Over the last decade, in a major switch in position, conservatives have embraced the cause of reducing prison populations in the states and, increasingly, at the national level. The long-term crime decline and the increasing antistatism of the Republican Party contributed to this change, but it also has an important cognitive component: Policy makers have become more open to evidence of the damaging effects of mass incarceration. In contrast to previous studies, our case shows that such policy “feedback” only functions politically when a signal about a policy consequence is assigned valence and intensity by policy makers, whose calculations are heavily structured by the demands of party coalitions. On issues in which no core coalition member has a major stake, feedback can be tipped from reinforcing to undermining and vice versa, but this process depends on the efforts of entrepreneurs to change the way information is processed. In a highly polarized environment, opening policy makers to previously ignored evidence requires the cultivation of a reform cadre composed of ideological standard-bearers who can vouch for the orthodoxy of the new position.

This article proposes a new explanation for the origins of entrenched judicial review, or judicial review supported by supermajority constitutional amendment requirements. The explanation is based on ex ante levels of economic inequality: Where economic inequality is higher, economic elites have more to lose from the advent of majority rule. These elites will have both greater incentives and greater ability to resist or check institutions responsive to popular majorities. We may then be more likely to see the adoption of less democratically responsive institutions, like entrenched judicial review, where more unequal wealth and income distributions are threatened by majority rule. The theory is consistent with the qualitative historical record from several former British colonies, including that of the United States. It also finds considerable support in an econometric analysis of the presence of entrenched judicial review in the first year of continuous democracy for those former European colonies that had become democracies by 2008, where pre-independence European mortality rates are used as a proxy for pre-independence economic inequality. These findings suggest that the adoption of entrenched judicial review in democracies may have been motivated at least in part because of its anticipated protection for higher levels of economic inequality.

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.

Dartmouth College v. Woodward is taken to be the seminal case in the rise of the corporation. In recognizing a charter as a contract that vested private rights against many forms of state regulation, the case paved the way for the private business corporation and helped usher in large-scale commercial development against Jeffersonian agrarianism. In this “classical liberal story,” Dartmouth College is understood to have preserved a private corporation against public interference. Yet this understanding of Dartmouth College neglects what the actual case was about and erases an important moment of constitutional development. American colleges in the colonial period were church–state schools forged when the church and state were not separated. The Dartmouth College case was part of a wider constitutional debate over what many saw as a public institution that, in the wake of the American Revolution, needed to be “disestablished” from the church. Doing so was part of a revolutionary constitutionalism that would help frame how we understood the relationship between public and private, church and state. This was a conflict about recasting institutions and embedding them in constitutional ideas. While advocates failed to solidify Dartmouth as a “public” institution, they succeeded in forging distinctions between public and private that shape how we think today.

The struggle for Native American voting rights has lasted more than two centuries. Although the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted citizenship to indigenous peoples born within the geographic boundaries of the United States, it did not ensure the right to vote. Because the Constitution gives states the power to determine the “times, places, and manner of holding elections,” many states statutorily denied Native Americans the franchise until federal lawsuits forced them to change. Having the statutory right to vote, however, did not ensure that it could be exercised in a meaningful way. Since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act there have been more than ninety voting rights cases involving Native Americans. While the overall historical trend has been toward extending the vote, periods of enhanced voting rights often have been followed by periods of retrenchment. In this article, we argue that the traditional frameworks used to explain racial inequalities fail to account for the unique character of relations between indigenous peoples and the U.S. government, and we propose a tripartite approach that draws from studies in core–periphery development and “racial institutional orders,” but also considers the many ways that tribal identities intersect with these.

Can the U.S. Congress address major challenges? Can Congress govern? Questions like these keep getting asked. This article addresses them by consulting the record since 1789. Given the separation-of-powers structure of the American system, such questions cannot be addressed directly. They need to be deconstructed. The presidency needs to enter the discussion, too. Also, what is a major challenge? To identify such challenges, and to supply a way of seeing how and in what respects Congress, as well as in a background frame the U.S. system more broadly, has performed, I draw on comparative analysis. How has the United States participated in thirteen major “impulses” that have invested a comparable set of nations at various times since the late eighteenth century? These challenges range from launching a new nation through building a welfare state through dealing with climate change and debt/deficit problems today.

When President Andrew Jackson removed the public deposits from the Bank of the United States, he set off an economic and political crisis from which, scholars agree, the Whig Party emerged. We argue that petitioning in response to removal of the deposits shaped the emergence of the Whig Party, crystallizing a new line of Jacksonian opposition and dispensing with older lines of National Republican rhetoric and organization. Where petitioning against removal of the deposits was higher, the Whigs were more likely to emerge with organization and votes in the coming years. We test this implication empirically by using a new database of petitions sent to Congress during the banking crisis. We find that petitioning activity in 1834 is predictive of increased support for Whig Party candidates in subsequent presidential elections as well as stronger state Whig Party organization.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Republican Party dominated American elections in all geographical areas except the former Confederacy, which remained solidly Democratic. Despite this, Southern states were consistently provided with a sizable delegation to the Republican National Convention (as much as 26 percent of the total). This raises the question: Why would a region that delivered no votes on Election Day be given a substantial say in the selection of the party's presidential candidate? Previous research on the role Southern delegates played in Republican conventions has been limited to individual cases or to studies only tangentially related to this question. We explore the continuous and sizable presence of Southern delegates at Republican conventions by conducting a historical overview of the 1880–1928 period. We find that Republican Party leaders—and particularly presidents—adopted a “Southern strategy” by investing heavily in maintaining a minor party organization in the South, as a way to create a reliable voting base at conventions. We also show that as the Republican Party's strength across the country grew under the “System of 1896,” challenges to the delegate apportionment method—and thereby efforts to minimize Southern influence at Republican conventions—increased substantially.

For much of the post-WWII era, conservative forces blocked progressive labor policy from reaching a floor vote. With huge Democratic majorities in Congress, the 1960s represented a rare opportunity for unions to substantively alter industrial relations policy. The decade served as an important moment of policy development for numerous groups in the coalition. Organized labor, however, made few gains during this prolific era. Despite labor's central position within the governing coalition, Democrats repeatedly failed to pass their most important legislative ambition, the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act's right-to-work clause. In 1965, Democrats nearly achieved this goal when such a bill passed the House, only to be blocked by a filibuster in the Senate. By analyzing the Democrats' legislative priorities during the Great Society, I show how coalitional politics structured the party's policy agenda and how this ordering affected legislation in turn. With the infusion of new coalitional demands, party elites strategically placed labor's controversial issue at the end of a long legislative agenda, effectively eliminating any chance for passage. Rather than locating all blame with the usual suspects, this rarely studied episode suggests that President Johnson and his leaders in Congress played a central role in the bill's failure. The study provides new insight into the process, and consequences, by which party leaders decide whose issues to prioritize when setting the agenda.

Arguments about national tax policy have taken center stage in U.S. politics in recent times, creating acute dilemmas for Democrats. With Republicans locked into antitax agendas for some time, Democrats have recently begun to push back, arguing for maintaining or even increasing taxes on the very wealthy in the name of deficit reduction and the need to sustain funding for public programs. But the Democratic Party as a whole has not been able to find a consistent voice on tax issues. It experienced key defections when large, upward-tilting tax cuts were enacted under President George W. Bush, and the Democratic Party could not control the agenda on debates over continuing those tax cuts even when it enjoyed unified control in Washington, DC, in 2009 and 2010. To explain these cleavages among Democrats, we examine growing pressures from small business owners, a key antitax constituency. We show that organizations claiming to speak for small business have become more active in tax politics in recent decades, and we track the ways in which constituency pressures have been enhanced by feedbacks from federal tax rules that encourage individuals to pass high incomes through legal preferences for the self-employed. Comparing debates over the inception and renewal of the Bush tax cuts, we show how small business organizations and constituencies have divided Democrats on tax issues. Our findings pinpoint the mechanisms that have propelled tax resistance in contemporary U.S. politics, and our analysis contributes to theoretical understandings of the ways in which political parties are influenced by policy feedbacks and by coalitions of policy-driven organized economic interests.

Payroll taxes and payroll deductions became ubiquitous in the United States by the mid-1940s, crucial to the financing of the emerging “mixed” welfare state as well as World War II. While scholars have firmly established the importance of elements of the warfare/welfare state such as Social Security, employer-based pensions and health insurance, and the mass income tax, voluntary sector institutions have garnered less attention. The history of payroll deduction demonstrates how this “infrastructural power” also advantaged institutions outside of the state, notably, charitable fundraising organizations commonly known as Community Chests (the forerunners of the United Way). Chests began to look toward the payroll deduction in the 1920s as an efficient and effective way of extracting donations from workers of modest means—though these were often fiercely resisted by an empowered labor movement in the 1930s. But it took the state's vast expansion of deductions during World War II, and the patriotic impulse of donating to war-related charities, to convince industrial unions and employers to support this method of donation. Like the income tax, this change in charitable giving remained in place after the war and became a vital element of financing this part of the public–private social safety net—a crucial boost to the voluntary sector from the state.

Scholarship on the U.S. public–private welfare state has pointed to the ways in which indirect, market-based channels of social policy provision often obscure the role of the government from many citizens who use these programs. This article argues that the same mechanisms that often depoliticize public–private policies for citizens who already benefit from them may actually politicize them for citizens who are unable to access those benefits. Focusing on the responses of black civil rights and veterans advocacy groups to the shortcomings of the Federal Housing Administration and the early GI Bill, it shows that public–private policies can draw advocacy groups, providers, and the state into conflicts over the terms of access. Despite facing very different challenges and bringing very different political capacities to bear, these two types of groups followed precisely the same processes of political mobilization and contestation in each case: First, they aggregated individual grievances into broader collective problems. Then, they traced those problems not to impersonal market mechanisms but to government policies and state authority. Finally, they pushed for reform across multiple venues to expand access for their members. By explicating these recurrent political dynamics, this article contributes to our understanding of policy feedback in the public–private welfare state and highlights the role of advocacy groups in helping to reshape the state's capacity to govern in a policy arena that is often characterized as dominated by third-party providers.