In June 1975 and January 1978, seminary students in the shrine city of Qum, Iran, staged public protests against the regime of Shah Muhammad Riza Pahlavi. In both instances security forces forcibly suppressed the protests. Yet the first incident generated almost no public outcry, while the second incident echoed throughout Iran and quickly became a rallying point for revolutionary mobilization. What was different about Iran in mid-1975 and early 1978 that might account for these different reactions? This article examines three widely credited explanations: economic downturn, widening political opportunity, and organizational mobilization of the opposition. The examination of economic and political explanations uncovered little evidence of significant differences between the two time periods; organizational explanations, by contrast, accounted for significant shifts in 1977 among the moderate and Islamist opposition, with the Islamist opposition in particular exhibiting a sense of optimism and efficacy in the weeks before January 1978. This changed self-perception appears to be the most likely explanation for the wave of protest that followed the suppression of the Qum protest of January 1978.

Between 1956 and 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) operated five counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) designed to repress a range of threats to the status quo. This article examines more than twelve thousand pages of memos related to FBI programs against white hate groups (mostly the Ku Klux Klan) and the New Left in an effort to gain insight into the Bureau's repression of left- and right- wing targets. The article's goals are both general and historically specific: First, to introduce a two-dimensional typology to organize and categorize repressive acts generally and then to use this typology to examine the patterning of repressive acts across the COINTELPROs. This approach allows for the uncovering of distinct overarching strategies applied to left- versus right-wing targets. These strategies are emergent in the sense that they are not apparent from a textual analysis of Bureau memos or through a comparison of the outcomes of each COINTELPRO. Recognition of these emergent strategies provides insight into the complex, ambiguous relationship that the FBI had with both the civil rights movement and the Klan.

This article describes and explains the movement of female relative wages in Sweden from 1920 to 1995. During this period the aggregate gender wage gap shrunk from 41 to 15%. The bulk of the change took place in two periods: 1920 to 1940 and 1960 to 1980. With regard to determining factors, the analysis distinguishes between the period before 1960, when the rise in the female relative wage was the result of employment shifts, and after 1960, when wage structure change was the prime determinant. In the interwar period, women moved from low-paid to better-paid jobs, notably in trade and commerce and public services, as legal and administrative reforms opened up the public sector to women and educational reforms raised the educational level of the female labor force. The most rapid change in the gender wage gap occurred at a time when the solidaristic wage policy doctrine was embraced by the blue-collar trade unions and formed the basis of claims in wage negotiations. This study suggests, however, that excess demand for female labor rather than egalitarian ambitions of strong trade unions was the decisive factor behind the rapid reduction of the gender gap. Likewise, supply and demand shifts may well explain why the female relative wage stagnated from the late 1970s. These observations add up to the somewhat unorthodox conclusion that institutions were of primary importance for female relative wage development in the interwar period, while market forces played the leading role after 1960.

This article explains Mauritius’s exceptional state building and development during late colonialism as the product of a conjuncture of two separately determined historical processes. The first causal chain involves the creation of a bureaucratic state, which was built over two centuries of French and British colonial rule. The second main causal path concerns the development of a society with dense associational ties. This process was set into motion by land distribution that occurred in the late nineteenth century and resulted in the emergence of several villages of small landholders. The essay argues that a prolonged period of labor riots beginning in the late 1930s and the more interventionist policy of the British government after World War II combined to initiate a “critical-juncture period” that increased relations between state and societal actors. This increased embeddedness made possible state-society synergy, which promoted broad-based development by engaging and strengthening both state institutions and societal associations, thereby endowing Mauritius with the institutions necessary for broad-based development after colonial independence as well.

This roundtable celebrates the twentieth anniversary of Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (1982). Skowronek’s book introduced scholars to the emerging field of historical institutionalism, offering an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing government and public policy. Tackling three different policy areas, the book offered a pathbreaking examination of institutional development and a treatment of political actors that moved beyond standard accounts of elites who responded only to societal or corporate demands. Building a New American State demonstrated how politics could be understood only historically, since current conditions were layered over preexisting institutions. Through this book, Skowronek became one of those rare authors able to influence scholarship in several academic fields. The theoretical and substantive insights of his book influenced the first and second generations of scholars who built the field of American Political Development, using historical data to examine how institutions structured politics over long periods of time and how policies reconfigured politics. This roundtable explores how this classic book affected the study of government in the disciplines of political science, history, and sociology. The authors discuss ways each discipline developed a distinct version of American Political Development. The roundtable also explores how the interdisciplinary project of historical institutionalism has evolved since the early 1980s and new directions in which the field might go.

Although American Political Development is one of the more sociological corners of political science, for the most part sociologists have not been attuned to its contributions. Even among historical sociologists, the central conversations have been motivated by classic questions about transitions to capitalism and revolution in Europe rather than by puzzles of American exceptionalism.Much of political sociology has focused on individual voting behavior and public opinion; social movements research focuses heavily on the most recent decades in American history. Consequently, a review of the impact of Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State within sociology reveals a sharply delimited set of direct influences beyond the research already well known to scholars in American Political Development, largely the work of Theda Skocpol (1992) and her many students and collaborators (e.g., Orloff and Skocpol 1984). A rereading, by contrast, highlights the importance of the book for contemporary discussions of the forms and processes of institutional change.

During my first year of graduate school (1982–83), Louis Galambos congratulated me for having the courage to go into a dying field. Naïveté, not courage, had propelled me to leave my position as deputy director of income maintenance programs for the New York City Department of Social Services and study political history at The Johns Hopkins University. Although contact with the job market four years later would confirm my adviser’s warnings, at the time he issued this “heads up” I did wonder what Dr. Galambos had been smoking. After all, it seemed to me that politics, and particularly its bureaucratic incarnation, touched the lives of Americans more of ten and more forcefully than ever before. How could interest in this topic be declining? What’s more, by my third year in graduate school, I had mastered a rich body of literature that confirmed the centrality of politics.The Progressive synthesis, dating back to James Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington, was under fire but still compelled elegant work that had begun to focus less on Progressive presidents and more on the fate of liberalism as it engaged racism, sought to reconcile local preferences with national agendas, and grappled with Americans’ increasing distrust of the centrally directed programs that the New Deal and the Great Society spawned (Brinkley 1982, 1995; Chafe 1980; Gerstle 1989, 2001; McGirr 2001; Sugrue 1996).

Stephen Skowronek’s Building aNew American State remains one of the most influential books in political science and history of the past two decades. In political science, Building engendered a set of deep disciplinary transformations that simultaneously sent scholars sprinting into the history books for new cases with which to ply and test theory, goaded them into rethinking what it meant for the United States to possess a “state,” and welcomed them in embracing the study of institutions as a worthwhile endeavor in political science. In history, Skowronek’s book challenged scholars to reconceive the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as a fundamentally distinct period of governance, a peculiar challenge to the institutional forms that had dominated nineteenth-century American politics. Two decades later, historians and political scientists are still laboring to answer Skowronek’s call.

Before Julian Zelizer called with the idea for this forum, I had marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Building a New American State as just one more entry on a growing list of reminders of the swift passage of time. Now, as I read the reflections of scholars who have risen to prominence during this period in political science, sociology, and history, the fullness of these years is readily apparent. Building a New American State has aged gracefully as the symbol of a larger enterprise, one that Julian Zelizer, Elizabeth Clemens, Dan Carpenter, and Brian Balogh have done much to expand, sustain, and enrich. Reflecting back on my own experience, I realize that my inclination as author to find something of critical significance on every page of the book gave way some time ago to admiration for the growing corpus of work that was engaging its themes and pushing its arguments in new directions. I count myself lucky to have had this work seized upon by a generation of scholars ready to rethink the development of American government and politics, and I am grateful to them for giving it a life of its own.