The Social Security Act of 1935 and its 1939 amendments included federal programs for maternal and infant welfare, child welfare services, and Aid to Dependent Children (ADC). Inclusion of these programs is largely owing to women reformers’ long advocacy for public assistance to families in need. The Social Security Act nationalized aspects of the program championed by the Children’s Bureau, itself a product of women’s civic organization and institution building. These advances laid the ground for crucial components of the contemporary American welfare state, which included surveillance and intrusion into the lives of ADC families and the perpetuation of a system of subnational administration that reproduced racial inequality. Yet critics of these female reformers have not fully considered the institutional constraints they faced and the policy transformations they did not control. This article considers the policy achievement of maternalists in terms of its policy failures by considering the bureaucratic struggles of female reformers once they reached access to federal policymaking, culminating in the Committee on Economic Security that led to the Social Security Act. We consider the strategies from a place of both access and marginalization as they jockeyed for bureaucratic territory with others with different claims to expertise.

Partisan polarization on “culture war” issues has become a defining feature of contemporary American politics. This was not always the case; for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, social issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights played no role in politics. Where and when did the partisan divide begin? Did the initiative come from state or national parties? Was there a critical moment, or was position change incremental? We have constructed an original database of nearly 2,000 state party platforms from 1960 to 2018. These platforms allow us to trace position-taking on these issues and generate estimates of platform ideology. By the time national parties took positions, we show, they lagged state-level position-taking. Contrary to long-held assumptions, we show that state party system polarization did not occur around any critical moment but rather was incremental.

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.

This article examines how public opinion—notably political activism and protest, as well as threats of violence, and violence itself—shaped the eventual resolution of the 1876 election. While not discounting the bargaining or machinations of party elites in forging an ultimate compromise, the standard explanation in the scholarly literature, the emphasis here adds important texture and nuance to the conversation, and strongly suggests that public opinion (broadly construed) played a significant, if not exclusive, role in pressuring party leaders to compromise on the eventual Electoral Commission Act that resolved the crisis. In particular, a series of January 1877 demonstrations held across several key states, coupled with the threat of “menace” at the heart of the Southern rifle clubs that were prominent in the campaign and its aftermath, provided strong incentives to partisan leaders and especially members of Congress to seek compromise to resolve the electoral crisis. The article also addresses the contested nature of mass meetings and protests in this era—and in general—and how partisans seek to define terms and behaviors to suit their political positions.

In the summer of 1941, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), led by the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph, planned to march tens of thousands of African Americans on Washington, DC, to pressure President Franklin Roosevelt to abolish discrimination in the federal government and defense industries. After intensive negotiations, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning those forms of discrimination and creating a federal agency to oversee this work: the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). Randolph and his allies use of pioneering pressure tactics coincided with a critical period of institutionalization of the modern presidency, ultimately resulting in executive action that significantly advanced civil rights and economic opportunity for Black Americans. Many scholars, focusing only on civil rights activists’ fraught relationship with Roosevelt and the Southern Democrats’ stubborn defense of Jim Crow in Congress and the states, have seen the highly contentious battles over the authority and policies of the FEPC as constituting a major defeat for MOWM’s state-centered civil rights strategy. Yet Randolph and his allies continued to believe that the most practical path to reform ran through the executive branch. In this article, we draw a contrast between the actions first taken by President Roosevelt with his wavering commitment to the FEPC and the stronger and more definitive actions taken by President Truman to desegregate the military and civil service, which broke open public-sector employment for African Americans. Beyond strategic considerations, the New Deal expansion of jobs in the national service and military made the modern executive an essential target of Randolph’s campaign to join the battles for civil rights with economic freedoms. Randolph’s decision to focus on employment in the rapidly expanding defense industries, federal workforce, and military thus marked a critical episode in the fight for the economic rights of Black Americans.

This article engages with scholars working on the history of capitalism and with scholars of American political development to form a historical materialist perspective on the creation of the American federal government. First, it returns to the debate about the state in capitalist society to develop an approach for theorizing the relations between class, capitalism, and states. Next, it addresses the position of American capitalism in the 1780s, arguing that it was still in a long transition phase. After this, it reinterprets the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in the context of the long and uneven history of American capitalist development. I argue that the U.S. Constitution created the foundations of a state that would serve capitalist interests, including capitalist slave owners, but, at the same time, provided some space for social relations of production not yet fully subordinated to the power of capitalism to coexist.

The end of the Civil War brought freedom to 3.9 million formerly enslaved people. Yet, almost immediately following the war, Southern states started to incarcerate freedpeople at unprecedented rates in an effort to reinstate racial hierarchies in the post-Emancipation era. Not before long, Southern states introduced new carceral institutions, most notably the convict-lease system, under which prisoners were leased out as laborers to private contractors for the duration of their sentence. The emergence of convict leasing has often been portrayed as a programmatic attempt by the Southern whites to find an alternative to antebellum chattel slavery.1 Paying special attention to the sequencing of political events during Reconstruction, I revisit this story by highlighting the role that state capacity and public finance played in the introduction of the policy. As conviction numbers swelled after Emancipation, the carceral capacity of Southern penitentiaries was quickly overwhelmed, prompting Reconstruction legislatures and governors to search for alternatives to conventional imprisonment. I argue that convict leasing emerged from these capacity challenges as a cost-effective solution that initially enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Over time, leasing grew more profitable, both for the state governments and the lessees, and abolition efforts were stalled for decades, even when the system became increasingly abusive. Using a range of archival materials, I illustrate these carceral developments in an in-depth case study of the origins of convict leasing in Georgia.

During the 2020 election, voting by mail greatly expanded due to concerns with COVID-19. While voting by mail is relatively easy for most individuals, who have United States Postal Service (USPS) residential mail service, it is much more difficult for those with nonstandard mail service. In this article, we examine how decisions made by the USPS in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have resulted in deeply entrenched structural inequities in the access to mail services on the Navajo Nation in Arizona when compared to rural nonreservation communities. Most (89 percent) of current Post Offices were established during the settler colonial period, during which sites were chosen primarily to advance military objectives and serve the interests of Anglo-American settlers. The resulting inequitable pattern of postal access remains, resulting in inferior mail service on the Navajo Nation and adversely impacting many aspects of life. Post Offices are fewer and farther from each other on reservation communities; there are fewer service hours; and we show in a mail experiment that letters posted on reservations are slower and less likely to arrive. This research fits within the growing body of American political development research on path-dependent processes and “spatial racism” within geography.

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.

Conflicts over the employment status of Uber, Lyft, and other gig workers have made headlines in recent years. I argue that the conditions facing these workers and other independent contractors today are in many respects the result of policy decisions made seventy-five years ago, in hard-fought battles over which workers would—and which would not—be protected by New Deal social programs and labor laws for employees. In 1947–48, New Deal Democrats were poised to establish a more expansive definition of “employee,” extending eligibility to a range of workers excluded by more restrictive common law standards. The Republican-led 80th Congress thwarted the attempt to expand coverage, however, by blocking administrative initiatives, reversing court rulings, and redefining employment-based eligibility for federal labor and social protections. Their actions redirected policy on employment relations, restricting the reach of New Deal protections in the post–WWII economy and shaping the terms of subsequent conflicts over employment status in ways that have left broad power and discretion in the hands of employers.

The party regime concept is central to the study of American political development. Yet many questions about the processes through which party regimes are created, maintained, and dismantled remain unanswered. This article argues that religious bodies have historically played an important role in these processes. Specifically, I demonstrate that “mainline” Protestant groups made three distinct contributions to the entrenchment of the post–New Deal Democratic regime. First, the National Council of Churches (NCC) credibly reframed Democratic policy commitments as embodying universal values (as opposed to the preferences of favored interest groups). Second, the NCC's economic policy arm, which included representatives from business, labor, and the clergy, successfully created the impression of an overwhelming elite consensus in favor of center-left economic policies. Third, the NCC used its moral authority to empower the moderate Republican opposition while simultaneously marginalizing the party's well-funded and potentially influential right wing. The NCC was one of many civil society groups that opposed the GOP right's attempts to roll back the New Deal. But the professional diversity of its membership, its ability to frame its pronouncements in religious terms, and its links to the Protestant grassroots made it arguably the most effective.

After nearly two decades under U.S. rule, the 1917 Jones Act granted American citizenship to Puerto Ricans. I argue that the United States strategically granted collective citizenship in order to strengthen its colonial rule. The convergence of two conditions prompted the grant of citizenship: Congress determined that the islands were strategically valuable to the United States; and Congress registered an independence movement on the island that could threaten colonial control. When Puerto Ricans demanded independence, Congress enveloped them in a bear hug that granted citizenship to weaken their movement. While citizenship was an attractive solution to many of the problems of colonial rule, there were strong objections within the United States to granting citizenship to a population considered to be nonwhite. As a result, Congress created a workaround by disentangling citizenship from statehood and from many of the rights and privileges that typically accompany it. Though citizenship is often associated with democracy and equality, American officials turned citizenship into a mechanism of control for the empire they were building. This work uncovers strategies of American territorial expansion and colonial governance and confronts deeply held notions about American citizenship and political community.

In 2011, the passage of Governor Scott Walker's “Budget Repair” policy retrenched collective bargaining rights for public workers in Wisconsin, a state that was the earliest adopter of these rights and locally celebrated as “union country.” In this article, I use critical juncture analysis to examine this significant case of institutional change. I argue that newly elected GOP politicians initially saw opportunity in a new legislative majority—emerging from the popularity of the Tea Party during the 2010 midterm elections—and attempted strategic policy crafting to mobilize support for this anti-union bill. However, these efforts eventually devolved into a reactive struggle for power with entrenched Democratic legislators and previous policy beneficiaries. Incorporating work on organizational deviance, I show how politicians in both parties sought to control the policymaking process with improvised oppositional tactics that undermined governing norms, ultimately resulting in the bill's passage. This study, thus, expands on theories of institutional change, illuminating the subversive politics of many contemporary movements and political parties.

For the first time since 1860, our collective future as an ideologically coherent and nominally democratic nation is at risk. In the short, medium, and long term, our nation faces several systemic and intertwined threats. Because these cascading crises threaten our fundamental political ideals and our lives, we recommend here a rapid and careful reorientation of at least some part of American political development (APD) toward a scholarship of foresight—that is, one based on the premise that anticipating and shaping the future is now as important as or more important than understanding the past. The article first considers some of the ways in which APD is tethered to the past and then discusses how several of the subfield's analytical approaches are compatible with a scholarship of foresight. Prognosis, prediction, and projection, we argue, are analytical tools that can inform prescription. We conclude with five sets of recommendations that can help APD scholars consider turning their attention toward the future.

From the first attempt to raise congressional pay in 1816, voters have judged members harshly for increasing their own compensation. During debates on the Compensation Act of 1856, members acknowledged that the experience of 1816 still loomed over them, though they disagreed about whether the lesson was not to increase pay or not to replace the per diem with a salary. In the end, they did both. Unlike the “salary grabs” of 1816 and 1873, however, few were punished directly by voters and the law was not repealed. The splintering of the party system allowed representatives to shift responsibility and obscure accountability. The timing of elections and addition of anticorruption provisions further limited backlash. Senators recognized the electoral jeopardy of representatives and so built a broad multiparty coalition for passage. While representatives were sensitive to the judgment of voters, the brief period of a multiparty Congress aided adoption of salary-based compensation in spite of that judgment, making possible later moves toward professionalization.

Recent political developments point to the presence of grave problems with democratic governance in the United States. They suggest that scholarship in American political development (APD) could be better at studying the experiences and thinking of everyday Americans. APD scholars often study institutional changes, policy initiatives, and other shifts in governance without studying how these developments affect the lives of U.S. citizens and residents. And many developments of critical political importance are ignored or do not receive the scholarly attention they deserve. For our scholarship to do justice to the recent crises and better relate to the political world around us, as several recent past American Political Science Association (APSA) presidents have recommended, the article calls for APD scholarship to be better at focusing on people themselves: on their health and safety, their material standing, and their personal and social educations. By adding a fuller study of people to their research, APD scholars would be better equipped to identify important political developments that do not always capture the attention of Congress, the White House, and the media, but that are too important to ignore.

The policy feedback literature developed in an era in which the level of polarization and the intensity of party competition were far lower than today. These background conditions narrowed the scope of many policy debates and facilitated the consolidation of programmatic expansions after their enactment. As a result, the feedback literature emphasized the ways that new policies build supportive constituencies and become entrenched. While the core insight that policies can generate major political repercussions remains solid, American political development (APD) scholars should pay greater attention to the role of negative feedback processes and backlash politics in an era of disunity. Based on a review of New York Times articles mentioning policy backlash between 1960 and 2019, I show that the 2010s was a period of heightened countermobilization. Backlash forces have diffused from civil rights into many other arenas—including health, trade, and immigration—due to partisan polarization, conflicts over cultural shifts, and the negative feedback from activist government itself.

This article examines the institutional development of the U.S. Court of Claims (USCC), in order to shed new light on the nature of constitutional and institutional change in the early Republic. From the founding period through the mid-nineteenth century, members of Congress believed that empowering other institutions to award claimants monies from the Treasury would violate two core doctrines: separation of powers and sovereign immunity. However, as claims against the government ballooned over the first half of the nineteenth century, Congress fundamentally changed its interpretation of the Constitution's requirements in order to create the USCC and thus to alleviate its workload. This story of institutional development is an example of constitutional construction and creative syncretism in that the institutional development of the USCC came from continuous interactions among political actors, working iteratively to refashion institutions capable of solving practical problems of governance. This close study of the court's creation shows something important about American constitutional development: Certain fundamental ideas of the early Republic, including sovereign immunity and separation of powers, were altered or jettisoned not out of some grand rethinking of the nature of the American state, but out of the need to solve a mundane problem.

After the dramatic disruptions of Trump years, American political development might do well to consider whether American exceptionalism still holds or has changed, and that would require scholars to be more attentive to cross-national comparisons and perhaps also to change the countries with which the United States is compared.

Democratic states often claim that their authority rests upon the “will of the people” as expressed through representative institutions. However, there is an irresolvable conundrum that undermines that claim: the “opening dilemma” that invariably attends the founding of democratic states during which those representative institutions are created. While familiar to democratic theorists, the “opening dilemma” has many hitherto unexplored dimensions, among them its actual occurrence in democratic politics. Using the 1869 Illinois Constitutional Convention as a case study, the article demonstrates why individual preferences cannot effect a founding without the intervention of arbitrary and thus undemocratic authority. The conclusion suggests why the opening dilemma might become a serious threat to American democracy if the nation were to attempt to convene a new constitutional convention.