Many perceive the clash between those advocating rational choice theory and their critics to be the dominant cleavage in contemporary political science. At least as fundamental, if much less widely discussed, is the divide over the role of historical analysis (or the investigation of temporal processes). Most social scientists take a “snapshot” view of political life. How does the distribution of public opinion affect policy outcomes? How do individual social characteristics influence propensities to vote? How do electoral rules affect the structure of party systems? Disputes among competing theories center on which factors (“variables”) in the current environment generate important political outcomes. Variable-centered analy- ses are based, however, on some questionable assump- tions about how the social world works.For useful discussions see Andrew Abbott, “Transcending General Linear Reality,” Sociological Theory 6 (1988): 169–86; John C. Harsanyi, “Explanation and Comparative Dynamics in the Social Sciences,” Behavioral Science 5 (1960): 136–45; and Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). The significance of such variables is frequently distorted when they are ripped from their temporal context. There is often a strong case to be made for shifting from snapshots to moving pictures. Placing politics in time systematically situating particular moments (including the present) in a temporal sequence of events and processes can greatly enrich our understanding of complex social dynamics.

Civil rights cemented its place on the national agenda with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, fair housing legislation, federal enforcement of school integration, and the outlawing of discriminatory voting mechanisms in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Less recognized but no less important, the Second Reconstruction also witnessed one of the most punitive interventions in United States history. The death penalty was reinstated, felon disenfranchisement statutes from the First Reconstruction were revived, and the chain gang returned. State and federal governments revised their criminal codes, effectively abolishing parole, imposing mandatory minimum sentences, and allowing juveniles to be incarcerated in adult prisons. Meanwhile, the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 gave the federal government an altogether new role in crime control; several subsequent policies, beginning with the Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and culminating with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, ‘war on drugs,’ and extension of capital crimes, significantly altered the approach. These and other developments had an exceptional and long-lasting effect, with imprisonment increasing six-fold between 1973 and the turn of the century. Certain groups felt the burden of these changes most acutely. As of the last census, fully half of those imprisoned are black and one in three black men between ages 20 and 29 are currently under state supervision. Compared to its advanced industrial counterparts in western Europe, the United States imprisons at least five times more of its citizens per capita.

Theoretical and descriptive studies of the Supreme Court exhibit a curious parallel. Both usually begin from the premise that judicial review is “a deviant institution in a democratic society.” Much normative work claims that independent judicial policymaking is rarely legitimate in a democracy because, with few exceptions, elected officials rather than appointed judges should resolve social controversies. In a frequently cited passage, Alexander Bickel asserts that the Supreme Court is “a counter-majoritarian force” in our system of government. Much empirical work, by comparison, insists that independent judicial policymaking seldom takes place in a democracy because, with few exceptions, judges appointed and confirmed by elected officials sustain whatever social policies are enacted by the dominant national coalition. Robert Dahl observes that it is “unrealistic to suppose that a Court whose members are recruited in the fashion of Supreme Court justices would long hold to norms of Right or Justice substantially at odds with the rest of the political elite.”

Government-sponsored health insurance is a central pillar of the modern welfare state. In advanced industrial democracies, public spending on medical care accounts for an average of 6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), making it the largest category of social spending after public pensions.Computed from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, The Reform of Health Care Systems: A Review of Seventeen OECD Countries (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1994), 38. The comparison with pensions is made by Karl Hinrichs, “The Impact of German Health Insurance Reforms on Redistribution and the Culture of Solidarity,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 20 (1996): 653–87. Despite the popularity and resilience of established health programs, however, the introduction of government-sponsored health coverage has been highly controversial everywhere. Few social programs involve the state so directly in the workings of the economy and the practice of a powerful profession. Few entangle the interests of so many diverse and resourceful groups. And few cast in such stark relief the ideological principles at stake. Although the participants in conflicts over health policy have differed from nation to nation, no country has acquired national health insurance without a fierce and bitter political fight.

Institutions are instruments of stability. Twenty years of research in the “new institutionalism” has produced voluminous studies into how structures constitute or constrain the behavior of actors in political, social, and economic contexts. Agenda controls order and limit the alternatives actors choose from, logics of appropriateness dictate appropriate “scripts” agents follow in structural contexts, learning effects and high initial fixed costs reinforce past choices in ways that restrict future alternatives.Kenneth A. Shepsle, “Institutional Arrangements and Equilibrium in Multidimensional Voting Models,” American Journal of Political Science 23 (1979): 27–59; Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “Introduction” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991); Paul Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,” American Political Science Review 94 (2000): 251–67. In other words, institutions produce stability through “regulative, normative, or cognitive mechanisms” that limit, constitute, or constrain the range of alternatives actors confront.Elisabeth S. Clemens and James M. Cook, “Politics and Institutionalism: Explaining Durability and Change,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 441–66.

Paul Pierson's “Not Just What, but When: Timing and Sequence in Political Processes” is a fitting centerpiece for this symposium. The article takes up themes that have occupied students of comparative politics for some time now and moves the debate decisively forward.For earlier efforts to assess the role of sequencing and timing in politics, see for example, Harsanyi's discussion of “static” and “dynamic” explanation (J. Harsanyi, “Explanation and Comparative Dynamics in Social Science,” Behavioral Science 5 (1960): 136–45); also Verba's early attempts within the context of modernization theory to specify more precisely a “sequential model” that linked outcomes within particular countries to the sequence in which they encountered a set of putatively common challenges (Sidney Verba, “Sequences and Development,” in Leonard Binder et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971], 283–316). Tilly has dealt with related issues of temporality and ordering; see Charles Tilly, “Future History,” Theory and Society 17 (1988): 703–12; Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984); and Tilly, “The Time of States,” Social Research 61 (1994): 269–95. Schmitter and Santiso have also addressed these topics (Philippe C. Schmitter and Javier Santiso, “Three Temporal Dimensions to the Consolidation of Democracy,” International Political Science Review 19 (1998): 69–92). And of course, Pierson's agenda picks up on themes long advocated by the editors of this journal to take temporality seriously (Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “Beyond the Iconography of Order: Notes for a ‘New' Institutionalism,” in The Dynamics of American Politics, eds. Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin Jillson (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994). Pierson's overall message is that social phenomena are often better captured in “moving pictures” that situate a given outcome within a broader temporal framework than in “snapshots” based on cross-sectional data. He constructs a convincing case for this proposition and along the way he also makes progress in rendering the ubiquitous but vague concept of path dependence more useful.For other treatments of this issue see Stephen D. Krasner, “Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective,” Comparative Political Studies 21 (1988): 66–94; Timur Kuran, “The Tenacious Past: Theories of Personal and Collective Conservatism,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 10 (1988): 143–71; Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and James Mahoney, “Uses of Path Dependence in Historical Sociology,” unpubl. ms., Brown University, 1999.

Between 1850 and 1930, demographic upheaval in the United States was connected to reorganization of the racial order. Socially and politically recognized boundaries between groups shifted, new groups emerged, others disappeared, and notions of who belonged in which category changed. All recognized racial groups—blacks, whites, Indians, Asians, Mexicans and others—were affected. This article investigates how and why census racial classification policies changed during this period, only to stabilize abruptly before World War II. In the context of demographic transformations and their political consequences, we find that census policy in any given year was driven by a combination of scientific, political, and ideological motivations.

Based on this analysis, we rethink existing theoretical approaches to censuses and racial classification, arguing that a nation's census is deeply implicated in and helps to construct its social and political order. Censuses provide the concepts, taxonomy, and substantive information by which a nation understands its component parts as well as the contours of the whole; censuses both create the image and provide the mirror of that image for a nation's self-reflection. We conclude by outlining the meaning of this period in American history for current and future debates over race and classification.

In this article, we will probe two distinct historical questions. First, we explore why congressional representatives from the South, who had generally supported the Democratic Party on labor issues during the 1930s, joined with Republicans to oppose the party's pro-labor orientation in the 1940s. We also examine why the class-based union movement that mobilized so assertively after the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 became so cramped and pragmatic by the early 1950s. These puzzles, we believe, are closely related. Our explanation for why labor's horizons, topography, and prospects constricted to workplace issues, to some segments of the working population, and to limited geographic areas by the end of the Truman years points to how southern Democrats shaped the main institutions produced by New Deal and Fair Deal labor legislation.

The claim that institutions “matter” is a subject of lively debate in the study of politics today. It is also something of a nonissue that is not really being debated at all. The reason it can be both at once is that the claim is loaded with theoretical baggage. If it is taken to mean that the actions of politicians or bureaucrats are in fundamental respects autonomous of social interests, the statement can easily prove controversial. If it is taken to mean that institutional context shapes the decisions of political actors, or that the relation between social interests and political outcomes varies with the institutional setting, then there is not much to debate; for there has long been a virtual consensus among students of politics that institutions do matter in these general respects.

Few transformations have been more significant in American politics in recent decades than the Democratic Party's embrace of racial liberalism and Republicans' adoption of a more conservative stance towards civil rights-related policies. We hypothesize that pressure to embrace a liberal position on civil rights was much stronger among northern Democrats and their coalitional partners than among northern Republicans and their affiliated groups by the mid-1940s, as the Democrats became firmly identified as the party of economic liberalism and labor unions. To test this hypothesis and develop a more fine-grained understanding of the dynamics of party positioning on civil rights, we collect and analyze a new data source: state political party platforms published between 1920 and 1968. These unique data suggest that Democrats had generally become the more liberal party on civil rights by the mid-to-late 1940s across a wide range of states. Our findings – which contradict Carmines and Stimson's prevailing issue evolution model of partisan change – suggest that there were strong coalitional and ideological pressures that led the Democrats to embrace racial liberalism. This finding not only leads to a revised perspective on the civil rights revolution, but also to new insights into the dynamics of partisan realignment more generally.

Following its 1992 reorganization, the once scandal-ridden and sclerotic Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) experienced a dramatic turnaround. The agency morphed from a caricature of the ills of bureaucracy into a model of effective federal administration. Politicians who previously blamed the agency for its slow and inefficient response to disasters came to depend on the agency to lend credibility to their own efforts. After the agency’s reorganization, politicians at all levels of government purposefully appeared beside FEMA workers. As recently as 2002, FEMA’s reputation was so strong that the designers of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) included FEMA in it to lend prestige to the nascent department. Unlike other agencies so included, FEMA was allowed to keep its name, confirming the cachet of its brand.

While there is a vast and rich literature on the benefits and services provided by the welfare state, few scholars have investigated how these programs are financed. The tax side of the budget equation is crucial for the ability of welfare states to exist and expand; without a stable and growing source of revenues, the welfare state can neither meet its existing obligations nor increase its responsibilities. The mode of finance can be particularly important, as some taxes are more visible or contested, and thus more difficult to raise. For example, because there are limits to how much revenue can be raised with progressive income taxes, many industrialized countries finance large social programs through contributory finance, that is, payroll taxes. Levied over a broad swath of the population, these taxes generate a large amount of revenue, yet are politically acceptable because people see them as payments that entitle them to benefits in return.

Current wisdom about the American welfare state's laggard status among advanced industrial societies, by attributing it to the weakness of the Left and organized labor, poses a historical puzzle. In the 1930s, the United States experienced a dramatically progressive turn in social policy-making. New Deal Democrats, dependent on financing from capitalists, passed landmark social insurance reforms without backing from a well-organized and electorally successful labor movement like those in Europe, especially Scandinavia. Sweden, by contrast, with the world's strongest Social Democratic labor movement, did not pass important social insurance legislation until the following two decades.

Twenty years after Louis Galambos published “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis,” the organizational strand of revisionist history has become a mainstay of scholarly interpretation. One hallmark of its maturity is that today the organizational synthesis is itself a subject undergoing revision by charter members and critics alike. High priests like Galambos have underscored the wealth of scholarship spawned by the organizational approach and have discerned broad new trends and tensions in that scholarship. Galambos recently blessed three denominations that have embellished and elaborated upon the founders' abiding faith in the forces of modernization to reshape state-society relations: technology, as mediated through large-scale corporate development; the administrative state, as it has developed over the twentieth century to embrace a new, corporatist form of liberalism; and the pervasive professionalization of society. Yet many leading historians remain outside of the organizational flock. Alan Brinkley, one of the agnostics, has criticized organizational historians for pushing “vast segments of society to the periphery of historical analysis.” Michael McGerr, an outright heretic, has questioned the whole endeavor, doubting whether there “really was an ‘organizational society’ in the early twentieth century (or even now)” and charging the historians who in-vented that society with the sin of “presentism.”

Info the 1870s, Republican Leaders were preoccupied with the danger that a Southern re-entry into the political system might produce an overthrow of their coalition at the polls and a restoration of the Jacksonian coalition to its former dominance. Nor was this a chimera: the success of the Republican revolution in national policy-making had been predicated upon enormous artificial majorities that were produced in a Congress in which the Southern states were not represented. Indeed, the Republican fears were partially realized after 1872. Southern “Redemption” and the persistence of traditional Northern support for the Democrats resulted in a unique period of partisan deadlock which lasted from 1874 until Republican capture of all branches of the federal government in 1896.

There is no escaping the New Deal's pivotal place in studies of twentieth-century American politics. Social scientists have vigorously debated the causes of the New Deal's distinctive features and continue to argue about its consequences for subsequent American political development. The predominant perspective advances a coherent linear history in which the central features of New Deal reform shape the understanding of political developments both before and after the 1930s. The era of Progressive reform is viewed as a precursor to the expanded public power and the practice of activist government that was consolidated in the 1930s. The Great Society is the effort to extend the benefits of liberal reform to African Americans, who had reaped only scant benefits from the central achievements of New Deal reform. When this effort went “too far,” it resulted in a far-reaching backlash against activist government. The “rise and fall” of a New Deal order that had the creation of active government at its core has thus provided a central narrative for the study of twentieth-century politics.

Few political observers would readily assume that a present-day politician's or interest group's claims about their preferences accurately reflect their genuine views. However, scholars often unwittingly make this very assumption when inferring the preferences of historical political actors. In this article I explore the influence of business groups on Medicare's passage to illustrate how inattention to political actors’ strategic misrepresentations can bias qualitative and quantitative research. An ongoing debate wrestles with the pattern that businesses often grant support to welfare-state expansions just before they occur, a regularity some take as evidence that business interests dictate these expansions. I use Medicare as a case study and document that key business groups and their allies did not truly favor the program. However, I also show that these actors strategically misrepresented their preferences as Medicare's passage became likely in order to advance more limited alternatives. The strategic nature of this position is exceptionally easy to miss; yet inattention to it produces the opposite, erroneous conclusion about these actors’ historical role. Medicare's legislative history thus illustrates the methodological necessity of documenting whether political actors are misrepresenting their preferences. I discuss how scholars can do so by tracing actors’ stated preferences across strategic circumstances, including audiences and time.

No administrative agency figures more prominently in American political development than the Post Office Department (POD). In peacetime (and frequently enough in wartime), the Post Office has employed far more Americans than any other agency of state. Indeed, at several junctures in American history, the department employed more Americans than any other organization, public or private. As Richard John's landmark analysis in Spreading the News shows, the patronage system and the very integrity of the nineteenth-century party system would have been inconceivable without the size and expansive reach of the Post Office. Nor would nineteenth- and early twentieth-century political life so fueled by the widespread distribution and consumption of newspapers, petitions, and pamphlets have been imaginable in the absence of the national postal network. So too, the deepest challenges of political reform at the turn of the century eliminating patronage, reducing administrative corruption, and challenging monopolies in telegraph and railroads all centrally involved the POD. Over two centuries, the Post Office has “spread the news”; operated banks; built roads; experimented in air transport; shuffled military supplies; waged campaigns against pornography, consumer fraud, and sedition; and managed a national telegraph system during world war.1. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

For those interested in understanding the role of government in modern life, important public policies have long been objects of close scrutiny. Traditionally, however, policies were treated only as outcomes that needed to be explained. More recently, there has been growing interest in the political consequences of policy development. Policies are no longer seen simply as effects, with attention focused on why these policies emerged. Policies have important repercussions as well: once adopted, they restructure the political and social environment that produced them.