This manuscript revisits the history of American highway policy from the perspective of the powerful institution at its core: a confederation of state highway departments able to cut through partisan and sectional divides in Congress with two powerful claims: they represent both the advice of experts and the will of the states. After documenting their role in the development of the American highway system, the manuscript applies this perspective to current policy developments with an emphasis on the potential reauthorization of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021, scheduled to expire at the end of fiscal year 2026. The manuscript concludes that the intersection of a looming fiscal crisis with the climate crisis creates the opportunity for this still powerful institution to launch a sustained transition away from fossil fuels, with impacts significantly beyond this policy realm.

Though observers at the time noted that a well-coordinated lobbying campaign contributed to enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, subsequent popular and scholarly accounts have largely ignored the role of institutional advocacy, focusing instead on either the inspirational effects of direct-action protest outside of Washington or unhindered institutional activity by policymakers themselves to explain the achievement of this legislation. In contrast, this article investigates civil rights movement organizations’ engagement in federal legislative lobbying and the broader network of labor, religious, and other public interest lobbyists within which their Washington representatives collaborated. Using archived sign-in sheets from meetings hosted by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, I identify 138 individuals who participated in the Civil Rights Act’s lobbying campaign as Washington representatives of various organizations. Drawing on their memoirs, obituaries, and other records of their professional careers, I trace these Washington representatives’ paths to the Civil Rights Act lobby. This descriptive analysis reveals a critical mass of Washington representatives with ample Beltway experience, findings that challenge conventional periodization of the civil rights movement’s institutionalization and suggest new interconnections in the development of the administrative and civil rights states.

When and why did House parties identify exclusive committees? The nexus of parties and standing committees defines the distribution of power in the U.S. House of Representatives, shapes legislators’ careers, and affects Congress's ability to address the nation's problems. Yet, political science provides inadequate and often misleading characterizations of the parties and the most important standing committees. We provide missing detail and offer a historical perspective on party efforts to arrange standing committees in the period since the revolt against Speaker Joseph Cannon in 1909–1910. Our narrative offers a foundation for explaining party efforts to regulate committee membership and meet legislators’ demands. For the first time, we define three periods in committee assignment limitations. In doing so, we place key events in historical context: We report that the modern exclusive committees (Appropriations, Rules, and Ways and Means) did not become defined until the 1950s; the identification by the two parties of a larger set of exclusive committees for which a one-assignment limitation applied began decades earlier; the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 placed a one-assignment limitation in House rules that had been party practice for three decades by then. In recent decades, deep partisanship has been accompanied by a loosening, not tightening, of restrictions. In fact, there are no fully exclusive committees remaining in practice.

The expansion of schooling in the early 20th Century required the modernization of state governments at the subnational level and related fiscal policy reform. Organized educators in California and Washington promoted legislation in 1920 that would increase each state’s support for schooling. In spite of similar fiscal policy goals and a shared commitment to the support of public schooling in both states, the legislation passed in California and failed in Washington. This comparative analysis of fiscal policy reform in the two states demonstrates the relationship between education fiscal policy and state formation, between tax policy and social change, the role of states as subnational sites for fiscal policy experimentation in the early twentieth century, and the role of policy feedback in fiscal policy reform. A close study of factors contributing to the divergent legislative outcomes illuminates underlying relationships between fiscal policy and associative action at state levels over the 70-year-period preceding the 1920 reform campaigns and demonstrates the centrality of education to research in fiscal sociology and political development.

In British North America, imperial sovereignty required peripheral cooperation in public finance. However, because of limited coercive British state capacity, local colonial assemblies and town governments operated with substantial autonomy. The interests of colonial subjects did not align exactly with those of politicians and military officers in the center of British imperial authority in London. Short term success in colonial war between 1754 and 1763 required policies that incentivized colonists to buy into the imperial project. After 1758, Parliament and royal departments managed to incentivize greater provincial participation and resource allocation to the military by co-opting existing colonial merchant networks using lucrative public contracts. The contracts requested a small number of merchant firms in colonial cities take on large debts to circulate notes of credit in exchange for commissions. Merchant financiers could use these notes to pay for military expenses. The contracts promised bullion remittances from England to cover the debts, but these funds ultimately proved insufficient to cover outstanding obligations. Failures to remit led to a colonial credit crisis between 1762 and 1768 which shook colonists’ faith in the credibility of the British fiscal state in the decade leading up to the American Revolution.