This article considers a significant but overlooked set of policy developments in the latter half of the twentieth century: the extension of collective bargaining rights to most health care workers, many of whom were formally excluded for three decades under the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments. Drawing on primary sources including archival records, an exhaustive review of congressional testimony, and rulings from the quasijudicial agency governing private sector industrial relations, this article shows that health care workers did so in two interrelated processes. First, in coordination with the civil rights movement, workers mobilized and used both disruptive and legal social movement tactics. Second, in doing so they drew the state into and revealed its position in the collective bargaining process between workers and health institutions, facilitating what is conceptualized as cross-domain policy feedback. Cross-domain policy feedback occurs when a policy in one domain (e.g., public health spending) influences the politics of a policy in a seemingly separate one (e.g., labor and employment relations). Such effects, this article suggests, are likely to occur when a policy is relatively large in scale, implicates actors with a diverse set of interests, and offers significant ambiguity and discretion in its implementation. Empirically, this article is the first to chart the institutionalization of collective bargaining rights for health care workers, among the largest group of private sector employees in the postindustrial economy. It also offers a new theoretical and conceptual framework through which to study the ways by which public policies reshape political dynamics—an enduring research agenda for students of American politics and policy.

This article examines three high-profile House ethics cases involving former Speakers James Wright (1988–1989) and Newt Gingrich (1994–1997) and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (1997–2004). The analysis of the filing and disposition of charges in the three cases provides some evidence for the “politics-by-other-means” or “partisan-ethics-wars” framework that is sometimes used to evaluate ethics enforcement in Congress. However, the analysis also provides evidence of bipartisan agreement both in the ethics committee and on the floor. The article highlights the areas of bipartisan consensus and the principles behind that consensus. In paying attention to the content of the cases, it also highlights an important change in ethics investigations over time, specifically an increase in “political gain” cases. The article thus calls attention to aspects of House ethics investigations that are undervalued and inadequately addressed by the partisan-ethics-wars framework.

In this article I analyze Salvador Allende’s economic program and policies. I argue that the explosion of inflation during his administration (above 1,500% on a six-month annualized measure) was predictable, and I show that the government’s response to it was political. I postulate that runaway inflation generated major disaffection among the middle class and that that unhappiness paved the way to Pinochet’s coup d’état in 1973.

Understanding the origins of policy ideas can be crucial when trying to explain dynamics of political change and continuity. Paradigmatic changes in the German pension system have been attributed to the import of “foreign” neoliberal policy ideas from transnational organizations and other countries. The literature describes such processes as policy diffusion, transfer, or translation. In contrast, this article argues that foreign pension ideas did not have a substantive influence on local policy innovations and preference-formation processes. Instead, pension policy pioneers developed their ideas predominantly “from within” through bricolage by reconfiguring long-standing domestic schools of thought. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, the analysis combines a broad historical perspective with case studies of individual policy makers. This sheds new light on the careers of ideas and why significant actors pick them up at certain points.