From today's vantage point, the radical potential originally envisioned for parcel post is hard to imagine. One historian facilely characterized postal savings banks (1910) and parcel post (1912) as small incremental advances in the evolution of state action: “From legislation designed to restrain harmful practices in big business, it was but a step for the government to embark in business on its own accord.” Yet parcel post marked a dramatic departure in public-sector initiatives: it put the federal government in the transportation business to compete with well-established private firms. That the United States started parcel post so late – it was the last major industrialized nation to do so – suggests the extent to which the service raised fundamental questions about the proper sphere of state action.

Modern state building entails not just the expansion but the transformation of national bureaucratic organizations. Whether in late-modern social revolutions, in the rationalization of industrial states in the late nineteenth century, or in the construction of a national state in America, bureaucratic transformation often involves changes in organizational authority patterns and culture.Wilson's remark is taken from the Annual Report of the Secretary of Agriculture, 1912: xiv. Reese's remark appears in a letter of Reese, A. G. Rice, Alexander G. Hudson, and F. C. Lucas, to Secretary David F. Houston, June 23, 1916; National Archives, Record Group 16, General Correspondence of the Secretary of Agriculture, Category “Employee Clubs,” College Park, Maryland. Young's speech was given to the Second Annual Banquet of the officers and clerks of the Railway Mail Service centering at St. Louis, on Nov. 18, 1904, (reprinted in Railway Post Office, official magazine of the Railway Mail Association, Jan. 1905, 9, emphasis added). Specifically, many narratives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century state construction suggest that a centralization of authority within the bureaucratic state occurred even as state bureaucracies specialized and as the tasks, “roles” and guiding cultures of civil servants were altered. The centrality of state transformation to late-modern revolutions is defended by Theda Skocpol in States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Stephen Skowronek discusses the importance of organizational transformation in state building in Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877– 1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Bernard Silberman argues in Cages of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) that the rise of “the rational state” in France, Japan, the United States, and Great Britain was typified by the transformation of the administrative role. Recognizing that the Weberian process of bureaucratic rationalization occurs when state bureaucracies assume novel tasks and programmatic complexity (19–24), Silberman suggests that a fundamental change in the orientation of bureaucratic roles occurs during this process. In the case of France and Japan, bureaucracies were characterized by an organizational orientation (a “firm-specific” role entailing organizational control of knowledge and organization- specific loyalties), whereas in the United States and Great Britain, they were characterized by a professional orientation (involving individual control of knowledge and professional ethics). Centralization, specialization and cultural change accompanied one another.

A growing body of scholarship explores processes of gradual but transformative institutional change, classifying patterns of change into several categories. I argue that policymakers themselves actively contest the appropriate institutional frames for understanding changes as they seek to guide institutional change, and show that judicial determinations of statutory meaning are sensitive to judgments about which institutional perspective is most compelling. A process-tracing examination of institutional changes in the Glass–Steagall Act over the law's whole life span, from 1933 to 1999, provides a concrete example of how the dynamics of contestation can play out. Those who conceived of Glass–Steagall as the institutional embodiment of the separation between commercial and investment banking argued that expansion of commercial bank powers represented institutional drift. Alternatively, those who came to see Glass–Steagall as just one set of statutory imperatives to be handled within the larger institutional context of American banking law, including banking regulators, interpreted regulatory changes as constructive acts of conversion adapting to novel economic challenges. I document the slow process through which courts came to accept the second framing while noting how the fixity of statutory text nevertheless continued to limit available adaptations.

During the 2020 election, voting by mail greatly expanded due to concerns with COVID-19. While voting by mail is relatively easy for most individuals, who have United States Postal Service (USPS) residential mail service, it is much more difficult for those with nonstandard mail service. In this article, we examine how decisions made by the USPS in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have resulted in deeply entrenched structural inequities in the access to mail services on the Navajo Nation in Arizona when compared to rural nonreservation communities. Most (89 percent) of current Post Offices were established during the settler colonial period, during which sites were chosen primarily to advance military objectives and serve the interests of Anglo-American settlers. The resulting inequitable pattern of postal access remains, resulting in inferior mail service on the Navajo Nation and adversely impacting many aspects of life. Post Offices are fewer and farther from each other on reservation communities; there are fewer service hours; and we show in a mail experiment that letters posted on reservations are slower and less likely to arrive. This research fits within the growing body of American political development research on path-dependent processes and “spatial racism” within geography.

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.

Through a comparative historical analysis of the American states, I show how public education was the original policy field through which white American women became empowered as voters and political officials. Women's changing status within the education profession and “school suffrage” rights are an important and overlooked aspect of women's political history, and the rural orientation of state governments and women's increasing administrative authority as county superintendents and rural supervisors of education was pivotal to women's political empowerment. Women's authority, however, varied across regions and across states, with women's authority especially strong in Western states. I find that women in the field of public education were most empowered where there was a history of school suffrage rights, where administrative offices were elective rather than appointed, and where the power of the state superintendent of public instruction was weak. These findings suggest that democratic institutions, more than economic development or state capacity, were fundamental to women's increasing authority in the policy domain that commanded the largest share of state and local resources at the time.

This article attempts to examine the processes by which the United States was transformed from an “isolationist” power to an “internationalist” one in the World War II period, focusing on the role of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an influential and controversial foreign policy organization.It is clear, however, that the internationalist-isolationist dichotomy is too simplistic; it has been demonstrated, notably by corporatist historians (on whom more below), to be at odds with the historical record. It is also of some importance, however, to take seriously the fact that the participants in the seismic foreign policy shift that did occur - even if there were interconnections and continuities between the two eras - categorized the past as “isolationist” and the future as “internationalist.” Their reading of the past - or at least of the interwar years - that they had all lived was that it was blighted by isolationism, even if the Hoover and other administrations had encouraged private bankers and others to engage in various international efforts. Their hopes, or rather strategies, for the future were pinned on globalism as the guiding star of U.S. foreign policy, but only after the spectre of isolationism - as an organized force, an intellectual current, even, perhaps, as a prejudice or as common sense - had been exorcized. “Isolationism” may not withstand the test of history, but it was real because the main political actors of the day believed it to be so, and their political strategies were constructed on such beliefs. See the following studies of the CFR: Lawrence Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977); Robert D. Schulzinger, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: History of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990); Inderjeet Parmar, “The Issue of State Power: The Council on Foreign Relations as a Case Study,” Journal of American Studies, (1995); for an extreme right-wing view, see Phoebe Courtney, Nixon and the CFR (New Orleans: Free Men Speak, 1971). In focusing on an organization, I certainly imply that the transformation process was not driven purely by the logic of world events - Nazi domination of Europe or Japanese aggression - but also by concerted efforts by people dedicated to a set of principles and ideas about America's place in the world – ideas which challenged the isolationist status quo, sought to undermine it and to ultimately replace it with an internationalist consensus.

The transformation from nineteenth-century proprietary capitalism to twentieth-century corporate capitalism involved fundamental changes in the rights of business corporations as market actors. At the end of the Civil War, corporations were controlled by individuals and families. At the turn of the twentieth century, corporations were in the midst of a merger movement that resulted in firms with concentrated capital, large numbers of shareholders, and control residing in management. New legal rights needed to be put in place to support this more advanced level of capitalist development. Most scholarship on the transformation of business corporation rights has focused on changes in the courts and in Congress, principally in regard to antitrust regulation. In addition, however, there was another locale essential to transforming the shape of the business organization: state legislatures developed and allocated corporate rights. Nineteenth-century state laws sought not only to enable the corporation to exist, but also to regulate its place within the state economy. With the advent of corporate capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century, state capacity to regulate through statutory law waned.

Before addressing the commentators for their thoughtful input on “Misrepresented Interests,” let me first thank the editors of Studies in American Political Development for providing a forum for an enduring debate about the power of capitalists in capitalist democracies like the United States. As a comparativist, I ventured into that complicated territory after extensive research in Sweden, where I discovered to my great surprise that the Social Democrat labor movement was kicking at open doors as it introduced each piece of Sweden's famous system of industrial relations and social insurance. Sweden's undeniably powerful employers stood contentedly aside and had no interest in closing the doors afterward. I was able to come to that conclusion with confidence only because the Swedish Employers’ Confederation had allowed me extraordinary access to their entire archives, confidential minutes, internal and external correspondence, and the diaries of a former chief executive.

In 1866, members of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction introduced the Fourteenth Amendment into the House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively. Several speakers indicated that the force of the new amendment would be to protect basic or fundamental citizen rights against adverse action by state governments, and would allow Congress for the first time to protect such rights against such state action. The clause that would do this was the privileges or immunities clause: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”

Not so long ago, nearly all African-Americans living in the United States were subject to a multitude of racial restrictions officially prescribed and enforced by state governments and their local subsidiaries. Most of the Jim Crow system dated from 1890–1910. By the middle of the twentieth century, this system was well established, so much so that many people assumed that it had always existed and that it expressed the timeless folkways of the South. However, in what strikes the historian as an astonishingly brief period during the 1950s and 1960s, the edifice was largely torn down. The puzzle is this: How could any institutional apparatus so deeply embedded, long-standing, and apparently strong be toppled so quickly? Although many scholars have discussed aspects of the puzzle, no one has offered a simple, clear, and compelling explanation. We aim to do so in this essay.

“Hegemony” has become a fashionable catchword in a number of intellectual circles. One encounters it among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, even (or, perhaps, especially) literary critics. Many a frustrated radical finds it a useful explanation for the quiescence of the masses. Marxist scholars frequently see it as a liberating departure from Marx's economic reductionism. More mainstream social scientists often detect little harm in it, since the notion that people are not ruled by force alone, but also by ideas, seems highly congruent with what they have learned from Max Weber and Talcott Parsons.

Electoral campaigns are a distinguishing feature, worldwide, of modern representative democracies. For most citizens in most polities, campaigns provide a compelling incentive to think about government. So campaigns thus are a, perhaps the, main point of contact between officials and the populace over matters of public policy. If, as democratic theorists postulate, rulers are responsible to the ruled, the nexus of responsibility, the time and place that we impose it, is during campaigns and the elections in which they culminate.

Upon his inauguration in 1861, Abraham Lincoln faced the greatest threat to the survival of the nation that has confronted any incoming president. His victory had been made possible by the splintering of the opposition in a four-way race; the total popular vote for his foes substantially exceeded his own.James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 232 As he assumed office, he was confronted with the secession of several states and the possibility that others would soon follow, and southern forces had seized U.S. arsenals and laid siege to Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. Within weeks, his decision to send relief to the fort had provoked the first shots of the war and additional states joined the Confederacy. Lincoln and his fellow Republican leaders now confronted the daunting task of restoring the Union.

American politics has been transformed by the emergence of the advocacy party—a form of organization in which extraparty interest groups, advocacy organizations, and social movements substitute for the diminished institutional capacity and popular legitimacy of the formal party apparatus. Many scholars have rightly pointed to the presidential nomination reforms made by the Democratic Party's post-1968 Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection (known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission) as a key contributor to polarization by increasing the influence of ideological activists. However, I argue that polarization is not the direct result of the actions of McGovern-Fraser reformers, but rather the outcome of their pitched battle with intraparty opponents of reform, who, while failing to prevent changes to presidential nominations, were ultimately successful in defeating the party-building dimension of the reformers’ project of party reconstruction. The product of their intraparty struggle was a hybrid institutional amalgam that layered new participatory arrangements over a hollow party structure, thus setting the Democratic Party on a path toward the advocacy party and its polarizing politics.

Medicare is one of the largest social programs in the world. Did organized industry favor Medicare's passage in 1965? If it did, this would represent powerful evidence in favor of the theory that social programs typically require cross-class alliances to pass, such as alliances between business and labor. However, in a previous article in this journal, I argued that answering questions about political actors’ preferences—such as whether organized industry favored Medicare's passage—can be surprisingly difficult due to the “problem of preferences”; that is, political actors might misrepresent their true policy preferences for many reasons. For example, when their ideal proposals are not politically feasible, political actors may wish to bolster support for a more politically viable alternative to a disliked proposal—even if they do not truly support this alternative to the status quo. To better understand political actors’ true policy preferences, I argued, scholars should trace how those actors’ expressed preferences change as a function of their strategic context—just as scholars seeking to understand the impact of any other variable trace the effects of changes in it.

In 1933, the U.S. Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). A cornerstone of the New Deal, the AAA offered government payment to farmers who cut production of basic crops such as wheat, cotton, and corn. Originally designed to lift agriculture out of the depths of the Great Depression, government farm programs evolved over the next several decades into a complex policy regime of price supports, acreage controls, and government loans.

Scholars have accorded the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a uniquely important place in the annals of American political development. During this period, the nation underwent transformations from a rural and agricultural to an urban and industrial society. Underlying these transformations was a revolution in the nature of the country's political economy, which shifted rapidly from a longstanding proprietary-competitive order to an unwonted corporate-administrative one.Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3. Specifically Sklar defines “proprietary-competitive” as capitalist property and market relations in which the dominant type of enterprise was headed by an owner-manager (or owner-managers), or a direct agent thereof, and in which such enterprise was a price-taker, rather than a price-maker, price being determined by conditions of supply and demand beyond the control of the enterprise short of anticompetitive inter-firm collusion. By the new “corporate-administrative” order, he means a political economy characterized by the capitalization of . . . property in the form of negotiable securities relatively widely dispersed in ownership, a corresponding separation of ownership title and management function, and management of the enterprise by bureaucratic-administrative methods involving a division, or a specialization of managerial function, and an integration, or at least a centralization, of financial control. It is meant to designate “a process occurring not merely in a few notable firms, or in a sector of the economy . . . but pervasively, and hence involving the change in the broader economy from price-competitive to administered, or ‘oligopolistic,' markets” (Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, 4 n.1). This transformation fundamentally altered traditional forms of work and management in the private sector, leading to the preeminence of a wage-labor system, the separation of corporate ownership from control, and the rise of bureaucratized and professionalized business management.See Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism: 1885–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977). At the same time, a “new American state” was formed with its own analogous cadres of governing professionals, professionals who in the new administrative agencies asserted increasingly centralized control over the nation's economy and civil society.Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

The Social Security Act of 1935 is widely considered to have established an American welfare state that is “two-tiered” or “two-track” in character, and which divided American social citizenship by gender.This depiction is commonplace; for a recent example of its use, see Dia ne Sainsbury, Gender Equality and Welfare States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28–29. It seems to have originated in Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minne apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 144–60 and Barbara J. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (M adison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 123–51. Scholars have generally assumed that to the extent such “gender bias” emerged in public policy, it must have been manifest in the law from the outset, inscribed in the differ ences between the work-related, contributory plans in the legislation versus the need-based, grant-in-aid public assistance programs.For example, see Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994), 253–85; also Fraser, Unruly Practices, 149–53. Yet, although the two major social programs for non-elderly American in the Social Security Act differed in such re gards, they emerged from the policymaking process in 1935 on fairly equal ground, with seemingly similar prospects for success or failure.

The precipitous decline in collective bargaining between employees and employers during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century in the United States should tell us something useful about American political development. The decline of collective bargaining is about more than waning union influence or competitive conditions in the labor market because collective bargaining was the primary expression of the regime established by the New Deal Democratic Party electoral coalition. For a generation, labor-management bargaining epitomized empowered liberal democracy which, acting through the legislative branch, established a new legal regime of industrial order. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA) shaped a pluralist industrial order by creating new rules that curbed the authority of managers and compelled business firms to participate with unions in a process of rational bargaining based on the assumption of competing employee and employer interests.I do not mean to suggest that the place of collective bargaining was uncontested. Scholars, however, launched major efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to understand how “industrial relations” fit into the emerging conception of pluralism. This was an important effort because union-management relations were central to the New Deal Democracy. For example, John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1956); Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom, Politics, Economics and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes (New York: Harper and Row, 1953); Clark Kerr, Labor Markets and Wage Determination: The Balkanization of Labor Markets and Others Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick Harbison, and Charles A. Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1966); J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1969). By the mid-1960s, industrial relations was a rare topic for political science investigation; aside from Greenstone, political science conceived “labor” and “work” to be “private interests” and not a matter of political significance. Yet collective bargaining is no longer the focal point for industrial relations, and industrial relations no longer occupies the center of governing attention. The various reasons for this trend have attracted significant scholarly attention; however, the issue is confounded by arguments that union decline is a wrongly conceived topic to investigate.