When people think of the origins of American social policy, they usually think of the 1935 Social Security Act, part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's second New Deal. That legislation created both old-age insurance, now commonly known as social security, and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), recently known as welfare. Though central to today's social policy, these programs were somewhat marginal to New Deal social policy because they dealt with special categories of “unemployable” citizens. The key concern of New Deal social policymakers was instead with those deemed “employable,” and their problems were addressed mainly by another and much less studied program from the second New Deal: the “Works Program” operated mainly by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The lack of attention to the WPA has had important consequences for understandings of American social policy.

On 3 October 1986, the 99th Congress—acting at the behest of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—voted to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA). The passage of this bill, which placed strict economic sanctions on the white supremacist regime in South Africa, was a watershed moment in American politics for two reasons. First, veto overrides in the foreign policy-making arena are an exceedingly rare form of legislative action. More importantly, this was the first time in American history that the members of a minority group were able to use their positions within the Congress to translate a parochial desire into foreign policy against the will of a sitting president.

Why write about the Wagner Act again? There is no shortage of commentary, yet disagreement persists on basic questions: Why did the measure pass? Did the Wagner Act make any difference. If so, how?

Here I argue that the Wagner Act was passed by Progressive liberals inside and outside the government, in alliance with a mass labor movement. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) played a major positive role in the emergence of new industrial unions.

The election of 1912 retains its hold on the imagination of students of American political development. Long interpreted as a conflict between tradition and modernity, Martin Sklar has recently argued that the old order had passed by 1912. In law and economy, competitive-proprietary capitalism had been eclipsed by administration. The political conflict was now over who would administer prices and investment, the corporation of the state?

Ethics reform in Congress is expected to display extensive instability and “cycling.” Members hold conflicting views about ethics, and parties have weak capacities to order their preferences. The trend is for legislators to resist change until a scandal erupts and forces them to act. As a result, ethics reforms in Congress have typically developed through a layering of short-term and piecemeal institutional responses to the scandal of the moment. But the accumulation over time of seemingly small adjustments to the ethics process has been more path-dependent than anticipated in theories of disjointed pluralism. Legislators have had to commit to more open and collaborative forms of self-enforcement because of the feedback effects of ethics rules on Congress and the “tight-coupling” of standards of conduct between the executive and legislative branches of government. With each new scandal and partisan abuse of the process, pressures for a more independent mechanism to enforce ethics rules has grown stronger over time. The more ethics became governed by impersonal rules, the more it undermined Congress's past trajectory of political self-discipline. It is in this changing balance between positive and negative feedback effects that we can locate the mechanism that is gradually transforming ethics self-regulation in Congress into a new form of “co-regulation” with outsiders in the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE).

Scholars of American politics often assume World War II liberalized white racial attitudes. This conjecture is generally premised on the existence of an ideological tension between a war against Nazism and the maintenance of white supremacy at home, particularly the Southern system of Jim Crow. A possible relationship between the war and civil rights was also suggested by a range of contemporaneous voices, including academics like Gunnar Myrdal and activists like Walter White and A. Philip Randolph. However, while intuitively plausible, this relationship is generally not well verified empirically. A common flaw is the lack of attention to public opinion polls from the 1940s. Using the best available survey evidence, I argue the war's impact on white racial attitudes is more limited than is often claimed. First, I demonstrate that for whites in the mass public, while there is some evidence of liberalization on issues of racial prejudice, this generally does not extend to policies addressing racial inequities. White opposition to federal anti-lynching legislation actually seems to have increased during the war. Second, there is some evidence of racial moderation among white veterans, relative to their counterparts who did not serve. White veterans were more supportive of anti-lynching legislation in the immediate postwar period, and they offered stronger support for black voting rights in the early 1960s. However, they were not distinguishable on many other issues, including measures of racial prejudice and attitudes toward segregation.

The purpose of this study is to amend both the recent literature on the development of the American state and the recent literature on the impact of slavery on American public policy. In fact, with this article, I am bringing together these two bodies of literature by demonstrating how slavery contributed to the development of the American state. While the first body of literature largely ignores how slavery affected the development of the American state, the second traces the proslavery biases of federal policies without discussing how those policies positively affected the development of the American state. The assumption common to both is that, to the extent slavery affected the development of the American state, it negatively affected that development. My goal is to correct that assumption.

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.

In lobbying for the job discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964, liberal civil rights advocates wanted an administrative job discrimination enforcement regime modeled on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), with no private lawsuits. Pivotal conservative Republicans, empowered by a divided Democratic Party and the filibuster in the Senate, defeated an administrative framework and provided instead for private lawsuits with incentives for enforcement, including attorney's fees for winning plaintiffs. They were motivated by native suspicion toward bureaucratic regulation of business in general, as well as fear that they would not be able to control an NLRB-style civil rights agency in the hands of their ideological adversaries. In the political environment of 1963–64, some meaningful enforcement provisions were necessary, and to conservative Republicans private litigation was preferable to public bureaucracy.

This choice had important self-reinforcing policy feedback effects. Civil rights advocates were initially optimistic about agency implementation and skeptical about the efficacy of private litigation to enforce Title VII, even with attorney's fees for winning plaintiffs. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, civil rights advocates observed an agency lacking the material resources and political will and commitment to carry out its mission. At the same time, they observed levels of private enforcement that far exceeded their expectations, as well as courts inclined toward broadly proplaintiff interpretations of Title VII. The CRA of 1964's attorney's fees provisions also had the effect of contributing funds to civil rights groups that prosecuted lawsuits and of conjuring into being a private, for-profit bar to litigate civil rights claims in general, and job discrimination claims in particular. These developments drove a transformation in the enforcement preferences of civil rights groups toward private litigation, weakening their historic support for administrative implementation. Working together with the burgeoning for-profit civil rights bar, they mobilized to expand the fee-shifting provisions of the CRA of 1964 across the entire field of civil rights, which they accomplished by successfully lobbying for enactment of the Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Awards Act of 1976. Thus was created the modern civil rights enforcement framework.

The right to bear arms is one of the most controversial issues in United States history; it has always been so, though not for the reasons usually cited by contemporaries. It has been customary since at least the late nineteenth century to view military organizations as an extension of the legitimate authority of the state (except in case of unsanctioned resistance). The American experience, however, gives lie to the assumption that there is a clean analytical divide between state and civil society when it comes to military matters.

This article aims to illuminate how non-state actors participate in forging public institutions and in establishing public agendas. It also sets out to identify novel mechanisms of state building. It does so by examining the historical experience of the Immigrants' Protective League (IPL) from its founding in 1908 through 1924. The history of the IPL highlights the role of organized, networked women in generating new boundary stories and doing boundary work; in conducting research and enhancing legibility; in incubating new policy experiments; and in moving the national, state, and local governments to take up new tasks in the progressive era. Focusing on women's activism in this period, and efforts to link immigrants to categories of the vulnerable, reveals that porous boundaries, hybrid power-sharing arrangements, and public-private collaborations may be more typical in forging new American institutions and public agendas than is generally recognized—and insufficiently captured by a narrative of a weak state borrowing temporary capacity from private actors.

Much has been written about the “new technology” of U.S. elections: computerized letters, data banks of potential contributors, advanced video advertising techniques, speedy transportation and communication, and instant analysis of polling data. If one examines these discussions for a sense of how the growing use of these new technologies has changed the politics of elections, one finds several themes. Many scholars and journalists have described, for example, the high dollar costs of technology-dependent campaigns, the consequent influence of political action committees, how presidential candidates in particular are “marketed,” via the media, like toothpaste or breakfast cereal, and the prevalence in campaigns of superficial image rather than issues. We argue here that these changes in the way elections are conducted are associated with a deeper change in the conception of elections. The core of this argument is that changes in election technology have made possible the conduct of campaigns in which “strategy” has taken on a new meaning, and that leaders and the public share a view of elections that has progressively less to do with education, public discourse, or participation.

At Professional meetings of political scientists and in journals there have occurred discussions of the future of studies in the field of political science traditionally labeled public law. Now we have the further comments by Rogers Smith in the American Political Science Review and Sotirios Barber in this volume of Studies. The editors of Studies have asked me to join in the Smith-Barber dialogue.

From the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 through the New Deal, American legislators commonly endowed administrative agencies with broad discretionary power. They did so over the objections of an intellectual founder of the American administrative state. The American-born, German-educated lawyer and political scientist Ernst Freund developed an Americanized version of the Rechtsstaat—a government bound by fixed and definite rules—in an impressive body of scholarship between 1894 and 1915. In 1920 he eagerly took up an offer from the Commonwealth Fund to finance a comprehensive study of administration in the United States. Here was his chance to show that a Continental version of the Rule of Law had come to America. Unfortunately for Freund, the Commonwealth Fund yoked him to the Austrian-born, American-educated Felix Frankfurter, a celebrant of the enlightened discretion of administrators. Freund's major publication for the Commonwealth Fund, Administrative Powers over Persons and Property (1928), made little impression on scholars of administrative law, who took their lead from Frankfurter. Today the Rechtsstaat is largely the beau ideal of libertarian critics of the New Deal; few recognize that it is also part of the diverse legacy of Progressive reform.

During the 1992 presidential contest, the press and pundits alike characterized the challenge posed by H. Ross Perot and the political organization he created, United We Stand America, as the most significant assault on the two-party system since Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Campaign. In one sense, this comparison is more penetrating than these observers imagined, for the impressive showing of Perot was emblematic of the candidate-centered, plebiscitary electoral politics that Roosevelt and the Progressive party championed in 1912. Given that Perot ran without partisan attachments and refused to cede authority to the rank and file of a new reform movement, however, the allusion has proven to be as ephemeral as the public opinion polls it relies on. The Progressive party was born during the 1912 election as more than an aegis for Roosevelt's ample desire for power; it embodied the aspirations of reformers whose quest for a vehicle of political, social, and industrial transformation was at least a dozen years old.

The rise of the Republican Right in the 1960s reshaped not only the politics of the Republican Party, but ultimately that of the country as well. What had started as an improbable movement to draft Goldwater for president in 1964 emerged, amid the political and social turmoil of the decade, as the dominant force within the Republican Party. But what has not received as much attention is the significant role that the national Republican Party leadership and the emphasis it placed on party renewal, rather than reform, played in the Right's rapid post-Goldwater ascent. This article examines how the process of party renewal, specifically the emergence of a national “service party” structure, helped not only to unify the GOP after the 1964 Goldwater loss, but also led to the development of a more conservative Republican Party during the second half of the 1960s.

Historically, vouchers, which provide a sum of money to parents for private education, were tools of racist oppression; but in recent decades some advocates claim them as “the civil rights issue of our time.” This article brings an analytic-historical perspective rooted in racial orders to understand how education vouchers have been reincarnated and reinvented since the Jim Crow era. Combining original primary research with statistical analysis, we identify multiple concurrent and consecutive transformations in voucher politics in three arenas of racial policy alliance contestation: expansion of color-blind policy designs, growing legal and political support from a conservative alliance, and a smorgasbord of voucher rationales rooted in color-blind framing. This approach demonstrates that education vouchers have never been racially neutral but served key roles with respect to prevailing racial hierarchies and contests.

Social scientists of democratic change have emphasized the role of class action in that process, neglecting the discursive shift that was necessary to legitimate mass party competition in the early American case. Although historians of U.S. party formation have emphasized the discursive dimension of this transition, they have focused on more formal theories of party and neglected the importance of martial discourse, which was perhaps more pedestrian, but had a distinctive mass appeal. Drawing on the papers of prominent politicians and the editorials of local party newspapers in Alabama and Illinois, I argue that incipient party elites used the language of wartime discipline to recruit national-level leaders, local operatives, and voters to the new form of elective politics. Martial discourse was therefore integral to the larger discourse of party, which ultimately helped to overcome the inherited antipartyism of the early Republic.

V. O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation continues to be a central text in political science, the single most important work in understanding the role of the South in American politics. This article returns to, replicates, and seeks to advance Key's analysis of southern politics in Congress, reanalyzing and extending his account of southern strategies and actions in the House of Representatives. Where Key's text was characterized by an episodic attention to issue substance, we focus directly on how southern representation varied across discrete issue areas. We generate temporally fine-grained issue-specific ideal points for members of Congress that allow us to determine how congressional preferences changed across time, generating a more refined portrait of the process by which southern Democratic members diverged from their northern counterparts. We also thicken and extend Key's account along regional and temporal dimensions, assessing how his findings change when we employ a legal-institutional definition of the South, and include the whole period from the beginning of the New Deal to the close of the Truman administration. The article concludes by detailing the significance of our finding to the study of American politics, particularly American political development.