For students of American Political Development, the emergence of globalization and Americanization as themes of inquiry has spurred a growing interest in explaining America's rise as “a legal-economic and geopolitical hegemon.” An important episode in this rise came during the American occupation of Germany after World War II. In postwar Germany, America's military government realized that the American public remained unwilling to support (over the long term) the global projection of what Michael Mann has called “despotic power.” To achieve its fundamental goal of reorienting Germany toward a peaceful coexistence with the Unites States, military government turned instead to what Mann has called “infrastructural power” (power projected “through” society by state institutions). In pivoting from despotic to infrastructural power, three important consequences followed for the occupation. (1) Because it relied on the development of new infrastructures within a new German state, the occupation saw institutional “genesis” in which the Germans themselves influenced the pathway and timing of military government policy. (2) In creating new state institutions, military government performed “policy bricolage,” creatively reconstructing institutions “from” the ruins of war-torn Europe (as opposed to “on” its ruins). (3) Financial policy took a central place in military government's focus because it allowed for “increasing returns” in advancing military government's interests. Collectively, military government's experience provided lessons for an American state in the world.

Comparative studies of capitalist political economies have settled on a new understanding of how historical choices about electoral rules were constitutive of the current varieties of capitalism that are distinguished by their strategies of growth and adjustment to competitive conditions. The countries that have “coordinated market economies” typically have well-organized unions and employers with distinct partisan representation under multiparty electoral rules, and they have more egalitarian outcomes. The countries that have “liberal market economies” have arms-length market-based relationships under the plurality rule that are more conflictual, and they have inegalitarian outcomes. This article develops the analysis of electoral rules and industrial order by taking another look at the United States, which has always been taken as a case of plurality and liberal market economy. In contrast, New York had multiparty politics for most of the twentieth century, in part because of its cross-endorsement fusion rule of nominations. This article argues that fusion operated in a similar way to proportional representation to enable labor–management collaboration and social regulation. Collaboration in New York City was a constitutive element of the New Deal's laboristic politics. The later disruption of this American version of coordination transformed the U.S. political economy into a liberal market economy.

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.

In 2019, nearly 70 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries received their health insurance coverage through a private, managed care organization (MCO). Twenty-five years earlier, 9.5 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries were enrolled in MCOs. This dramatic growth in Medicaid managed care enrollment represents the delegation of significant power by federal and state governments over a critical social program to private actors and market forces. Medicare, too, experienced a similar pattern of transformation. Together, Medicaid and Medicare, two critical pillars of American social policy, paid more than half a trillion dollars to private insurance companies in 2019 to provide public health insurance to 75 million people. This manuscript examines the policy consequences of building private firms directly into the structure of American social policies. In contrast to existing work on “submerged” or “delegated” policies, this manuscript highlights the structural power that such policies bestow on the government's private partners and develops a new theory of structural power in which firms are able to constrain health policy reform through their threats to disrupt the delivery of public policies and social benefits to millions of people across the United States.

Interest in the politics of constitutional amendment has increased dramatically over the past decade. In particular, there have been a number of recent works addressing the causes and consequences of the Seventeenth Amendment. Daniel Wirls is to be commended for his contribution regarding regional differences in interest and attitudes toward the direct versus indirect election of senators.

Eisenhower is credited with steering a course between ideological extremes, his “presidency of consolidation” implying that his economic policy traced a smooth, unitary path. Instead, I argue that his is a twofold legacy. Eisenhower's most frequently cited actions, such as modifying Social Security and unemployment insurance, involved moderating the pace but maintaining the direction of past policy. But in relation to the New Deal labor policy regime, his actions carried a quite different developmental significance. When it came to the federal government's posture toward unions and labor organizing, Eisenhower reversed both the direction of policy and the future capacity of institutions to fulfill the New Deal's goals. As with any presidency, the first two years of Eisenhower's term were crucial in setting the agenda and determining priorities. Two initiatives, amending the Taft-Hartley Act and shaping the membership and decisions of the National Labor Relations Board, show how Eisenhower's ideas and policy tactics developed. The success of his administrative strategy had the effect of consolidating the potential inherent in the Taft-Hartley Act and—long before Reagan's “war on labor”—altering the developmental trajectory of the political economy of labor policy.

In his introduction to the 1991 edition of Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, journalist Tom Wicker noted its relevance for understanding the ambivalent appeal of values that had led both to the downfall of communism and to the “demonization” of Saddam Hussein. Wicker also noted that Hartz's synoptic use of “liberal” as encompassing what is commonly referred to in American political discourse as “liberal” and “conservative” ideologies might “add to some Americans' confusion” about the already “confused and abused” use of the term. As we reach the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Hartz's book, it is important to reassess the work, especially in light of what might seem an obvious parallel between his concerns in the context of the Cold War and contemporary worries about the relationship between American foreign policy and domestic politics that has evolved since 2001. Whether the valence has been negative or positive, Hartz's image of a liberal consensus in the United States has created a picture that has held the academic mind captive and shaped its approach to both scholarship and political analysis.

During roughly the half-century straddling the turn of the twentieth century, America’s national government underwent a dramatic transformation. It proceeded on two fronts, politics and administration. At the beginning of the era, politicians were deeply enmeshed in a system of patronage and graft reflecting their indebtedness to the local and state political parties without whose support their careers would have languished. Local party organizations recruited and sponsored candidates, ran election campaigns, and directed subsequent career moves among its cadre of politicians. In return, these politicians used their offices to stoke the party machine with a steady supply of patronage appointments and government contracts. By the end of the era, a variety of state and national reforms had effectively dismantled the patronage system.

“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.

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.

Recently historians have ventured a multifaceted critique of boss rule, suggesting that the very existence of the political machine has been exaggerated, that machines did not materially affect patterns of political mobilization, had only a limited role in the making of public policy, and (contrary to pluralist theory) did little to improve the welfare of the ethnic working class. For these revisionists the boss was really a bit player in the era when he allegedly held center stage. As Terrence McDonald argued the case in the last installment of this annual, “ethnicity, patronage, and the machine” represent unduly narrow ways of viewing urban political development. According to Jon Teaford and David Thelan, urban political history needs to replace the party boss and his ethnic clientele with interest groups—business, labor, taxpayers, and consumers of municipal services—and their impact on local policies concerning economic development, taxation, and service delivery. In their view, the study of public policy making must take precedence over the allocation of party patronage.

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.

The American knowledge economy (AKE) is not a foreordained transition in the organization of economic production, nor is it a form of political economy shaped predominately by the political demands of highly educated workers. It is a politically generated consensus for producing economic prosperity and economic advantage over other nations in which intellectual property (IP), and the businesses that produce it, play a leading role. The history of AKE development reveals as much. In the AKE's formative period, from 1980 to 1994, IP producers and a faction of neoliberal Democrats (the “Atari Democrats”), not decisive middle-class voters, played a pivotal role in reconfiguring institutions of American political economy to hasten the AKE transition. Their vision of AKE development inherently complicated the Democratic Party's attitude toward rising market power and continues to shape contemporary disputes within the party over antitrust enforcement and the validity of the AKE project itself.

As a subject for serious investigation, constitutionalism in faraway places seems finally to have come of age. To appropriate the famous metaphor from the First Amendment arena that is the concern of this paper, it is as if, until relatively recently, a “wall of separation” had shielded both scholarly and judicial analysis of American constitutional issues from the experience of other polities. As a result, too often constitutional inquiry has been denied the illumination and insights of comparative research. My specific aim in this article is to explore the concept and practice of the secular constitution within three nations that are committed, albeit in different ways, to the principle of religious liberty.

Antebellum states were critical in supporting the emerging rail system of the nineteenth century, yet not all states engaged in active rail promotion efforts. In this analysis, I consider how local economic and political conditions, as well as the rail promotion activities of a state's contiguous neighbors, impacted a legislature's rail promotion decisions. The findings suggest that states only engaged in rail promotion when local infrastructure was of poor quality and a state's tax revenues were sufficient to support rail expenditures. These findings reveal that diffusion, powered by social learning, does not drive all state policy innovations. Instead, local conditions and parallel thinking are important factors in state policy development. Furthermore, the analysis underscores the power of local governments in the antebellum period, while also raising the question of whether such diffuse state building was effective.

Civil rights legislation of the sixties and seventies sought to end racial discrimination in the United States; doing so required that the federal government establish an official ethnoracial taxonomy in order to specify who was and was not covered by the various statutes. Specifically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, and the Home Mortgage Act of 1975 required federal agencies to identify particular groups to be monitored for evidence of discrimination. Since these statutes were enacted, scholars and activists have argued over their political effects. In fact, the questions raised are legion: Who has benefitted from civil rights protections? Has discrimination diminished or simply morphed into new forms? Who counts as a minority and on what grounds? How has the massive immigration of the last four decades intersected civil rights reform? Should foreign nationals qualify for civil rights protections? If yes, how do more recent claims to diversify fit with older notions that civil rights legislation as a means of redressing past wrongs?

When, how, and under what conditions can individual legislators affect presidential appointments? Since the early 1900s, the senatorial norm of the blue slip has played a key role in the confirmation process of federal district and appeals court judges, and it is an important aspect of the individual prerogative that characterizes senatorial behavior more broadly. We analyze newly available blue slips, covering the historical period 1933–1960. We show that the blue slip functioned in this era most often to support and expedite nominations, indicating that senators used this device to shape the nominations agenda in this period. Additionally, we analyze the factors that contributed to an individual senator's decision to support or oppose a nominee, or return a blue slip at all, finding that senators were more likely to return positive blue slips when the Judiciary Committee chair was not a coalition ally. We argue that while blue slips did at times provide an early warning for poor nominees, they more often offered a means by which senators ensured that their desired nominees were confirmed swiftly. The positive role of the blue slip demonstrates that this device protected the individual prerogatives of senators, allowing them a degree of agenda-setting authority with regard to nominees in the weak parties era.

Parallel statements through the 1970s and 1980s can be found regarding study of the religious elements in early modern liberal political thought, notably that of Hobbes and Locke. By any measure, the study of religion in American politics, history, and culture, and in political philosophy today, is not only flourishing, it threatens to overwhelm us. This is true not only in the bureaucratic sense of the Religion and Politics Section of the APSA, but in the focus on religion across the discipline and in the use by these political scientists of the work of political, social, cultural, racial, and gender historians and literary critics. And where enough entrepreneurial academics go, grant-giving foundations are sure to follow.

Richard Bensel's comment on my article “Populism, Paranoia, and the Politics of Free Silver” is, like all of his writing, thoughtful, careful, detailed, and well written. However, I find that I disagree with a number of Bensel's points. In this response I try to clarify areas of disagreement and point to several cases where I believe my argument has been slightly misconstrued, which is understandable given the length and complexity of the paper.