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Herbert Hoover's Last Laugh: The Enduring Significance of the “Associative State” in the United States
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2011
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State-building in America is a tortuous process. Policy entrepreneurs who seek to establish new state capacities face significant ideological and institutional constraints. These constraints often limit the scope of their entrepreneurship and typically force them to compromise or adapt their ideals to fit political circumstances. Yet, although its path of development has been convoluted, there is an American state and not a trivial one at that. Indeed, the same features of the polity that constrain state-building can also motivate and support it.
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