Scholars of judicial behavior have persuasively demonstrated that parties profoundly influence the elaboration of judicial doctrine, but have paid more limited attention to understanding how courts can transform the content of party agendas. In this article, I argue that judges can work to deliberately define the issue positions adopted by the political parties with which they are affiliated. I contend that judges can, like other political actors, use the tools of their office to further explicitly partisan goals. Although they may employ traditional modes of legal reasoning, judges may nevertheless craft their decisions in ways that prioritize certain party principles over others, interpret the law in ways that knit together the beliefs of divergent factions within their party coalition, articulate principles to guide the party's incorporation of new issues, and, in some instances, begin to outline a coherent ideological vision for the party. I develop this theory through a close examination of the Slaughterhouse Cases, regularly cited as a core building block of the American constitutional canon.

I will discuss Civic Ideals in three contexts. The first is external to Smith's book: I propose a framework for a counternarrative, one that uses Smith's three-part classification of liberalism, republicanism, and ascriptive values, but in order to carry a very different story. This counternarrative stresses the decisive role played by the “ascriptive values” of common law, religion, and nationalism in infusing both substance and power into the “thin” liberal and “thick” republican principles constituting the distinct political regimes of our political history. The second context is internal: here I explore the way Smith's argument is premised on the assumption that civic ideals are equated with national identity, making his argument and this book a “partisan” struggle for the soul of America. This is the case even though his method of analysis privileges (slightly thickened) national liberal civic ideals above more locally based republicanism as political democracy and above any and all ascriptive claims. In Smith's view, liberalism exists on a plane of rationality and truth that places it above the battle even though it must compete with traditions that have great power to elicit powerful political and moral loyalties. I extend this critique from theory to history by showing that Smith's legal-theoretical mode of analysis “works” as a plausible historical explanation only because it replicates a particular (that is, “partisan”) tradition of political discourse in America, namely the national republicanism of “reform liberalism.” Smith's “party” today is that of liberal perfectionism, a term currently in use to distinguish liberalism as a positive set of values from liberalism as a set of neutral procedures and principles. This replication is paradoxical, however, because that mode of discourse, exemplified in the rhetorical form of the jeremiad, was always part of a national political theology – “Americanist to the core” – institutionally anchored in an informal national intellectual-cultural-religious reform establishment that claimed nevertheless to embody universal or world-historical philosophical, moral, and religious values.

This article explores the contentious and dynamic relationship between Woodrow Wilson and a nascent, diverse civil rights movement from 1912 to 1919. The pivotal relationship between Wilson and the early civil rights movement emerged out of two concurrent and related political developments: the increasing centrality of presidential administration in the constitutional order and the growing national aspirations of political strategies and goals among reform activists. Not only do we illustrate an early form of social movement politics that was largely antithetical to the administration's objectives, but we also trace how the strategies adopted by civil rights leaders were contingent on an early, still-to-be institutionalized administrative presidency. We highlight Wilson's involvement in the racial unrest that emerged from the debut of the film The Birth of a Nation and in the race riots that accompanied the Great Migration and World War I in his second term. These early twentieth-century episodes legitimized a form of collective action and helped to recast the modern presidency as an institution that both collaborated and competed with social movement organizations to control the timing and conditions of change.

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.

In the post-Reconstruction South, two Republican factions vied for control of state party organizations. The Black-and-Tans sought to keep the party inclusive and integrated, while the Lily-Whites worked to turn the GOP into a whites-only party. The Lily-Whites ultimately emerged victorious, as they took over most state parties by the early twentieth century. Yet no comprehensive data exist to measure how the conflict played out in each state. To fill this void, we present original data that track the racial composition of Republican National Convention delegations from the South between 1868 and 1952. We then use these data in a set of statistical analyses to show that, once disfranchising laws were put into place, the “whitening” of the GOP in the South led to a significant increase in the Republican Party's vote totals in the region. Overall, our results suggest that the Lily-White takeover of the Southern GOP was a necessary step in the Republican Party's reemergence—and eventual dominance—in the region during the second half of the twentieth century.

The development of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has been extraordinary. What started in 1975 as a minor amendment to a forget-table tax bill became in the 1980s one of the most popular programs in Washington. The national media and policymakers from both parties repeatedly praised the program. The New York Times, for example, hailed the EITC as “a wonderful but little-known anti-poverty weapon…the best means available for lifting the working poor out of poverty.” Republicans embraced the program as a superior alternative to welfare (meaning Aid to Families with Dependent Children), to a higher minimum wage, and to government-run day-care centers. President Bill Clinton made expanding the EITC central to his plans for reforming welfare, increasing the progressivity of the tax system, and improving the economic security of low-wage workers. One would be hard-pressed to find any government program that received such universal acclaim among political elites. By the early 1990s, it had become the policy equivalent of penicillin. Only in the spring of 1995, as congressional Republicans sought to balance the budget within seven years, did some policymakers seriously consider cutting this program.

The Liberal Tradition in America is truly an exceptional book. Its conceptual framework has been widely criticized as wrongheaded, and each of its organizing theses has been held to be historically inaccurate. Nonetheless, it continues to figure as a central text for scholars in political studies and American studies. We teach it regularly in graduate seminars, allow the problems it raises to shape our research agendas, and organize symposia to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. Indeed, it is tempting to suggest that, if nothing else, Louis Hartz long ago proved that it is more desirable to be interesting than to be right. To that end, I write here to register an appreciation of his work even as I acknowledge the aptness of much of the criticism to which it has been subjected. To my mind, a Hartz who has been refined and reframed by decades of criticism can still offer valuable insight into America and America's engagement with the world, particularly in a moment of caustic political and sharp economic divisions that would seem to belie the consensus he emphasized, and in the midst of the emergence of forthrightly illiberal doctrines shaping both American domestic and foreign policy.

Imagine a political scientist who fell asleep twenty-five years ago. Now, she wakes up to a vibrant, new intellectual scene. The bookshelves in her office groan with work on historical institutions – the state is back in with a vengeance. Meanwhile, pluralist self-interest models have evolved into rational choice; the homely geometry metaphors (remember the “parallelogram of forces”?) have grown up into serious calculus.

Let me begin with the bottom line: Samuel DeCanio has addressed a very important topic, skillfully crafted an argument, and marshaled an impressive body of evidence behind his thesis. The result is a significant addition to the literature on American political development on several different levels. And that is so despite the fact that I believe his interpretation extends beyond the evidence in some respects. This comment addresses both these extensions and, as a collateral objective, suggests that the way in which we reconstruct political situations and causal relationships is inevitably an art, not a science.

Nowhere in political science was the “behavioral revolution” of the fifties more pervasive than in public law. Normative debates on constitutional issues were left largely to lawyers or to the dwindling number of scholars in American political thought. Recently, as Professor Sotirios Barber observes, normative inquiries have undergone a resurgence in this section of the discipline, a resurgence within which the bulk of my ongoing work rests (quite impenitently). This resurgence has many sources, one of which is a wider recognition in contemporary political science that ideas can shape political conduct and that empirical inquiries find their ultimate justification in their contributions to normative reflection.

In one of his last published works, Vernon Louis Parrington authored the introduction to a book entitled The Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government. In it he endorsed the book's claim that ratification of the U.S. Constitution had been accompanied by “bitter class divisions.” In Parrington's view, the struggle for ratification was accurately described as both a political “clash between aristocracy and democracy” and an economic class struggle “between the greater landed and financial interests and the agrarian interests” of the new republic. He concurred with the author that “the two [struggles] in reality were one.” Hence, he suggested, relative to this historical context, the Constitution should be regarded as “a deliberate and well considered protective measure designed by able men who represented the aristocracy and wealth of America; a class instrument directed against the democracy.”

Family and medical leave policy in the United States is often noted for its lack of wage compensation, but is also distinctive in its gender neutrality and its broad coverage of several types of leave (combining pregnancy leave with medical, parental, and caregiving leave). This article argues that the distinctive design of leave policy in the United States is explained by its origins in contestation over the civil rights policy regime that emerged in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, women's movement advocates creatively and strategically formulated demands for maternity leave provision that fit an interpretation of this new policy regime's antidiscrimination logic. Because of this decision to advance an antidiscrimination claim, advocates became committed to pursuing a leave guarantee on gender-neutral grounds, which in turn enabled the broad-coverage leave design. This case study suggests that scholars of social policy and American political development should pay greater attention to the impact of civil rights on social policy. This article also contributes to the study of policy development by providing an example of how political actors cross boundaries between policy domains during the policy making process and by presenting a reconceptualization of “policy regimes.”

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.

The exclusion of agricultural workers from the 1935 Social Security Act and Wagner Act is frequently cited as one of the significant limitations of the New Deal social and economic program. Standard explanations for this exclusion point to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's and other New Dealers’ deference to the interests of powerful Southern Democrats in Congress, particularly their opposition to civil and labor rights. However, these explanations fail to recognize the important roots of this exclusion in earlier New Deal policy debates extending beyond the influence and interests of Southern Democrats. This article focuses on important political-economic debates that emerged in debates over the 1933 industrial and agricultural policy, which ultimately resulted in the exclusion of agricultural workers. Further, these debates and resulting policy changes shed light on the challenges and opportunities for building coalitions of labor unions and racial advocacy organizations to fight for broad economic restructuring. Exploring these strains of political-economic ideas provides a more complete explanation for agricultural workers' exclusion from the New Deal economic programs.

This article reconstructs a set of widely disseminated nineteenth-century ideas about the relationship between diversity and democracy and details how these informed state-building and political action. An emerging argument in nineteenth-century discourse held that representative governments in diverse societies would degenerate into anarchy without “amalgamation,” extermination, expulsion, or enslavement: Only in societies where there was sympathy across the entire community, constantly renewed through intercourse among social equals, could free institutions be sustained. This argument gave support for state-builders to regulate diversity either through an imperial politics of “moving people” or by interposing the state in intimate encounters of sexual and social intercourse. The intimate and imperial dimensions of state-building were thereby conceptually linked. This account helps explain important features of nineteenth-century politics, including the frequent criticism of abolitionists that by supporting racial civic or political equality they were encouraging “racial amalgamation.” In responding to this charge, American antislavery discourse contributed to a distinction between political and social equality that would fundamentally shape state-building after the Civil War. The article shows scholars of American political development how our accounts might be revised by situating debates and developments within a transnational perspective.

Since the 1980s, scholars have argued that during the Gilded Age urban party machines incorporated working people through the use of patronage, informal provision of personal welfare, and limited concessions, thereby eliminating sustained labor and Socialist Party alternatives and keeping workers’ militancy and assertiveness confined to the workplace. That view is challenged by a historical comparison of the policing of labor disputes in New York and Chicago. In New York, organized workers were eliminated from the governing coalition of the Swallowtail-Kelly regime that succeeded the Tweed Ring, and police routinely used coercion to defeat strikes and intimidate Socialists. In Chicago, however, labor and Socialists were part of the governing coalition of the Carter Harrison regime, and the police took a hands-off stance in many strikes. This article explores the contrast in policing and the balance of social forces in the two cities and seeks to explain the differences by examining the political settlements that concluded Reconstruction, the ethnic makeup of each city's working classes, the different characteristics of each city's labor movement, and labor's ability to mount third-party challenges—all in the context of regional variations. It concludes that historians cannot assume that workers were incorporated into machines in this period.

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.

We trace the origin of felony disenfranchisement from the colonial period through Reconstruction. On the eve of the Civil War, three-quarters of states had criminal disenfranchisement statutes. These laws were based on “legal moralism” principles, which limited the franchise to those in good standing with the community. Efforts at disenfranchisement grew as access to the ballot increased and criminal justice reforms replaced capital and corporal punishment for imprisonment. We highlight important transformations in felony disenfranchisement during Reconstruction, specifically in new state constitutions and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. All but one Southern state included felon disenfranchisement in their new constitutions that the Republican-controlled Congress ratified for readmission to the United States. Radical Republicans in Congress and state legislatures were in most cases advocates of felony disenfranchisement to exclude former Confederates from political participation.