Bonds that tie and/or divide: A study on the role of state policy and family power structure in Midwestern farmers' political actions during the 1980s farm crisis

In the 1980s, American agriculture suffered the most severe financial stress since the Great Depression. Unlike experiences from the precedent farm crises, no significant farmers' protest was witnessed. This study investigated the Midwestern family farmers' political actions during this farm crisis by importing the state financial policy and family power structure into consideration. I hypothesized that a corporatist political participation tradition was formed through the previous agrarian movements that, in turn, solidified formal farm organizations' political clout and patterned the political interaction between farmers and the state. The state provided financial subsidies and helped in building formal farm organizations to channel farmers' demands into policy concerns that affected both farm operators' and spouse's political outlooks and behaviors. Farm operator's political behaviors were polarized into participatory and extra-institutional participation, while farm spouse's remained uniquely one-dimensional. The farmers/state relationship, once established, repressed farm women's household decision power in both economic and political matters. By importing farm couple's variables into the opposite sex's models and dividing the independent variables into personal, household/farm, and communal/organizational domains, this study found that farm operator's participatory political actions were largely affected by farming matters and male organizational variables whereas the spouse's were influenced by female organizational variables. As for the operator's extra-institutional political participation, personal and spouse's political outlooks counts for most of the effects. When the past radicalism and the state's financial intervention were controlled in the analysis, this study found that male variables were more effective in the farm spouse's models in areas with radical past and higher state financial subsidies but, the same was not found in areas without radical past and with lower subsidies. This analysis demonstrates that farmers' political acquiescence in the 1980s was chiefly caused by the gradually formed corporatist agrarian tradition.