The year 2003 marks the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978, a late chapter in the development of the American administrative state and the most significant reform of the civil service system since its creation through the Pendleton Act of 1883. The Act made a number of enduring contributions to the personnel system of the federal government. Given the recursive nature of public management debate, there is considerable policy importance in trying to understand the original basis of decisions on legislation that have shaped the federal government over the last twenty-five years, and the CSRA has recently been the subject of renewed interest. More important, the CSRA was a rare and relatively important shift in the beliefs and attitudes—the administrative doctrine—that shape the evolution of the administrative state. Significantly, the debate during the CSRA saw the emergence of deep divisions within administrative doctrine, divisions that continue to shape public management policymaking.

In 1970, Elizabeth Wickenden, a longtime activist on behalf of public social provision and a broker between voluntary social welfare agencies and the federal government, despaired of a quiet revolution occurring in social service provision. “Virtually unchallenged and undebated,” she observed, “the principle established with the first large-scale federal welfare program, the Federal Emergency Welfare Administration [sic], that public funds should only be expended by public agencies, was quietly repudiated.” Through a series of domestic initiatives, including the Economic Opportunity Act of 1965 and amendments to the Social Security Act in 1967, the federal government had begun to channel a significant amount of money through nongovernmental organizations. To older activists like Wickenden, who had fought hard to build the public infrastructure of the welfare state, such a trend was troubling, as it seemed to indicate a dwindling commitment to public social provision that had informed New Deal social policy.

Historians of the United States have long contended that the study of governmental institutions, including the history of public policy, is no longer central to the teaching and writing of American history. Some lament this development; others hail it as a sign that other worthy topics are finally getting the attention they deserve. Yet is it true? The recent outpouring of scholarship on the relationship between the state and the market, or what an earlier generation would have called political economy, raises questions about this venerable conceit. Indeed, if one were to pick a single word to characterize the state of the field in the history of American political economy, it might well be “robust.”

Discussions of New Deal policymaking suggest that many reforms were enacted from 1933 to 1937, but after this the New Deal ended. Although this analysis provides a generally accurate portrayal of presidential-congressional power relations, it overlooks the ability of some federal agencies to advance policies opposed by political and economic elites, and assumes that the plight of government agencies is always closely tied to the fortunes of elected leaders. The history of the Securities and Exchange Commission provides a somewhat different story. The SEC continued to pursue policies opposed by the securities industry despite increased political opposition in the late New Deal. This was due largely to the liberal-reformist ideology held by a large number of SEC commissioners and staff. They believed the agency should adopt a more mandate-driven approach and issue greater numbers of regulations than the SEC had in the early New Deal. As a result of the commissioners he appointed, President Franklin Roosevelt was largely responsible for this change in SEC policymaking.

The evolution of hazardous waste into a national environmental problem is a puzzling phenomenon. The public and media perceive hazardous waste to be a major environmental and public health risk. Yet, although the problem of hazardous waste and its resultant contamination has long been known, no one took it seriously until about 1978. An interesting question is, Why did the public and media ignore hazardous waste for so long, particularly during a period of unprecedented public and media interest in the environment, especially pollution, in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s?

The United States made Marshall aid to European countries (1947–51) contingent upon bilateral agreements about major issues of economic and social policy. Because the implementation of the Marshall Plan in Britain coincided with the inception of the National Health Service (NHS), the bilateral agreements negotiated between Britain and the United States addressed the relationship between economic recovery and a new health policy that offered universal coverage for services that were fully funded from tax receipts.

There was a period in America when the political science and history disciplines were not that far apart. Both approaches to analyzing civil society had evolved out of an old Anglo-American tradition where these two subjects, along with philosophy and literature, were all considered in relationship to one another. During the formative years of the American research university, which took place at the turn of the twentieth century, both disciplines shared common founding fathers. A classic example was Charles Beard, whose influence spanned both areas of scholarship. Indeed, it was a breakaway faction of the American Historical Association that formed the American Political Science Association.

Since the late nineteenth century, American employers have relied on a program of welfare capitalism to deflect incursions into the workplace from the regulatory state or organized workers. Welfare capitalism encompasses social welfare benefits and health, safety, or leisure programs offered through the workplace—programs established and directed by the employer. In periods of labor upheaval and political social reform, American firms have relied on workplace social welfare as a private, managerial response to political pressure from the state and workers—particularly when workers sought to use the state to improve working conditions and guarantee economic security. Where or when employers no longer faced these threats, managers reasserted their control over the terms of work, compensation, and security. Out of this conflict emerged a public-private welfare regime, heavily tilted toward private sources and based on the exclusion of those who most needed economic assistance. Any narrative of the American welfare state, therefore, belongs within the century-long story of welfare capitalism.

In an obscure footnote to his groundbreaking study of deindustrialization in Detroit, Thomas J. Sugrue notes that “the history of industrial renewal in postwar American cities is still largely unwritten.” A review of the historiography of the postwar city confirms this statement. Historians have carefully explored the problems of low-income housing provision, red lining, and urban racial conflict, as well as the destructive consequences of federally subsidized highway construction, urban renewal, and suburbanization. With only limited exceptions, however, few scholars have examined the history of local policy strategies that addressed the disappearance of urban manufacturing jobs.

In a way, there is an unspoken subtext to this “state-of-the-field” panel on political history. For at least some of us, there is a whisper of uneasiness associated with this topic, a small internal voice concerned about the health and survival of political history. In the relatively recent past, the flowering of social history challenged and eventually toppled the dominance of political history—a fine development, given that in the long reach of history politics is only part of the story. Unfortunately, this shift of balance left some scholars with a bad taste in their mouths. Some social historians have retained a lingering antipathy toward political history as a looming presence—an elite-driven, chronologically organized, “imperalist” narrative that threatens to subsume scholarship once again. Some political historians, in turn, feel besieged by social history and its seeming focus on minority and underprivileged populations to the exclusion of much else. Both of these emotionalized outlooks rest on distorted and exaggerated assumptions. But for many political historians, the end result is a current of nervous tension about the place of their field in the larger scheme of historical scholarship.

Were it not linguistically awkward, I would be inclined to entitle these remarks a discourse on what went wrong with the love affair of policy-makers, academic pundits, and hard-core positivists with the world of science. In the nineteenth century, science was as identified with progress as bacon is with eggs. This optimism has given way to a pandemic mistrust of science by all sorts of elites. Popular displeasure became transparently evident in the waning decades of the twentieth century. Mistrust of science has only deepened in the first years of the new millennium. The ease with which scientific products are converted into destructive weaponry only partially accounts for the new skepticism about conventional claims. Unanticipated negative human consequences of actual discoveries in areas ranging from genetic engineering to wireless communication are at least as important an element in popular concerns. Nonetheless, professional assertions about the benefits of science continue unabated. Peter Watson in his fine recent survey, The Modern Mind, in which he asserts science as such “provides a new kind of humanity and a canon for life as it is now lived,” typifies these claims. The limitation in this by no means unusual formulation is that few people are actually involved in the life of science, while many are affected by applications of scientific work that often have indeterminate or, even worse, destructive consequences.

In their research, policy analysts and historians have had an understandable attachment to ‘successful” state and federal environmental programs, initiatives that spawn long-term imitation or significantly advance the goals or innovative methodologies of specific policymakers. Indeed, by the very nature of their success, they command the attention of scholars and lawmakers. However, as this study will show, inefficient, costly, or controversial programs widely viewed as “failures” often generate equally long-term, historically significant policy changes.

The conventional wisdom on how managed care came to replace traditional fee-for-service reimbursement as the nation's dominant mode of health insurance is that enlightened businesses and their employers led the way in responding to the emergence of market forces in health care in the 1990s. A common textbook treatment of managed care's ascendancy puts it this way: “Transformation of the health care delivery system through managed care has been driven principally by market forces, and reinforced by government.” The irony is that the opposite sequence of events is a more accurate portrayal of what actually happened. As this article shows, the transformation of America's health-care system through managed care was initially triggered—albeit indirectly—by government actions and then driven by market forces. In other words, before business behavior was a cause of managed care's extraordinary growth, it was largely a response to and an unintended consequence of government policymaking: in this instance, Congress's reform of Medicare in 1983.