While American political development scholars tend to focus on national or state-level politics, late nineteenth-century cities provided the lion's share of services: clean water, paved and lighted streets, and sanitation. How did cities innovate and build municipal capacity to do these things? We answer this question by looking at municipal responses to the garbage problem. As cities grew and trash piled up in the 1890s, cities explored ways to effectively collect the garbage. A government requires not just resources, but also the ability to marshal those resources. Corruption could provide such abilities. Looking at four corrupt cities—Pittsburgh, Charleston, New Orleans, and St. Louis—we consider whether corruption, and what type of corruption, fostered innovation and capacity. We compare these corrupt cities with a shadow study of the reformist government of Columbus. We found the following: (1) The logic of corruption is the most important factor to explain why municipal governments chose particular garbage strategies. Corrupt regimes chose garbage collection and disposal strategies that would benefit themselves—but these varied depending on what type of corruption dominated a city. (2) Corruption sometimes promoted innovation and capacity, but at other times, corruption hindered them. For better or worse, cities ruled by corruption gained the capacity that these informal regimes held.

Why do most African Americans and other racial liberals vote Democratic, whereas most racial conservatives—largely whites—vote Republican? To what extent is this alignment of race and party attributable to the strategic choice of GOP elites to take the party in a racially conservative direction during the mid-1960s? This paper exploits a little-known ballot initiative in postwar California to shed light on the question. Proposition 11, as it was known, would have outlawed discrimination in employment if it had passed. Instead, it failed by more than a two-to-one margin. Drawing on archival and statistical evidence, including the ecological analysis of precinct-level election returns, we find that Republican voters were much more likely than Democratic voters to oppose Proposition 11, despite Republican Governor Earl Warren's well-known support for fair employment practices (FEP) legislation. We conclude that many Republican voters tended strongly toward racial conservatism well before Republican elites decided to pursue racially conservative policies in the mid-1960s. We suggest that the emergence of the contemporary alignment of race and party may have been less contingent on elite strategy and more structurally determined than the conventional wisdom allows.

One of the most momentous shifts in twentieth-century party politics was the Democratic Party's embrace of civil rights. Recent scholarship finds that this realignment began as early as the 1940s and traces it to pressure groups, especially organized labor. But such scholarship does not explain why labor, which was traditionally hostile to African Americans, began to work with them. Nor does it ascribe agency to the efforts of African American pressure groups. Focusing on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), this article attempts to fill these gaps in the literature. It explains why civil rights and labor leaders reassessed their traditional animosities and began to work as allies in the Democratic Party. It further shows how pressure from the new black-blue alliance forced the national Democratic Party to stop straddling civil rights issues and to become instead the vehicle for promoting civil rights. NAACP and CIO leaders consciously sought to remake the Democratic Party by marginalizing conservative Southerners, and eventually succeeded.

Political scientists have traditionally dismissed the Democratic and Republican National Committees as “service providers”—organizations that provide assistance to candidates in the form of campaign funding and expertise but otherwise lack political power. I argue this perspective has missed a crucial role national committees play in American politics, namely that national party organizations publicize their party's policy positions and, in doing so, attempt to create national party brands. These brands are important to party leaders—especially when the party is in the national minority—since they are fundamental to mobilizing voters in elections. In case studies covering the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) in the period 1952–1976, I show that minority party committees prioritize their branding role and invest considerably in their publicity divisions, inaugurate new publicity programs, and create new communication tools to reach out to voting groups. Additionally, I show that in cases where the party is out of the White House, the national committees have considerable leeway in deciding what party image to publicize. Rather than being mere powerless service providers, I show that party committees have played crucial roles in debates concerning questions of ideology and issue positioning in both parties.

Contemporary conservatism places an affinity for, fidelity to, and defense of the U.S. Constitution at the center of its electoral, institutional, and movement politics. Through a survey of popular constitutional discourse in postwar conservatism's premiere magazine, National Review between 1955 and 1980—presented in the context of the development of (conservative) political thought and the institutional infrastructure for idea generation and propagation—I argue that that defense began to assume an ecumenically populist, antielitist, and antijudicial form only beginning in the mid-1950s, and a shared commitment to “originalism” only in the late 1970s. From the 1950s through the late 1970s, conservative constitutional argument was centered not on the judiciary, but rather on the (often divisive) constitutionalism of Congress and the executive, and on divergent views concerning structuralist versus moralist constitutional understandings. Over time, however, through dialogic engagement taking place over and through unfolding political events, the movement's diverse intellectual strands reframed and reinforced their relationship by focusing less on their differences and more on an ecumenically shared populist critique of judicial power emphasizing a virtuous demos arrayed against an ideologically driven, antidemocratic, law-wielding elite. During this formative period, besides advocating a particular approach to textual interpretation, constitutional discourse played a critical role in fashioning movement symbols and signifiers, forming hopes and apprehensions, defining threats and reassurances, marking friends and enemies, stimulating feelings of belonging and alienation, fidelity and betrayal, and evoking both rational logics and intense emotions—all of which motivate and inform the heavily constitutionalized politics of American conservatism today.

After more than a decade of membership stability, the U.S. Supreme Court experienced a pair of vacancies following its 2004–2005 term. In July 2005, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her intention to retire. It is widely believed that her own health, that of her husband, and the favorable political environment influenced her decision to step down in January 2006. In the interim, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, after struggling with ill health for many months, passed away on 3 September 2005, becoming the first sitting justice to die in more than five decades.

A central paradox of the modern American presidency is that citizens regularly call for strong presidential leadership while at the same time their political culture predisposes them to be reluctant followers.1 One of the ways contemporary presidents resolve this paradox is by invoking an electoral mandate. By persuading others that he possesses a mandate from the voters to pursue a particular policy agenda, a president can disguise his leadership under the pretense of simply carrying out “the will of the people.” The presidential mandate thus enables presidents to lead while seeming to follow, to exercise power over people under the guise of empowering the people.

We examine the development of legislative capacity in U.S. state legislatures in the twentieth century. This capacity can be derived from the legislators themselves, or from institutions and practices. We consider both sources as we provide an account of the ragged and piecemeal development of legislative capacity in the states. We argue that most state legislatures have been neither entirely professional nor amateur, but rather have existed somewhere in between, in a place where pockets of expertise fill in for professional capacity.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) led the corporate attack on labor organization and government regulation in the early twentieth century. Yet NAM's deep distrust of coordination, in fact, developed years into its organizational life: at its inception, NAM organizers sought mechanisms to coordinate economic and political business activity, and held policy positions that resembled those favored by contemporaneous European manufacturers. Thus, the organization's dramatic shift in policy preferences almost a decade later was something of a sea change: suddenly NAM became committed to laissez-faire liberalism—the antithesis of coordination—and became best-known for its commitment to fighting organized labor.

Why did it take the U.S. national government until 1882 to gain control over migration policies from the states, and what does this situation say about the strength of the early American State? This phenomenon is especially curious, since the control of entry into and across a nation is so fundamental to the very definition of a State. I argue that the delay of the national government takeover was not due to a lack of administrative capacity. Instead, there were regionally specific reasons that the states preferred to retain control of migration policy. The national government did not take over migration policy because of the strong nineteenth-century political-cultural understanding that many migration policies were properly within the province of local control. This article explains the timing and sequencing of state and federal controls over nineteenth-century migration policy and what this timing meant for the freedom of movement of many politically vulnerable classes of people.

Louis Hartz summed up the mission of his historical generation when he wrote, as part of the rationale for The Liberal Tradition in 1955, that “the way to fully refute a man is to ignore him … and the only way you can do this is to substitute new fundamental categories for his own, so that you are simply pursuing a different path.” Hartz was referring to the influence of Charles Beard and what Hartz called the “frustration that the persistence of the Progressive analysis of America has inspired.” He was arguing that his generation had to stop honoring the progressives by contending with them; the key to destroying their interpretation of American history was the reinvention of American history by means of new conceptual tools.

Scholars have long argued that the marginalized racial status shared by ethnic minority groups is a strong incentive for mobilization and coalition building in the United States. However, despite their members’ shared racial status as “Orientals,” different types of housing coalitions were formed in the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver during the 1960s and 1970s. Asian race-based coalitions appeared in San Francisco and Seattle, but not in Vancouver, where a cross-racial coalition was built between the Chinese and southern and eastern Europeans. Drawing on exogenous shocks and process tracing, this article explains how historical legacies—specifically, the political geography of settlement—shaped this divergence. These findings demonstrate how long-term historical analysis offers new insights into the study of minority coalition formation in the United States.

How has representation changed over time in the United States? Has responsiveness to public opinion waxed or waned among elected officials? What are the causes of such trends as we observe? Scholars have pursued these crucial questions in different ways. Some explore earlier eras in search of the “electoral connection”, i.e. the extent to which voters held office-holders accountable for their actions and the degree to which electoral concerns motivated politicians' behavior. Others explore the effects of institutional changes such as the move to direct election of senators or the “reapportionment revolution.”

This article examines the institutional, political, and legal development of employment arbitration as it shifted from a Progressive Era form of justice enhancement to one co-opted by business-friendly conservatives arguably more concerned with protecting employers from litigation. While arbitration has a long history in the United States, the expanding use of mandatory, employer-promulgated arbitration clauses has more than doubled since the 2000s. In examining the nature of the shift, this article argues that it occurred through a gradual process of conversion in three institutional realms (1) legislative conversion, (2) private-sector conversion of public regulation, and (3) judicial conversion. Facilitated by a growing divide among Democrats on the value of arbitration, conservatives began to promote it in the 1970s and 1980s as backlash to the expansion of statutory employment rights. I argue that they did so by converting the institutional infrastructures of labor and commercial arbitration, a process continued by the private sector and Supreme Court. As such, this article argues that conversion is the product of multiple actors targeting multiple institutions, over decades, and with consequences for both the literature on institutional change and conceptions of equality under the law.

From the early 1800s through the middle of the twentieth century, U.S. democracy was energized by the remarkable propensity of Americans to organize and join voluntary associations. Observers of many persuasions agree on this point – and also concur that the final decades of the twentieth century brought fundamental shifts in civic organization and citizen involvements with voluntary groups in the United States. The nature, tempo, and causes of these changes remain a topic for scholarly discussion, however. Investigators highlight different aspects of recent civic transformations and explore these changes using contrasting theoretical perspectives and types of empirical data.

A legislative “breakpoint,” the Cannon Revolt profoundly transformed congressional operation, spurring a series of reforms that ultimately led to the disintegration of traditional modes of partisan authority and the creation of new patterns of governance. In this article, I argue that the Cannon Revolt affords an opportunity to examine a crucial, but poorly understood, dynamic in congressional politics. Whereas spatial theories of Congress typically hold that legislators located at the floor median are decisive actors in chamber politics, the archival account presented here suggests that these legislators require the scaffolding of an intraparty organization to secure pivotal status. As I demonstrate, intraparty organization enabled a ragtag group of Republican reformers opposed to Cannon's “czar rule” to draft and unite behind a common proposal for parliamentary reform, and to build the cross-party coalition that scholars agree was critical to its passage. In this account, the influence of the so-called “Insurgent” Republicans hinged on their collective capacity to hang together in sufficient numbers to hold the balance of power in the chamber—in effect, organizing all potentially pivotal votes into one bloc essential to sustaining the majority party coalition.

The U.S. military was the principal agent of American state development in the seven decades between 1791 and 1861. It fought wars, removed Native Americans, built internal improvements, expedited frontier settlement, deterred slave revolts, returned fugitive slaves, and protected existing property relations. These activities promoted state development along multiple axes, increasing the administrative capacities, institutional autonomy, political legitimacy, governing authority, and coercive powers of the American state. Unfortunately, the American political development literature has largely ignored the varied ways in which the presence of slavery influenced military deployments and, in turn, state development during the pre–Civil War period.

Scholars of business mobilization emphasize that national, cross-sector employer associations are difficult to create and maintain in decentralized pluralist polities like the United States. This article considers an unusual case of a U.S. business group—the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—that has succeeded in creating a durable coalition of diverse firms and conservative political activists. This group has emerged since the 1970s as an important infrastructure for facilitating corporate involvement in the policymaking process across states. Assessing variation within this group over time through both its successes and missteps, I show the importance of organizational strategies for cementing political coalitions between otherwise fractious political activists and corporate executives from diverse industries. A shadow comparison between ALEC and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce further serves to reinforce the importance of organizational structure for business association management. My findings engage with literatures in both American business history and comparative political economy, underscoring the difficulties of forming business coalitions in liberal political economies while also showing how savvy political entrepreneurs can still successfully unite otherwise fragmented corporate interests. These conclusions, in turn, have implications for our understanding of business mobilization and corporate influence in politics.

It is no longer newsworthy to say that the American Founding Fathers were implicated deeply in the institution of slavery as slaveowners, slave traders, or just silent collaborators.1. For modern historiography, the foundational text is Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), which answers Dr. Samuel Johnson's famous question: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?” See also Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York: Norton, 1968). For forceful recent statements, Paul Finkelman, “Jefferson and Slavery: ÔTreason Against the Hopes of the World',” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 181–221; Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For forceful older statements, Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia, 2d ed. (1964; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Richard R. Beeman, The Old Dominion and the New Nation, 1788–1801 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972). Sympathy endures, especially for Jefferson, as in the dismissal of Finkelman's essay as “the prosecution's case” in Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 259 n.74. The fact that this could have seemed to be news in the 1970s and 1980s is, of course, a testament to the power of racism in American society for three centuries. The fact that Thomas Jefferson's DNA test could have shock value in the late-1990s may be even worse.2. See, e.g., the cover story, Barbra Murray, et al., “Jefferson's Secret Life,” with accompanying articles including Lynn Rosellini, “Cutting the Great Man Down to Size,” U.S. News and World Report, Nov. 9, 1998. Now that the intellectual task of reducing the iconic status of slaveholding “fathers” has been largely accomplished, however, serious questions remain about the meaning of slavery at the founding. There is more to it than the hypocrisy of whites or even the oppression of blacks. Social historians have described both the sufferings and the heroic self-defense strategies of Africans and African Americans in this period, both slave and free, in detail.3. The historiography of slavery has moved back from the previously dominant antebellum era. For earlier works, esp. Peter H. Wood Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974); Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961); Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983). More recently, Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: the End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: the Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Scholars no longer can pretend that “Americans,” much less “plebeian” Americans, were all white at the outbreak of the Revolution, whether they were assembled in the Boston streets or South Carolina lowcountry.4. For a recent argument to this effect, Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). Yet a substantive consideration of the meaning of these facts for the nation-state that was built in the Revolution is still missing. What was the impact of slavery on the political institutions whose creation was the triumph of the “fathers” of the founding generation? Aspects of the answer are well known: the removal of Jefferson's pathetic slavery clause (blaming Britain for American slavery) from the Declaration of Independence, the compromises that placed the three-fifths clause into the Constitution along with the fugitive slave and slave trade abolition clauses, the checkered career of the Northwest Ordinance as a ban on slavery in the territories, and the Haitian Revolution's reality-check on the libertarian enthusiasms of white Southerners.5. On these issues, in the order cited in the text, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997); Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Vintage, 1996); Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity,” Journal of the Early Republic 6 (1986): 343–70, and Paul Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance: the Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” Journal of the Early Republic 9 (1989): 21–51; Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), and Michael Zuckerman, “The Power of Blackness: Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution in St. Domingue,” in Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).