This essay stems from a prolonged study of Adolf A. Berle's drafts for the address “On Progressive Government” which Franklin Roosevelt gave in San Francisco during the 1932 presidential campaign. The essay compares Dewey's Individualism Old and New (Part I below) with the Commonwealth Club Address (Part II). The need for such a sustained comparison and commentary became clear only when I began to wonder whether Roosevelt's pragmatism—or rather the pragmatist teaching Berle formulated in responding to Roosevelt—was really idiosyncratic and philosophically derivative, as students of my generation had been taught to suppose. Like most journeymen, I had heard Justice Holmes's characterization of Roosevelt: “a first class temperament but a second class mind.” Coming from the oracle of pragmatist jurisprudence, that remark deflected my attention from Roosevelt's executive character and delayed my study of its effect on younger, more impressionable pragmatists like Berle. I also shared the common opinion of New Deal pragmatism as an encore for reform or a revanche for interventionism. I did not foresee that it might present an occasion for theoretical advance.

When well directed, science is the greatest agency for the welfare of mankind. John Wesley Powell, the director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), delivered this message to Congress in 1884. The purpose of Powell's testimony to Congress was not to argue for the erection of an organizational framework for American science, but to defend the one that had been put in place decades earlier. At the time of Powell's testimony, the United States had already begun to assume the mantle of the greatest scientific nation on the planet. “I have studied the question closely,” declared W. H. Smyth, the president of the Royal Geographical Society of London, “and do not hesitate to pronounce the conviction that though the Americans were last in the field, they have, per saltum, leaped into the very front of the rank.” The organizational structure at the heart of America's rapid scientific rise was initially constructed by scientists serving in the nineteenth-century American bureaucracy—by men like John W. Powell. Often seen as a source of state incapacity, in this instance, the federal bureaucracy was the most important force in American scientific development.

President Lyndon Johnson declared the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 to be “the most farsighted, the most comprehensive, the most massive housing program in all American history.” To replace every slum dwelling in the country within ten years, the act turned from public housing, the government-run program started in the 1930s, toward private-sector programs using both nonprofit and for-profit companies. As a result, since its passage, for-profit businesses have developed the great majority of low-income residences in the United States. The law also helped popularize the idea of “public-private partnerships,” collaborations of government agencies and non-government entities—including for-profit companies—for social and urban improvements. Remarkably, political liberals supported the idea that private enterprise carry out social-welfare programs. This article examines the reasons that Democratic officials, liberals, and housing industry leaders united to create a decentralized, ideologically pluralistic, and redundant system for low-income housing. It shows that frustrations with the public housing program, the response to widespread violence in the nation's cities, and the popularity of corporate America pushed the turn toward the private sector. The changes in housing and urban policy made in the late 1960s, the article concludes, helped further distinguish the American welfare state and encourage the rise of neoliberalism in the United States.

This essay defends the Populists against charges that they espoused an irrationally conspiratorial view of American history. Focusing on monetary policy, and the free silver issue in particular, I argue that the Populists correctly suspected that bankers conspired to demonetize silver and demonstrate that William Ralston, president of The Bank of California, secretly bribed Treasury Department bureaucrats and used Western congressmen to pass the Coinage Act of 1873. Ralston's involvement in silver's demonetization has important ramifications for our understanding of the free silver movement. Some of the congressmen who helped Ralston demonetize silver paradoxically went on to lead the free silver movement, blaming Eastern financiers for the measure they helped pass, and created organizations such as the American Bimetallic League and the American Bimetallic Party, organizations that popularized the ideas subsequently adopted by the Populists and William Jennings Bryan. As some leaders of the free silver movement were deeply involved in silver's demonetization, this period exhibited levels of duplicity that have been unrecognized until now.

How do “ideas” help to account for political outcomes? The age-old question of the role of ideas has been given new life recently, partly in response to the imposing structure of theory that has been built around economic or rational choice explanations, with their emphasis on interests and material circumstances rather than ideas. Few outside of the most abstract economic model-builders hold that ideas have no impact on policies, but there is little agreement on how that impact occurs or on the observable criteria that would establish (or contradict) the impact of ideas.

In the late nineteenth century – an age when the phrase “all politics is local” contained even greater truth than it does today – the distinctive institution of urban public life was the political machine. In assessing the machine's importance, some scholars have emphasized the machine's role in integrating newly arrived immigrants into the American political system, its provision of basic material goods to the impoverished, its promotion of upward mobility of immigrants, and its coordination of a socially and politically fragmented city. Other scholars have focused on the long-range effect of the political machine on American politics and policy, arguing that the cross-class coalitions built by machine politicians muted the development of a politicized working class in the United States. Some extend this causal chain, arguing that the lack of a stronger class-based politics produced in turn the relative weakness of the American welfare state compared to other Western democracies.

This article examines the efforts of political and legal actors to scale back access to the courts and judicial authority in the decades since the rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.  Despite the importance and consequences that such efforts have had for the judicial system and rights protections in the United States, public law and American Political Development (APD) scholars have only begun to study this phenomenon within existing theories of institutional change.  Through an examination of efforts to reform procedural rules that govern courtroom access, adjudication, and potential remedies, this article presents evidence that both builds on and pushes this scholarship in new directions.  In contrast to law and APD scholars who have promoted a ‘regime politics’ model of judicial authority that focuses on the interests of national elected officials and Supreme Court majorities, this article finds that actors pursuing retrenchment come from both within and outside the judiciary, evidencing a robust set of individuals and interests (far beyond judges and politicians) who might be considered “judicial” actors.  Building on and complicating current understandings of the politics of retrenchment, moreover, I find that the groups involved in judicial retrenchment change significantly over time, are motivated by more than partisan backlash, and that the availability of malleable institutional “rules” enhances the likelihood of their success.  Finally, I find that the processes of judicial retrenchment are distinctive but not static, unfolding in a series of methods for attempted change that are not only path dependent, but also path breaking.

A nation-state defending against threats may, in the process, alter itself: some threats cannot be handled by existing political and institutional arrangements. Of course, the dynamic response undertaken to answer external, state-issued threats has been widely noted. Many students of government—if not history—understand wars between nations to be a great catalyst for state development. Interestingly, even non-state and vastly weaker threats can elicit transformative responses.

The political foundations of the modern presidency were laid during the New Deal years. Franklin Roosevelt was the New Deal president. The relationship between these two facts is a matter of some consequence. On it hinges our understanding of presidential leadership and modern American government generally, not to mention the political significance of Roosevelt himself.

In his “Ninth Annual Report to the Massachusetts Board of Education” (1846), the Secretary of the Board, Horace Mann, discussed the teaching of moral and civic virtues inside the classrooms of American public schools. “The question now arises,” he declared, “and it is a question on which the worth or worthlessness of our free institutions is suspended—whether [our schools] be put in requisition to impart a higher moral tone to the public mind; to enthrone the great ideas of justice, truth, benevolence, and reverence in the breasts of the people.” For Mann, of course, the answer was self-evident: it was the special task of public schooling to carry out “a revolution…down among the primordial elements of human character” itself. “[E]very fibre in the nation,” he declared, “should be strained to the endeavor…. It is the mission of our age to carry this cause one step further… in its progress of development.”

This article explores the erratic history of counting by race on the Canadian census. It argues that the political development of racial classifications on Canadian censuses has been shaped by the interactions among evolving global ideas about race, the programmatic beliefs of international epistemic communities of statisticians and census designers, and domestic institutions involved in the administration of the census. First, Canadian census designers drew from shifting global conceptions about the nature of race and racial difference, which normatively defined the legitimate ends of race policies. Second, Canadian census designers often paid heed to the programmatic beliefs of the international statistical community about the appropriateness of collecting racial data. Finally, evolving political institutions involved in the administration of the census mediated these transnational ideas, molding them to fit the Canadian national context through institutional and cultural translative processes. Theoretically, this research makes the case that focusing on interactive political development can augment the theoretical toolbox of American political development, enabling a more comprehensive picture of the emergence, dynamism, and persistence of the Canadian racial order.

The parties’ polarization on abortion is a signal development. Yet while the issue has been much discussed, scholars have said less about how it reveals the unstable relationship between legislators’ personal backgrounds and their issue positions. We argue that the importance of personal characteristics may wane as links between parties and interest groups develop. We focus on the case of abortion in the California State Assembly—one of the first legislative bodies to wrestle with the issue in modern times. Drawing from newly collected evidence on legislator and district religion and Assembly voting, we show that divisions on abortion were chiefly religious in the 1960s—with Catholics in both parties opposing reform—but later became highly partisan. This shift was distinct from overall polarization and was not a result of district-level factors or “sorting” of legislators by religion into parties. Instead, growing ties between new movements and parties—feminists for Democrats and the Christian Right for the Republicans—made party affiliation supplant religion as the leading cue for legislators on abortion, impelling many incumbents to revise their positions. Archival and secondary evidence further show that activists sent new cues to legislators about the importance of their positions on these issues. Showing how personal characteristics became outweighed by partisan considerations contributes to understanding of party position change and polarization, as well as processes of representation and abortion politics.

A central question in the study of health politics and policy is the degree to which the state can shape American medicine. This long-standing debate began amid early battles over health insurance and continues through the contemporary opioid epidemic. Unlike recent and post–Affordable Care Act claims emphasizing the federal government's strong ability to intervene in healthcare marketplaces, this article supports claims of medicine's autonomy from political intervention, drawing on an extensive analysis of recurrent, halting, and largely unsuccessful efforts to regulate popular psychopharmaceutical drugs from the 1940s through the 1980s. I first develop an account of a “pocket of weakness,” the post-marketing pharmaceutical regulatory process, in an otherwise strong institution, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). I then demonstrate how this regulatory structure, interacting with policymakers’ incentives, caused constrained responses, inaction, and drift. Amid concerns about misuse, overuse, abuse, side effects, and addiction, regulators and legislators found it difficult to restrict access to or disincentivize the prescription and consumption of problematic therapeutics, in spite of their varied and repeated regulatory efforts. This elaboration of a pocket of weakness has important theoretical implications for historical institutionalist scholarship that principally focuses on state strength. This account also has substantive implications for scholarship on health politics and policy, mental health treatment, and the political causes of medicalization, and can help explain the opioid epidemic's emergence, potential trajectory, and circumscribed solution set.

Political science is notoriously divided into subfields. In parallel, most journals are restricted to one or another part of the discipline and most faculty teach only within their specializations and have little time to read outside of it. We then tend to lose sight of the fact that all of us are studying politics of one form or another and so perspectives that span the divisions are particularly valuable.

The movement of new social forces into the political system is one of the central themes in the study of American political development on both the national and local levels. For example, Samuel P. Huntington has characterized the realignment of 1800 as marking “the ascendancy of the agrarian Republicans over the mercantile Federalists, 1860 the ascendancy of the industrializing North over the plantation South, and 1932 the ascendancy of the urban working class over the previously dominant business groups.” And the process of ethnic succession—the coming to power of Irish and German immigrants, followed by the Italians and Jews, and then by blacks and Hispanics—is a major focus of most analyses of the development of American urban politics.

Two volumes have recently challenged the assumption that institutional change either (1) takes the form of gradual adaptation in the service of continuity, or (2) entails the abrupt breakdown of existing arrangements. This scholarship has demonstrated that change can also be simultaneously gradual and transformative. Conversion represents one type of such change; it involves the use of institutional resources for new purposes. I chronicle the conversion of the Bank of the United States (1791–1811) from a fiscal auxiliary of the federal government to an institution with both fiscal and monetary capacities. More generally, I ask whether this change squares with existing understandings of how conversion unfolds. Conversion is thought to occur when (1) new actors assume control, or (2) new challenges prompt the redeployment of resources. I ask whether the Bank's conversion resulted from (3) efforts by institutional elites to invent a rationale for deployment. I find that the change in question resulted from genuine concerns about the supply of bank credit in the Early Republic. With the details of this historical transformation in mind, I briefly digress in order to address repeated claims that the Bank of the United States was or became a “central bank” during this period.

In 1930, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the last of the major tariff bills that redistributed millions of dollars from consumers to domestic manufacturers. The Smoot-Hawley bill, E. E. Schattschneider observed, arose not from a process that was open and attentive to all but from “a free private enterprise in pressure politics which administered itself”, a process accessible only to protected industrialists and their congressional and bureaucratic allies. The outlines of public policy, he concluded, mirrored the membership of this “private enterprise”: “The nature of public policy is the result of ‘effective demands’ upon the government”.

In the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, mutual benefit societies were thriving voluntary organizations that touched the vast majority of working-class American households. Not only were they politically powerful as institutional actors, but more importantly, they were highly influential in providing their members with the ability to conceive of mutual assistance in a manner other than through the traditional lens of liberalism. Contrary to what may be considered the prevailing wisdom, my research reveals that whether they intended to or not, these organizations taught lessons that gave their members a coherent justification for supporting the emerging welfare state. There is also a methodological lesson, which is that membership organizations must be understood for their indirect social impact as much as their direct political one.

Politicians and program administrators played a central role in early studies of policy feedback but have largely been superseded by a focus on mass publics. This article attempts to revive and reorient the study of elite feedback effects by investigating, in the context of American federalism, whether and how national programs can influence the incentives and resources of state government officials. It examines four case studies in which national officials adopted a new program and subsequently tried to alter it by diminishing the states’ administrative role, reducing the financial resources available, or terminating the program. State-level actors emerged as critical stakeholders and strongly resisted national efforts to reform unemployment insurance and Medicaid, but neither the Sheppard-Towner Act nor general revenue sharing generated strong elite-level feedback effects. This variation suggests that timing (i.e., the political, economic, and administrative context), policy design (financial generosity, administrative discretion, duration of authorization, and coalition potential), and their interaction can prompt or discourage government elites to mobilize.

State-centered theorists have forwarded the argument that the role of ideas and state capacity in the formulation of public policies is evidence of an autonomous polity. These theorists hold that state capacity and ideas have an autonomous and independent role in determining state behavior and public policy development.1. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Christopher McGrory Klyza, “Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Patterns: Hardrock Mining, Forestry, and Grazing Policy on United States Public Lands, 1870–1985,” Studies in American Political Development 8 (1994): 341–74; Who Controls the Public Lands? Mining, Forestry, and Grazing Policy, 1870–1990 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America's New Deal (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). Reflective of this, statist Christopher Klyza posits ideas and state capacity as the primary factors in the development of the policy regime that manages grazing on the public grasslands.2. Klyza, “Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Patterns,” 363–70; Who Controls the Public Lands?, chap. 5. I contend, however, that the history of the federal grazing policy regime is indicative of a business dominance perspective, a society-centered approach.3. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1977); Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World's Political-Economic Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1977); John F. Manley, “Neo-Pluralism: a Class Analysis of Pluralism I and Pluralism II,” American Political Science Review 77 (1983): 368–83; G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990), and Who Rules America? Power and Politics, 4th ed. Specifically, the livestock industry, a producer group, is the most powerful explanatory factor in the development of this regime, not ideas or state capacity. Furthermore, utilizing the cases of the grazing agencies (the U.S. Grazing Service and later the Bureau of Land Management [BLM]), the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency I assail the autonomy that state-centric theorists ascribe to the state's capacity.