Two lessons from the 2000 presidential election stand out in particular. The first is that rules affect results. Elections are highly organized mechanisms of citizen participation. Established rules specify who can vote, where and when they can vote, what ballot form registers their vote, and what outcome constitutes winning. Rules, moreover, determine which officials count the votes, certify the victor, and declare the election to be legitimate. The rules governing election contests are not neutral in their effects. Each variant generally tends to advantage some given set of claimants and interests; therefore, the choice among election rules is often controversial, especially when the outcome hangs in the balance. The second, related lesson is that votes intended do not necessarily equal votes cast, that votes cast do not necessarily equal votes recorded, and that votes recorded do not necessarily equal the official vote total. In each case, there is the matter of translation, part of which is technical and depends on the ballot apparatus and part of which is political and depends on the discretionary decisions of those responsible for managing the electoral process. Problems of translation do not ordinarily affect who wins, but they can – and have during certain controversial episodes of U.S. electoral history.

One of the most difficult problems facing economic policymakers during the antebellum period was the threat of instability in the banking sector. Banks constituted not only critical sources of credit for both firms and individuals, but also the primary suppliers of money within the economy. Particularly because bank instability tended to be contagious, it was viewed as an especially vicious problem, and one that required a government solution. The challenge was to craft a policy that would be sufficiently stringent to assure a safe banking system and a secure money supply without being so stringent as to suffocate the economy, depriving it of vital credit and liquidity. Even today, this remains a formidable challenge in many developing countries.

The legal-political status and power of associations in American society is an age-old historical question. As early as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed,

There are a number of theories which argue that repression can help to explain why no labor party was established in the United States. These theories fall into two groups. In one group are versions of the soft repression thesis. In the other are versions of the hard repression thesis. These two theses contradict each other in basic respects.

In the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, mutual benefit societies were thriving voluntary organizations that touched the vast majority of working-class American households. Not only were they politically powerful as institutional actors, but more importantly, they were highly influential in providing their members with the ability to conceive of mutual assistance in a manner other than through the traditional lens of liberalism. Contrary to what may be considered the prevailing wisdom, my research reveals that whether they intended to or not, these organizations taught lessons that gave their members a coherent justification for supporting the emerging welfare state. There is also a methodological lesson, which is that membership organizations must be understood for their indirect social impact as much as their direct political one.

State-centered theorists have forwarded the argument that the role of ideas and state capacity in the formulation of public policies is evidence of an autonomous polity. These theorists hold that state capacity and ideas have an autonomous and independent role in determining state behavior and public policy development.1. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Christopher McGrory Klyza, “Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Patterns: Hardrock Mining, Forestry, and Grazing Policy on United States Public Lands, 1870–1985,” Studies in American Political Development 8 (1994): 341–74; Who Controls the Public Lands? Mining, Forestry, and Grazing Policy, 1870–1990 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America's New Deal (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). Reflective of this, statist Christopher Klyza posits ideas and state capacity as the primary factors in the development of the policy regime that manages grazing on the public grasslands.2. Klyza, “Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Patterns,” 363–70; Who Controls the Public Lands?, chap. 5. I contend, however, that the history of the federal grazing policy regime is indicative of a business dominance perspective, a society-centered approach.3. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1977); Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1977); John F. Manley, “Neo-Pluralism: a Class Analysis of Pluralism I and Pluralism II,” American Political Science Review 77 (1983): 368–83; G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990), and Who Rules America? Power and Politics, 4th ed. Specifically, the livestock industry, a producer group, is the most powerful explanatory factor in the development of this regime, not ideas or state capacity. Furthermore, utilizing the cases of the grazing agencies (the U.S. Grazing Service and later the Bureau of Land Management [BLM]), the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency I assail the autonomy that state-centric theorists ascribe to the state's capacity.

The fundamental difference between George Gonzalez's interpretation of grazing politics on the United States public lands in the twentieth century, as well as his other scholarship on public lands politics, and my own is our macrotheoretical approach. Gonzalez makes use of what he terms a business dominance perspective, “which holds that producer groups in conjunction with economic elites dominate federal policy making.” I, in turn, use a state-sensitive/pluralist approach, which Gonzalez refers to as a state-centered approach. Not surprisingly, we offer differing explanations of the same policies. Before addressing the specifics of his article, I will focus on the differences of our theoretical approaches and what I contend are his misunderstandings of a state-sensitive approach.1. George A. Gonzalez, “The Conservation Policy Network, 1890–1910: The Development and Implementation of “Practical” Forestry,” Polity 31 (1998): 269–99; Gonzalez, Corporate Power and the Environment (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); Christopher McGrory Klyza, “A Window of Autonomy: State Autonomy and the Forest Service in the Early 1900s,” Polity 25 (1992): 173–96; Klyza, “Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Patterns: Hardrock Mining, Forestry, and Grazing Policy on United States Public Lands, 1870–1985,” Studies in American Political Development 8 (1994): 341–74; Klyza, Who Controls Public Lands? Mining, Forestry, and Grazing Policies, 1870–1990 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

I would like to thank the editors of this journal for providing this venue and thus allowing this exchange between myself and Prof. Klyza to take place. Moreover, I would like to thank Prof. Klyza for his thoughtful rejoinder. Nevertheless, and not surprisingly, I disagree with his interpretation of my work. More importantly, however, I disagree with Prof. Klyza's interpretation of his own work as well as with his interpretation of the state-centered approach.