As one looks back on the important developments in political science over the past two decades, there is much to be applauded. While it may be premature to say that we have come “of age” as a scientific discipline, the field is clearly in better shape today than it was in the early 1950s. One indicator is the ratio between mere speculation and observed empirical regularities reported in our journal articles. Another is the decline in the percentage (if not in absolute numbers) of our colleagues who insist that political phenomena are just not amenable to scientific examination. A third might be the dramatic increase in the number of political scientists who have been exposed to training in the techniques and rationale of data making and data analysis. The list could be extended, but we need not do so here.

On the other hand, a stance of comfortable complacency would be very premature. Not only have we fared badly in coming to grips with the knowledge-action relationship in the abstract, but we have by and large done a poor job of shaping the policies of our respective national, provincial, and local governments. Since others as well as myself have dealt—if not definitively—with these issues before, let me eschew further discussion of the knowledge application question for the moment, and go on to matters of basic research. Of the more serious flaws to date, two stand out particularly. One is the lack of balance between a concern for cumulativeness on the one hand and the need for innovation on the other. My impression is that students of national politics (at least those who work in the vineyard of empirical regularities) have been more than conscientious in staying with one set of problems, such as the relationship between political attitudes and voting behavior. But students of inter-national politics have, conversely, tended to move all too quickly from one problem to another, long before cumulative evidence has been generated and before our findings are integrated into coherent wholes.

When one is asked to speak on the past, present, and future of social science history, one is less overwhelmed by the size of the task than confused by its indexicality. Whose definition of social science history? Which past? Or, put another way, whose past? Indeed, which and whose present? Moreover, should the task be taken as one of description, prescription, or analysis? Many of us might agree on, say, a descriptive analysis of the past of the Social Science History Association. But about the past of social science history as a general rather than purely associational phenomenon, we might differ considerably. The problem of description versus prescription only increases this obscurity.

The collective polio literature of the mid-twentieth century developed a model centered on age at infection. In this model, known as the hygiene hypothesis, risk of severe polio increased with socioeconomic status (SES) because higher SES was associated with older age at infection. Rural residence was also linked to increased polio risk due to older age at infection. Crowding and larger family size were associated with earlier age at infection and thus reduced the risk of severe polio. In contrast, according to the intensive-exposure hypothesis proposed by Nielsen and colleagues (2001, 2002), exposure to the poliovirus within the home was linked to increased severity of infection, making larger family size and crowding important risk factors. Data for polio deaths in Wentworth and York counties, including the cities of Hamilton and Toronto, from 1900 to 1937 were gathered from a variety of archival sources and socioeconomic class was coded using the five-point composite score scale from Hauser (1982). The results provide support for the intensive-exposure hypothesis as an addition to the traditional polio model. Age at death increased with status score during the earlier 1900–1929 period, but not in the 1930–1937 period. The overall proportions of polio deaths in the various status scores were stable over both periods and disproportionately prevalent in status score three (skilled blue collar). This analysis of polio mortality provides a more nuanced picture of the disease and its relation to SES in a time of rapidly changing socioecological conditions.

In this article I ask (1) whether the ways in which the early bourgeois public sphere was structured—precisely by exclusion—are instructive for considering its later development, (2) how a consideration of the social foundations of public life calls into question abstract formulations of it as an escape from social determination into a realm of discursive reason, (3) to what extent “counterpublics” may offer useful accommodations to failures of larger public spheres without necessarily becoming completely attractive alternatives, and (4) to what extent considering the organization of the public sphere as a field might prove helpful in analyzing differentiated publics, rather than thinking of them simply as parallel but each based on discrete conditions. These considerations are informed by an account of the way that the public sphere developed as a concrete ideal and an object of struggle in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain.

Most recent explanations of social welfare and development outcomes have focused on the role and impact of formal institutional arrangements, particularly the state. The institutional legacies of colonial rule and the role of democratic institutions have been common explanatory variables. This article focuses on the historical origins, persistence, and increases in inequality in Mexico and Chile during the twentieth century. It argues that despite important historical economic and political institutional differences, similar processes account for the unequal distributional outcomes that characterize the two cases. Critical conjunctures involved bitter struggle between social groups. While popularly based countermovements (along the lines predicted by Karl Polyani) arose periodically and struggled to improve social conditions, these movements were unable to alter the underlying sources of inequality. By mid-twentieth century, popular pressure had been able to exact only an unequal form of embeddedness (or social protection from the market) that contributed to inequality. Further, waves of popular mobilization linked to critical conjunctures produced reactive historical sequences involving fierce resistance from propertied elites and their middle-class allies. This resistance inevitably gave rise to new conjunctures ushering in new institutional arrangements that entrenched or increased inequality. The absence of a distributive settlement between propertied classes and popular groups was at the heart of the mobilization and countermobilization cycles in both cases; indeed, it was the depth of this disagreement, particularly the disagreement over private property, that fueled reactive sequences and their unequalizing outcomes.

This essay analyzes the economic conditions associated with urban social disturbances in the United States in the 1960s. Using state-level data on the social disturbances in conjunction with census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, the analysis tests the relationship between measures of wage inequality and measures of social disorder. In conjunction with accounts of the unrest, the findings support the rising expectations hypothesis, an aspect of the relative deprivation view of racial violence. In particular, overall wage inequality is a significant factor in the disturbances. Also, although the residual or discrimination component of wage inequality and the human capital component are related to the disturbances in the same way, this relationship is stronger for the human capital component of inequality.

The emergence of postwar welfare states in Europe is usually understood as a social and political phenomenon, as a social policy to prevent against forms of mass poverty and to grant general social rights and entitlements to populations during a period of rising prosperity. Beyond these sociopolitical aspects, the foundation of systems of social security after 1945 also had important cultural and epistemic implications. The promise of the state to provide a generalized form of security represented an important cultural factor in securing the social and political stability of postwar societies in Europe. This article examines some exemplary aspects of the meaning of social security by tracing their historical roots and their effects on postwar welfare states in Western Europe. In order to chart the various, interconnected cultural meanings of social security, it juxtaposes two institutional contexts in which social security and prevention were discussed: an international organization of social security experts and a Swiss life insurance company with an innovative health promotion service. The article shows how security was seen ultimately as an utopian response to the multiplication of risks and damages through the processes of industrialization and modernization and thus reveals how security served as both a technical concept for managing integrated systems of insurance and an instrument of control and calculation to help administer the economic and social policies of modern societies. By focusing on the example of life insurance, it demonstrates how security acted as an umbrella term for a generalized model of prevention that targeted the specific risks of a modern, middle-class consumer society.

The devolution of tuition authority, or abdication of tuition-setting control from elected representatives to unelected university governing boards, is an instance of marketization in higher education. Except for New York and Florida, all states have moved closer to a market-priced ideal by “deregulating” tuition. In this article, I describe my analysis of these two negative cases and argue that preexisting higher education policies have lasting effects on the institutional logics to which policy makers and other stakeholders have access, leading to divergent outcomes. What policy makers deem appropriate policy in their local context is shaped by a history of education policy making that likely preceded their position in office. However, the structure of institutions and the founding ideas of those institutions—as preserved in planning documents and remembered by select institutional actors—perpetuate a commitment to a certain institutional logic. Specifically, Florida and New York policy makers were constrained in their decision making about tuition devolution at multiple points in time by a family of institutions logic that reinforced the importance of their state university systems’ lack of formal tiers and their commitment to price similarity. The state policies governing these state systems became politically consequential because policy makers invoked the system cohesiveness mandated by such policies as a principal reason for rejecting devolution proposals. This powerful narrative appears to have precluded the ideational change toward a market university despite a move in this direction in other states.

This essay surveys the contributions of William H. Sewell Jr.'sLogics of History and concludes that the book sketches a compelling agenda for an integrated historical social science. The author first summarizes Sewell's ontological and epistemological claims concerning social structure and event, history and temporality, and sociohistorical causality. The author then discusses five main areas in which ambiguities in Sewell's approach might be clarified or his arguments pushed farther. These concern (1) the relationship between historical event and traumatic event; (2) the idea of the unprecedented event or “antistructure”; (3) the theory of semiosis underlying Sewell's notion of a multiplicity of structures; and (4) the compatibilities and differences between the concepts of structure and mechanism(here the author argues that social structures are the distinctive “mechanisms” of the human or social sciences). Finally, (5) Sewell's call for “a more robust sense of the social” in historical writing locates the “social” mainly at the level of the metafield of power, or what regulation theory calls the mode of regulation; the author suggests a possible integration of this society-level concept with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of semiautonomous fields.

Many social scientists have documented that the American corporate capitalist class is highly organized and cohesive, both in terms of formal structural characteristics (Domhoff, 1967; Useem, 1979; Scott, 1979) and informal social patterns (Baltzell, 1964; Domhoff, 1974; Mills, 1956). One of the major structural features integrating corporate capitalists is interlocking directorates, which have been shown to form a single, continuous, cohesive network (Sonquist and Koenig, 1975; Allen, 1974; Mariolis, 1975; Mizruchi, 1982; Pennings, 1980; Scott, 1979; Fennema and Schijf, 1978).

This research explains what happened to agricultural soil fertility during the “Campanha do Trigo” (Wheat Campaign) in Portugal, which began in 1929. It is commonly understood that the excessive expansion of wheat crops during the fascist “Estado Novo” (New State) regime led to the degradation of soils in the southern half of Portugal. This relationship, however, has never been questioned before. This article extends the narrative back into the last half of the nineteenth century in search of the origin of processes that gradually intensified throughout the country. In short, expansion of the cultivated area in association with the inadequate intensification of crop rotations over about 80 years, from the 1870s onward, including in non-wheat areas, strongly accentuated soil erosion and made organic fertilization progressively less effective. These transformations were only partially offset by chemical fertilization. Nitrogen and phosphorus were the key factors in this historical process. Focusing on the cultivation system and soil dynamics allows the successive integration of various kinds of historical evidence and sources. From an environmental question—why did agricultural soil degrade?—this article explores soil degradation over time and space, and assesses its social and biophysical impacts. At the same time, it addresses the history of agriculture in Portugal and its disciplinary foundations.

In studying how to best understand social program introduction, political scientists have built up a laundry list of contributory factors. We suggest, however, that “objective” problem pressure has been incorrectly neglected by many scholars in recent decades—and the well-known case of Germany’s nineteenth-century introduction of social insurance legislation provides a clear illustration of this point. In explaining the origins and design of German social insurance, the interplay of three factors is key: first, exceptionally high problem pressure, connected to both labor market- and state-building processes; second, a fragile institutional context dominated by Prussia; and third, the party political constellation. In making this argument, we draw on “open functional reasoning” and extract implications from the case study to further refine the underlying theory. Specifically, we find that goal-oriented action may both be more common and more prone to compromise than the theory suggests. As such, we not only present an argument for considering the potential impact of problem pressure, but also lay out and refine an approach to doing so. In contrasting this approach to the problematic functionalism that initially inclined many scholars to neglect of problem pressure, we hope to help rehabilitate the concept—and in the process strengthen the explanatory power of research in sociology and political science.

A comparative spatial history using GIS, this article examines the similar and differing effects of railway expansion on the growth of postal communications in Great Britain and France from 1830 to the eve of the Great War. It argues that the modern Postal Age in Great Britain and France began in the 1830s. In Britain in 1839, the Parliament obligated private railway companies to convey the Royal Mail throughout the kingdom at reasonable rates. Thereafter, the expansion of postal services and railway networks went hand in hand. Over the years, thousands of new post offices were established and were closer to rail stations than before. As the years wore on the geography of postal communication expanded greatly and by 1914 the majority of rural districts became part of the system of regular, daily mail. In France, a country four or five times larger than England and Wales with a relatively vast rural population, the task of modernizing postal service was a greater challenge. The inauguration of a “rural service” in 1829 employed some 5,000 men as postal carriers to deliver and collect mail throughout the countryside. Thereafter, their numbers grew as new post offices were established to serve villages and small towns with mail deliveries every other day. In the 1880s, under the Third Republic, the state greatly expanded the postal service, deeming it a national mission. It was then that the growing rail network came to shape the national geography of postal service. Hence, at the turn of the century the patterns British and French postal expansions converged.

Between 1934 and the time of the 1940 Census, the US government built and leased 30,151 units of public housing, but we know little about the residents who benefited from this housing. We use a unique methodology that compares addresses of five public housing developments to complete-count data from the 1940 Census to identify residents of public housing in New York City at the time of the census. We compare these residents to the larger pool of residents living in New York City in 1940 who were eligible to apply for the housing to assess how closely housing authorities adhered to the intent of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and the Housing Act of 1937. This comparison produces a picture of whom public housing administrators considered deserving of this public benefit at the dawn of the public housing program in the United States. Results indicate a shift toward serving households with lower incomes over time. All the developments had a consistent preference for households with a “nuclear family” structure, but policies favoring racial segregation and other discretion on the part of housing authorities for tenant selection created distinct populations across housing developments. Households headed by a naturalized citizen were favored over households headed by a native-born citizen in nearly all the public housing projects. This finding suggests a more nuanced understanding of who public housing administrators considered deserving of the first public housing than archival research accounts had previously indicated.

While a framework of statist welfare practices was constructed in the 1930s, the principles that underwrote it—and that defined the interaction of individual citizens and state agencies—were changed as a consequence of World War II and transformed as a result of Stalin's death and the onset of de-Stalinization. Following a major sequence of welfare reforms in the Khrushchev period, most people's encounters with social risk were substantially minimized. By the Brezhnev era, problems associated with moral hazard were creating new challenges for policy makers: not only did people enjoy the right to a job, as they had done for decades, but perverse incentives discouraged innovation and, for some, hard work. A welfare system had been established that went far beyond the universalism of Western Europe. Cash transfers diffused social risks. Furthermore, welfare touched almost all areas of life, from jobs to leisure, creating a new kind of industrial society, in which many social risks had been artificially eliminated. The effectiveness of this system was highly uneven, and many miserable examples of welfare provision persisted, but this revised relationship between risk and welfare guided the mentalities of policy makers and ordinary people alike. This article offers a commentary on the long-term nature of this process but focuses particularly on the reforms associated with Khrushchev, especially the pension laws of 1956 and 1964.

This article uses a unique data set from 1957 to examine the racial gap in health insurance coverage and the extent to which that gap influenced racial differences in health care spending. Results indicate that black households in 1957 were statistically significantly less likely to purchase health insurance than white households, even after controlling for differences in income, years of schooling, age, family size, marital status, and other personal and job-related characteristics. Findings in the article also provide weak support for the hypothesis that a racial gap in health insurance coverage contributed to racial differences in health care spending between blacks and whites; even after controlling for differences in income, education, and other characteristics, racial differences in medical expenditures were smaller for insured than for uninsured families, although the result is not statistically significant.

Edward Jarvis’s (1971 [1855]) study of insanity in 1854 Massachusetts still receives attention as an exemplary study of mental disorder. It is cited as the first American study of the “true” prevalence of mental illness in a general population (Dohrenwend 1975), the first American study to show that social standing (pauperism) was related to mental illness (ibid.), and the first American study to show that a substantial number of ill people were not receiving “professional” help (ibid.; Fox 1984). Likewise, Jarvis’s focus on social causation—social factors cause mental disorder, versus social selection, according to which mental disorder impairs social functioning and achievement—identified an important issue that still receives attention in the mental health literature (Dohrenwend 1975; Fox 1990; Turner and Wagenfeld 1967; Wheaton 1978).

Twentieth-century American men and women were often unable to live up to or down to their own fertility ideals. In a national random sample of 11,126 ever-married men and women over the age of 44, “discrepant fertility”—the difference between ideal fertility and completed fertility—was common. This article seeks to identify the causes of such discrepancies, and findings suggest that the most important exogenous factor is “birth cohort.” Those born prior to or after the Great Depression were prone to exhibit negative discrepant fertility, having had fewer children than they thought ideal, while those born during the Depression—the parents of the baby boom—were characterized by significant positive discrepant fertility, having had more children than they thought ideal. It is argued that these cohort effects are closely related to social and economic conditions that prevailed as twentieth-century Americans came of age and assessed their professional and familial prospects.

The outbreak of AIDS around the world in the last 15 or 20 years is usually referred to as the “AIDS epidemic,” or occasionally “pandemic” (Grmek 1990). These terms have no great analytic value. The major medical dictionaries and epidemiological textbooks define an epidemic merely as an outbreak of a disease marked by a greater number of cases than usual (see Fox et al. 1970: 246–49; Mausner and Bahn 1974: 22, 272–77; Stedman’s Medical Dictionary 1977: 470; Kelsey et al. 1986: 212; Walton et al. 1986: 351; Harvard 1987: 247). This condition is contrasted with the endemic form of a disease at “its habitual level, or what previous experience would lead one to anticipate.” The term pandemic is used to describe an epidemic widespread in the world and usually characterized by a large number of cases, for example, the fourteenth-century plague epidemic (or Black Death) and the influenza epidemic during the latter part of World War I. Some authorities stress the fact that epidemics are also characterized by a declining phase. This is true by definition, of course, for otherwise the disease could be described as shifting to a new and higher endemic level. But it is also of interest that most of these unusual outbreaks of disease are eventually limited by such mechanisms as a decrease in susceptibles as persons become immune or die; as interventions, either medical or behavioral, eliminate the source or interrupt transmission; or as the pathogen mutates and becomes less virulent.