As economic inequalities have skyrocketed in the United States, scholars have started paying more attention to the individual political activities of billionaires and multimillionaires. Useful as such work may be, it misses an important aspect of plutocratic influence: the sustained efforts of organized groups and networks of political mega-donors, who work together over many years between as well as during elections to reshape politics. Our work contributes to this new direction by focusing on two formally organized consortia of wealthy donors that have recently evolved into highly consequential forces in U.S. politics. We develop this concept and illustrate the importance of organized donor consortia by presenting original data and analyses of the right-wing Koch seminars (from 2003 to the present) and the progressive left-leaning Democracy Alliance (from 2005 to the present). We describe the evolution, memberships, and organizational routines of these two wealthy donor collectives, and explore the ways in which each has sought to reconfigure and bolster kindred arrays of think tanks, advocacy groups, and constituency efforts operating at the edges of America's two major political parties in a period of intensifying ideological polarization and growing conflict over the role of government in addressing rising economic inequality. Our analysis argues that the rules and organizational characteristics of donor consortia shape their resource allocations and impact, above and beyond the individual characteristics of their wealthy members.

This article revisits Nelson Polsby's classic article “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives” fifty years after its publication, to examine whether the empirical trends that Polsby identified have continued. This empirical exploration allows us to place Polsby's findings in broader historical context and to assess whether the House has continued along the “institutionalization course”—using metrics that quantify the degree to which the House has erected impermeable boundaries with other institutions, created a complex institution, and adopted universalistic decision-making criteria. We empirically document that careerism plateaued right at the point Polsby wrote “Institutionalization,” and that the extension of the careerism trend has affected Democrats more than Republicans. The House remains complex, but lateral movement between the committee and party leadership systems began to reestablish itself a decade after “Institutionalization” was published. Finally, the seniority system as a mechanism for selecting committee chairs—the primary measure of universalistic decision-making criteria—has been almost thoroughly demolished. Thus, most of the trends Polsby identified have moderated, but have not been overturned. We conclude by considering the larger set of interpretive issues that our empirical investigation poses.

Throughout U.S. history, the two major political parties have switched positions many times on a variety of issues, including how powerful the national government should be and how much it should regulate and guide the American economy. Are these changes simply the product of historical contingency, or are there structural factors at work that can help explain these developments? This article finds that change in party control of government can help explain change in party ideologies with respect to economic policy. Parties in long-term control of unified government tend to develop their ideology in ways that call for a stronger national government and more economic intervention, while parties in opposition tend to change their ideology in ways that call for less national government power and less economic intervention.

The early twentieth-century witnessed numerous efforts to reform state government institutions, resulting in the widespread adoption of such reforms as the direct primary and citizen initiative. By contrast, efforts to establish unicameral state legislatures experienced success in just one state: Nebraska. In this article, I examine why movements to adopt one-house legislatures in other states failed in the wake of the Nebraska breakthrough of 1934. Using a most-similar case study research design, I compare the successful Nebraska effort to unsuccessful subsequent efforts in Ohio and Missouri, and I point to rural opposition as being the decisive factor explaining divergent outcomes across the three states. In Nebraska, the lack of malapportionment in the bicameral legislature meant that rural communities did not fear that unicameralism would lead to their diminished influence in state government, but in Ohio and Missouri (where malapportionment was high) rural communities used their structural advantages in state politics to shut down unicameralism efforts. The article's findings suggest that the bicameral state legislature is an important institutional legacy of the bygone era of rural dominance in American politics.

Beginning in 1839 and continuing through the early twentieth century, the American states passed laws expanding married women's economic rights, including the right to own property and sign contracts. In almost every state, these significant legal changes took place before women had the right to vote. I argue that married women's economic rights reform is best understood as a piecemeal, iterative process in which multiple state-level institutions interacted over time. This rights expansion often occurred as a by-product of male political actors pursuing issues largely unrelated to gender—such as debt relief and commercial development—combined with paternalistic views of women as needing protection from the state. State courts played a crucial role by making evident the contradictions inherent in vague and inconsistent legal reforms. Ultimately, male political actors liberalized married women's economic rights to the extent that they thought it was necessary to allow for the development of efficient and workable property rights in a commercial economy, leaving women's place in the economy partially but not fully liberalized.

A central question in the study of health politics and policy is the degree to which the state can shape American medicine. This long-standing debate began amid early battles over health insurance and continues through the contemporary opioid epidemic. Unlike recent and post–Affordable Care Act claims emphasizing the federal government's strong ability to intervene in healthcare marketplaces, this article supports claims of medicine's autonomy from political intervention, drawing on an extensive analysis of recurrent, halting, and largely unsuccessful efforts to regulate popular psychopharmaceutical drugs from the 1940s through the 1980s. I first develop an account of a “pocket of weakness,” the post-marketing pharmaceutical regulatory process, in an otherwise strong institution, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). I then demonstrate how this regulatory structure, interacting with policymakers’ incentives, caused constrained responses, inaction, and drift. Amid concerns about misuse, overuse, abuse, side effects, and addiction, regulators and legislators found it difficult to restrict access to or disincentivize the prescription and consumption of problematic therapeutics, in spite of their varied and repeated regulatory efforts. This elaboration of a pocket of weakness has important theoretical implications for historical institutionalist scholarship that principally focuses on state strength. This account also has substantive implications for scholarship on health politics and policy, mental health treatment, and the political causes of medicalization, and can help explain the opioid epidemic's emergence, potential trajectory, and circumscribed solution set.

This article investigates an important yet poorly understood aspect of the origins of the U.S. carceral state. Many explanations attribute the rise of mass incarceration to the conservative tide in American politics beginning in the late 1960s: “tough on crime” policies advanced by southern Democrats and Republicans, white backlash against black civil rights, and the law-and-order politics of Nixon's “Southern Strategy.” But in focusing on conservatives, prevailing theories have ignored how the changing economic and political landscape of the post-WWII South shaped how policymakers thought about crime. This article examines how key elements of the carceral state emerged in the rapidly growing, metropolitan, and business-minded Sunbelt South between 1954 and 1970, using North Carolina as a test case. Drawing on a variety of archival sources, it unearths how moderate southern politicians with material links to extra-regional sources of capital, political links to northern liberal elites, and ideological links to postwar liberalism pioneered state-level carceral policy. It argues that the swift development of crime policy in midcentury North Carolina was the product of how the state's moderate elites chose to govern the emerging Sunbelt economy in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement. The problems of rampant civil disorder, racial extremism, and lawlessness, they argued, threatened the economic progress of North Carolina and required the implementation of strong yet race-neutral crime policy. This study offers an analysis of how the Sunbelt South, in shedding Jim Crow and entering the national political and economic mainstream, came to help spearhead the carceral turn in American politics.