. Farm policy further accentuates these inequalities as most farmworkers are excluded from New Deal labor and economic statutes due to pressure from southern Democrats and western agricultural interests. Since then, the agricultural workforce has shifted from being overrepresented by southern Blacks and European immigrants to Latinos and undocumented/migrant residents from Latin 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 agricultural economy as embedded within congressional and administrative institutions.
Daneri, Daniel R, and Paul Frymer. "Who Represents Farmworkers? Mapping the Political Exclusion of Non-Citizen Agricultural Workers in the United States." Under Review. Email for Draft.
For centuries, agricultural labor in the United States has depended on the political and economic exploitation of racialized people that are largely disenfranchised, whether because of slavery, Jim Crow laws, or citizenship and voting laws. Using geographic and congressional data, we explore the contemporary relationship between racial inequality, agricultural density, and the underrepresentation of the interests of agricultural workers who often reside disproportionately in conservative congressional districts. Then, we examine legislative roll-calls on votes specific to agricultural workers by modeling votes on immigration policies as a function of the number of non-citizen agricultural workers in a congressperson’s district. We find that the presence of non-citizen farmworkers pushes Republican legislators to endorse policy reforms that would create opportunities for citizenship.
Other Publications
Clark, Shane, John E. Petersen, Cindy M. Frantz, Deborah Roose, Joel Ginn, and Daniel R. Daneri. "Teaching systems thinking to 4th and 5th graders using Environmental Dashboard display technology." PloS one 12, no. 4 (2017): e0176322
Tackling complex environmental challenges requires the capacity to understand how relationships and interactions between parts result in dynamic behavior of whole systems. There has been convincing research that these “systems thinking” skills can be learned. However, there is little research on methods for teaching these skills to children or assessing their impact. The Environmental Dashboard is a technology that uses “sociotechnical” feedback–information feedback designed to affect thought and behavior. Environmental Dashboard (ED) combines real-time information on community resource use with images and words that reflect pro-environmental actions of community members. Prior research indicates that ED supports the development of systems thinking in adults. To assess its impact on children, the technology was installed in a primary school and children were passively exposed to ED displays. This resulted in no measurable impact on systems thinking skills. The next stage of this research examined the impact of actively integrating ED into lessons on electricity in 4th and 5th grade. This active integration enhanced both content-related systems thinking skills and content retention.
Daneri, Daniel R., Gregory Trencher, and John Petersen. "Students as change agents in a town-wide sustainability transformation: the Oberlin Project at Oberlin College." Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 16 (2015): 14-21.
An increasing number of colleges and universities are playing a crucial role in driving societal transformations and creating the physical and social conditions for accelerating progress towards sustainability. The potential of multi-stakeholder partnerships to enrich sustainability education through experiential learning is well documented. Yet there is less knowledge about the impacts on partnerships that result from student participation and the models that facilitate students to serve as agents of change and research. To address this knowledge gap, we examine the Oberlin Project at Oberlin College, an ambitious community partnership aimed at town-wide climate neutrality and sustainability. Findings show that contributions to stakeholder learning and partnership progress can occur through student participation models such as project-based learning, transacademic research, and internships.
Trencher, Gregory, Daniel R. Daneri, Kes McCormick, Toru Terada, John Petersen, Masaru Yarime, and Bernadett Kiss. "The role of students in the co-creation of transformational knowledge and sustainability experiments: experiences from Sweden, Japan and the USA." In Engaging Stakeholders in Education for Sustainable Development at University Level, pp. 191-215. Springer International Publishing, 2016.
Petersen, John E., Daniel R. Daneri, Cindy Frantz, and Md Rumi Shammin. "Environmental Dashboards: Fostering Pro-environmental and Pro-community Thought and Action Through Feedback." In Handbook of Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development in Higher Education, pp. 149-168. Springer International Publishing, 2017.