Citizenship, a fundamental political idea, exists in many forms in the United States. In this study, I apply the analytical strategies of American political development to examine the evolution of Cherokee constitutional citizenship law since 1827. The lack of political development studies on Cherokee governance presents a unique opportunity to identify foundational and second-story ideas underpinning Cherokee political thought. I contribute to the ongoing discussion of indigenous political development by creating a new theoretical framework for interpreting and analyzing durable shifts in Cherokee citizenship law. As America expands and diversifies, alternate, nonliberal views of citizenship increase in political relevance. Understanding why certain laws exist and where they came from is crucial for cultivating political engagement, engaging in productive discourse, and creating humanizing policies.

The FDR administration waged a war on crime starting in 1933. I argue that this war on crime had three primary effects. First, it created a ratchet effect whereby expanded institutions did not return to previous levels after the campaign ended. Second, it instilled enduring institutional and racial logics into law enforcement in America. By building a state through a war on crime, these leaders constructed a criminal justice system designed to make war. Moreover, they perpetuated the surveillance of Black leaders and eschewed calls from Black organizations demanding protection from widespread racial violence. Third, these political entrepreneurs induced an issue realignment that defined crime policy around a politics of consensus—a consensus that included every major political bloc but Black Americans, who unsuccesfully called on the federal government to hold local police accountable and address racial inequality. This coalition diffused their methods to states and deployed future wars on crime, and the racial logics cemented in the FDR era set the stage for these future wars to be deployed disproportionately against the Black community.

Research on corporate criminal law has grown since the Great Recession, but corporate criminal liability, the principle charging corporations for crimes, remains understudied. Literature points to a 1909 Supreme Court decision as its basis, but historical analysis of the doctrine's deeper political roots reveal that its development was contingent on the convergence of several unique factors driving turn of the century American politics. First, corporate criminal liability would not have emerged had it not been for shifts in jurisprudential theory reconceptualizing the corporate form as an independent entity. Second, middle managers of railroads emerged as powerful political players during this period who capitalized on this discursive shift to advocate for corporate criminal liability as an alternative to individual liability rules directed against them. Third, the Supreme Court upheld corporate criminal lability in 1909 because it was constructed by the era's Republican majority to protect the party's economic preferences, and corporate criminal liability was viewed as consistent with their conservative agenda. These factors were each necessary, but alone insufficient, in paving the way for the Court to validate the principle in 1909. How they fit together sequentially illuminates how the doctrine's construction was contingent on specific political and historical circumstances.

This article examines the origins and early activities of the Democratic and Republican Governors Associations (DGA and RGA, respectively) from the RGA's initial founding in 1961 through the 1968 national nominating conventions. I argue that the formations of these organizations were key moments in the transition from a decentralized to a more integrated and nationally programmatic party system. The DGA and RGA represent gubernatorial concern for and engagement in the development of national party programs and the national party organizations. Governors formed these groups because of the increasing importance of national government programs on the affairs of state governments and the recognition on the part of governors that national partisan politics was having critical effects on electoral outcomes at the state level, through the reputations of the national parties. To varying extents, the governors used these organizations to promote the national parties and contributed to national party-building efforts and the development of national party brands.

Since the 1970s, the neoliberal worldview has become reflected increasingly in the policy ideas and institutional innovations advanced by both major parties in the United States. This is most obvious in the realm of economic and social policy, but especially evident at the subnational level, particularly in the city. I argue that neoliberalism, as an ideology, a set of policy prescriptions, and institutional designs, is conceptually distinct from liberalism, especially in its “New Deal” form, social democracy, and from conservatism. Moreover, it is having a developmental effect—neoliberal ideas and institutions have proved durable. This article argues that an urban lens most strikingly reveals the presence of a neoliberal political order that has also made its mark on national political institutions, particularly in the American political economy.

Historians have long recognized that one of the principal functions of early nineteenth-century American state governments was the distribution of economic privileges, including preferential grants of corporate privileges. North, Wallis, and Weingast label such regimes natural states and argue that government as privilege dispenser is a characteristic of most societies and, in some few instances, represents a transitional phase between traditional premodern societies and modern open-access democracies. This article documents the operation of the natural state in New York, focusing on how Martin Van Buren's Democratic coalition manipulated the distribution of bank and insurance company charters so as to advance the interests of their Democratic coalition. Consistent with the North, Wallis, and Weingast interpretation, the evidence shows that the transition to open access was neither smooth nor inevitable; Van Buren's Democratic coalition reversed the long-run trend toward greater access until they were unseated during the financial crisis years of the late 1830s.

Through the 1880s, Senator Henry Blair (R-NH) spearheaded an effort to erode local control of education by turning Congress into a source of funds and oversight for state-level primary and secondary schools. The Blair Bill won support from an interregional, interracial, bipartisan coalition. It passed in the Senate on three separate occasions, was endorsed by presidents, and was a frequent topic of discussion among party elites. Yet in 1890 the bill failed for the last time, and local control would go largely unchanged until the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In this article we explore the decade-long battle surrounding Blair's proposal. Our analysis focuses on this lost opportunity as a way of highlighting the coalitional and institutional dynamics that work to prevent reform in an otherwise favorable environment. In this way, we contribute to a large literature on the uneven course of American state development.