Monica Prasad (on leave)

Assistant Professor of Sociology
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
PhD, Sociology, University of Chicago, 2000
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Curriculum Vitae
Additional biographical information

Click here for the carbon tax paper

Monica Prasad's areas of interest are political sociology, comparative historical sociology, and economic sociology. Her book The Politics of Free Markets (University of Chicago Press, 2006) won the 2007 Barrington Moore Award. Prasad's new work includes an edited volume on the sociology of taxation, research on the origins of progressive taxation in America, and a comparative historical investigation of carbon taxes.

Prasad is the recipient of several awards including a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities/Social Science Research Council, a grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), a postdoctoral fellowship from the Michigan Society of Fellows, and article awards from the American Sociological Association.

Current Research

The Politics of Free Markets. Prasad's book asks why neoliberalism in the 1970s was so much stronger in the U.S. and Britain than in France and Germany. She shows that—contrary to what is usually assumed—at the time of the oil crisis in the 1970s: American and British tax policies were more punitive to business and the wealthy than the tax policies of France and West Germany. American and British industrial policies were more adversarial to business in key domains. And while the British welfare state was the most redistributive of the four, the French welfare state was the least redistributive. This led to a backlash from business and the middle classes in Britain and the U.S., which entrepreneurial politicians mobilized. Meawhile, the pro-growth policies of France and West Germany engendered loyalty from business and the middle classes. Prasad argues in favor of institutional models of politics, and against class, culture, and "varieties of capitalism" explanations.

Origins of Tax Systems: A French-American Comparison. In this paper Prasad and Kimberly Morgan of George Washington University examine why the United States has a more progressive tax code than France. Although total tax revenues are lower in the United States, the shape of the tax structure is more biased against capital and the wealthy than the tax structure of France: The United States taxes capital at higher levels and labor at lower levels, and the United States relies on progressive income taxes whereas France relies on regressive consumption taxes. Morgan and Prasad argue that an unusual historical sequence—the rise of industrial capitalism in the context of an underdeveloped state—led to popular support in the United States for income tax as a way to discipline capital.

The Thunder of History: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective. Prasad is editing a volume with Isaac Martin and Ajay Mehrotra on the sociology of taxation, with contributions by Charles Tilly, Joel Slemrod, Robin Einhorn, Christopher Howard, Evan Lieberman, Elliot Brownlee, Edward McCaffery, and other leading scholars of the "new fiscal sociology."

The Undeserving Rich: 'Moral Values' and the White Working Class. Prasad and her colleagues, including Andrew Perrin of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducted in-depth interviews with working-class Republicans one month before the 2004 presidential election. They found that—contrary to what some scholars have argued—"morality" was indeed a resonant theme for these voters. But these voters' definition of morality was unique: For one quarter of the interviewees, it revolved around the question of how the two candidates, both wealthy men, handled themselves in relation to their wealth. This paper is forthcoming in Sociological Forum.

Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification. In the above study, Prasad and her colleagues also explored the reasons for the resilience of the belief that Saddam Hussein was partly or largely responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. They argue that this belief was so resilient because respondents concluded that, if we invaded Iraq, there must have been a good reason for doing so, and 9/11 seemed the most obvious justification. They call this process inferred justification.

Selected Publications

Prasad, M. The Politics of Free Markets. University of Chicago Press (2006).

Prasad, M. 2005.Why is France so French? Culture, institutions, and neoliberalism. American Journal of Sociology 111(2): 357-407.