A single-state budget directs billions of taxpayer dollars to carry out various political and policy goals. Governors as chief executives have the fiscal responsibility to construct budgets, the political desire to create public policy, and the institutional means to achieve these goals. They seek out opportunities to make substantial changes in public policy provided to them by interest groups. Different interest group environments across policy issues thereby motivate gubernatorial intervention with distinct short- and long-term rewards. Nearly three decades of data from all American states substantiates these claims and shows real consequences: Policy issues and their corresponding budgets that experience short-term shocks grow more slowly over time. American governors change the fiscal landscape of a state when they are motivated to intervene in a policy domain and are enticed by interest groups to use their institutional powers.

American governors have specific means – veto and agenda-setting powers – for shaping public budgets. Governors face competing managerial and political pressures when constructing a budget: forces of legislatures, agencies, and parties that demand changes in individual categories contending with the need to deliver the budget as a whole. In addition to managing these competing interests, governors also have their own preferences they wish to express in the budget. This chapter shows how the institutional strength of governors affects their ability to reign in competing demands. Our quantitative analysis shows that governors with stronger powers can make large cuts and raises in budgets even larger: a finding we term “bottoming-out” and “topping-off.” This mechanism has significant consequences for the budget as a whole: Disruptions in spending lead to slower long-term budget growth overall. Hence, executive power leads to less stable policymaking, particularly in instable interest group environments.

In this chapter, we first summarize literature in public policy process theory, political institutions, state politics, and interest groups. We leverage this scholarship to offer a detailed argument about state budgeting that proceeds in three steps. The first step is about how policy issues provide motives for action. The second step is about how the formation of interest groups around issues makes those issues more or less amenable to policy change. The third step is about how the institutional strength of the executive – in this case, a governor – provides the means to change policy given the interest group context surrounding issues. Our claim is that issues provide the motives, interest groups provide the opportunities, but the extent to which governors act on those opportunities depends on their means.

This chapter looks at the abuse and regulation of schools. It begins with a brief history of religion and education law before examining the Trojan Horse Affair which began in 2014 and reverberates today. An extraordinary volume of disinformation encrusts this series of events, which is here related via an outline of the salient facts as drawn from official reports and court cases, with minimal reference to newspaper articles and academic commentary. The related issues of illegal schools and unregulated madrassas are touched on. The theoretical discussion illustrates that liberal individualism views education as a means to emancipate the individual into secularism, while multiculturalism treats it as a means to preserve and perpetuate minority cultures. It concludes that these perspectives fail to take schools seriously as institutions whose primary purpose is to provide as many British children as possible with a good education. The pluralist response points to what the Trojan Horse Affair and education law are really about: ensuring that every school, regardless of classification, is properly regulated, well-governed and capable of rebuffing any threat to its good functioning.

The fourth chapter reconstructs the population history of the Nahua community in Xochimilco for the entirety of the colonial period. Having established the timing, rate, and extent of demographic change, the chapter traces the implications of population decline for social relations. The chapter argues that epidemics and subsequent interventions by the government in the tribute system, incomplete and unsuccessful though they were, represented an assertion of royal authority, one that provided opportunities for Nahua nobles and commoners to contest and renegotiate their relationships with each other and with the colonial administration. These changes proved to be especially threatening to the nobility. In response, the dynastic rulers sought to reassert their own political power within the altepetl, although their success owed much to the efforts of noblewomen in securing and harnessing economic assets to their families’ advantage. They also contracted valuable strategic marriage alliances that bolstered, if only temporarily, their families’ positions in the face of so much loss of life.

The chapter singles out two senators, two governors, and four Fox News heavyweights as having played especially important parts among the president’s enablers. The two senators – Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and inveterate Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham – were remarkable for the prominence, persistence, and importance of their fealty. The two governors – Florida’s Mike DeSantis and Georgia’s Brian Kemp – were standouts for standing strong in Trump’s corner, no matter the rising numbers of Covid-19 cases in their respective states. And the four Fox News heavyweights – Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity – were striking for their staunch and some would say slavish clinging to the president’s coattails. As with every enabler, most notably those singled out by name in this book, Trump’s presidency, and even his subsequent electoral viability, would not have been possible without them.

This chapter reveals the great level of control that local elites accumulated over both local and royal institutions in Santo Domingo, to expand their influence to other parts of the Spanish Caribbean and acquire a profitable network of associates and introduce contraband goods into the city. Rodrigo Pimentel’s political life provides an illuminating example of the particularities of Santo Domingo’s institutional life, but on a larger scale, it also reveals the profound limitations that the Spanish Monarchy’s bureaucratic apparatus had to govern its own Caribbean territories and, by extension, most of its colonial dominions beyond Mexico City and Lima. Under the Habsburg, colonial centers of royal authority, Audiencias and governors often became extensions of the communities that hosted ministers and royal officials, and not anchors of royal power in remote Spanish possessions, as the crown initially intended. In theirdealings withhigh courts, these local groups of power both made and unmade the Spanish empire: they limited the influence of Madrid, but by using royal institutions for their own ends, they shaped the edges of the empire according to their own interests.

takes a deeper examination of the dynamics that produce advancements in progressive state citizenship, with cases from both the historical and contemporary periods: the two-decade push for driver’s licenses in California and New York, the timing and spread of state sanctuary laws on immigration since 2005, and a historical examination of Black state citizenship in the antebellum North. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) of policy change, the authors argue that some of the most notable legislative advancements in progressive state citizenship have occurred because of the intersection of two key factors: state advocacy coalitions that unite strong social movement actors and legislative champions alike, combined with policy openings created by federalism tensions. The chapter concludes by offering thoughts on the future of progressive state citizenship in a politically polarized United States.

turns to immigrant citizenship with a focus on California to carefully assess where the state currently stands with respect to progressive state citizenship and to situate the present moment in a sweep of the state’s history, which saw it pioneer and champion anti-Chinese and anti-immigrant legislation from its founding through the late 1990s and only move toward more pro-immigrant policies in the last two decades. We then explore key milestones in immigrant rights over the past decade and pinpoint 2015 as the year when progressive state citizenship became crystallized. Finally, we trace key factors that incubated and enabled the development of progressive state citizenship in California, including voter backlash against racial propositions, partisan shifts in the state legislature, and the growing strength of social movement actors across various regions, aided by long-term investment strategies by private foundations.

This chapter unpacks the federal intervention in the War on Drugs and analyzes the strategies the president followed across states depending on governors’ political affiliations. We disaggregate the intervention on the military, judicial, communicative, and social policy dimensions and assess patterns of cooperation and conflict between federal and subnational authorities. Using extensive interviews with federal and subnational elites and case studies from three cities in three states, we show how Mexico’s federal government followed differentiated strategies to deal with drug violence. The president protected subnational co-partisans (PAN) in Tijuana (PAN); partially cooperated with centrist opposition authorities (PRI) in Ciudad Juáreza; but confronted leftist governors and mayors (PRD), leaving them at the mercy of drug cartels in Apatzingán. Cartels responded by launching strategic attacks and challenging their rivals in municipalities with vulnerable leftist states.Thus, the politicization of law enforcement in the War on Drugs – which was possible because Mexico transitioned to electoral democracy without developing the rule of law – became a major stimulant of violence.