The Supreme Court changed abortion laws across the United States on 22 January 1973. Abortion had been illegal in many states, and in others a closely regulated medical procedure. In only four states did the law provide a broad right to terminate a pregnancy in the early months. Roe v. Wade declared that this right in the context of the doctor-patient relationship was protected by the Constitution's “right to privacy.” In practice, abortion became a matter of personal choice.

State criminal disenfranchisement provisions have recently attracted much scholarly attention. Some scholars have examined the consequences of these policies, such as the number of individuals they have disenfranchised (particularly the high percentage of African Americans), the way in which they have altered election outcomes, and their effect on voter turnout. Other scholars have assessed the persuasiveness of various justifications for these policies. Still other scholars have analyzed legal strategies that might be used to repeal these policies.

Do party ideologies matter in the making of public policy in the United States? The conventional answer to this question is equivocal. The American parties are generally considered to be less ideological than their Anglo European brethren. More important perhaps, these parties seem to lack the organizational characteristics necessary to implement such ideologies (were they present to begin with). With fragmented leadership in the legislature, a decentralized system of candidate selection and a federalist, divided-powers constitutional regime, the American political system seems inhospitable—if not downright inimical—to party ideology. The American parties, writes Theodore Lowi, are “constituent parties and have almost never been ‘responsible,’policy-making parties.”

While the American teachers’ unions are commonly understood to be guarantors of public school teachers’ job security through their backing of teacher tenure laws, the relationship between tenure and teachers’ organizations is historically contingent. This article shows how in 1937 Pennsylvania teachers pushed their state legislature to pass what was at the time the most empowering teacher tenure law in existence. Using primary documents, the article examines how nonunionized teachers politicized tenure in the early 1930s, before the New Deal reshaped the political environment. Women activists from Philadelphia’s AFT Local 192 successfully lobbied the legislature in Harrisburg in 1937 to pass a far-reaching tenure law that not only guaranteed due-process rights for teachers, but did so without allowing for a probationary period and without exception for married women teachers. Pennsylvania’s teacher unionists fought against efforts to reform the law in the years that followed.

The tension between democratic institutions and the project to integrate international markets for trade and investment has been an enduring feature of the contemporary era of globalization. This article analyzes how officials in the executive branch navigated this tension in the making of inward foreign direct investment policy during the 1970s. Based on recently declassified archival sources, it traces how top officials in the Ford administration decided to establish a new interagency committee in order to appear responsive to congressional pressure and still leave its “open door” investment policy intact. Yet this measure only marked the first step in resolving their political dilemma. Lower-level functionaries then had to manage the problem of how to give the new committee the appearance of strength while also maximizing its discretion to be weak. Overall, this article contributes the first comprehensive account of both phases of the policy-making process using new archival evidence.

In the years since the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Roe v. Wade (1973), the abortion controversy has raged across America with increasing vigor. Since Ruth Bader Ginsburg's appointment solidified the Rehnquist Court's moderate bloc, holding the line on Roe's basic principle but inviting more state regulation, the conflict over abortion is likely to expand and intensify in most of the fifty states. The increased and bitter activity since the Supreme Court decided Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), which gave state legislatures more latitude to respond to pro-life pressures, provides only a small indication of what the future may hold. Almost twenty years after Roe legalized abortion in the United States, an end to the “clash of absolutes,” as Laurence Tribe has recently called the American abortion conflict, seems nowhere in sight.

Relatively little is known about how late nineteenth-century associations worked to get their policy goals adopted by state governments. We study this question here, considering the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and three policies it supported: scientific temperance instruction, increasing the age of consent, and prohibiting tobacco sales to minors. Overall, WCTU-supported legislation was more likely to succeed in states with unified Republican state legislatures, aided by neighboring state adoptions (scientific temperance) and greater WCTU membership (increasing age of consent and prohibiting tobacco sales to minors). These findings are supported by historical evidence, which reveals how WCTU leadership targeted particular states when lobbying for scientific temperance instruction laws and utilized its broad membership base to pressure state legislatures on the other two issues. In total, these results show how one late nineteenth-century membership group was able to facilitate the successful spread of its policies throughout the nation.

This article examines the financial industry’s critical role in retargeting U.S. health policy goals of improving peoples’ health in the 1960s to those of expanding institutional wealth in the 1970s. Government collaborated with finance to support not-for-profit hospitals’ use of debt to build services that augmented capital and operated like for-profit businesses. Certificate of Need, hospital rate review, and national health planning programs came to assess hospital performance in terms of capital formation, returns on investment, and bond ratings. The regulatory programs helped gentrify medicine by reinforcing selective investment in lucrative, high-tech services that market specialty procedures to affluent populations in place of disease control, primary care, and general acute care for all. Their actions laid the groundwork for the 1980s finance industry coup, which employed market ideology to dominate health policy at the expense of equality, effectiveness, and public health governance.

The Reagan agenda embodied a single broad goal for domestic policy: to redefine the scope of public authority to limit the extent of state intervention in the market. This goal found a concrete expression in attempts to reverse welfare-state policies, restructure the tax system, and lighten the “regulatory burden.” The Reagan revolution was extended to antitrust. A number of top appointees were representatives of the Chicago school, a conservative group of economists and attorneys characterized by a faith in the efficiency-promoting nature of markets and a grave pessimism regarding government intervention in the economy. They rejected the political and social goals of antitrust and argued that the market rather than the state was best suited to determine the most efficient forms of economic organization.

This exploration of the politics of land-use reform in New York’s vast Adirondack Mountains provides a revealing window onto the ambiguities, evolution, and importance of environmental liberalism during the 1970s. A distinctive set of circumstances, featuring forceful advocacy by Governor Nelson Rockefeller and propitious political timing, led to the creation in the early 1970s of one of the most ambitious state-level environmental reforms in modern American history. But implementation during the mid- and late 1970s proved challenging. Environmental management by a new regional agency that possessed powerful regulatory authority over all public and private lands in the region produced discontents, distrust, and organized opposition among both developers and property-rights advocates on the right and environmental advocates on the left. The result was an uneasy, enduring legacy: the new regulatory institution and key environmental planning ideas of the early 1970s and the later, wide-ranging discontents would coexist in similar forms for decades to come.

For nearly 150 years, the Supreme Court has denounced jurisdictional ambiguities in immigration policy, regularly striking down state laws as unconstitutional intrusions on the federal government’s “broad, undoubted power.” Most scholarship on the historical evolution of US immigration policy has followed suit, rendering invisible the role of state governments and federalism in immigration policy during the crucial, transformative decades of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. This article redresses these silences by spotlighting the aggressive state policy activism and critical intergovernmental negotiations over how to control immigration and noncitizens from the 1870s to the 1920s. Focusing on two older, eastern seaboard states—Maryland and Virginia—and two newer, southwestern states—Arizona and New Mexico—these historical case studies show how subnational immigration initiatives were fueled by distinctive local and regional labor need and racial landscapes. This article also identifies and illuminates distinct forms of autonomous, interdependent, insistent, and validated activism by states in immigration federalism.

The subject of American counterintelligence has generated a considerable amount of scholarship in recent years, the bulk of that research focusing on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Those agencies were and continue to be commonly recognized as having fulfilled the primary role as the nation's intelligence-gatherers. Within this vast intelligence community exists a microcosm in the form of counterespionage, or more euphemistically, counterintelligence.

Over the last thirty years, historians and historically minded political scientists have effectively overturned the long-held perception of the nineteenth-century United States as a polity defined by its lack of an effective state. By highlighting the myriad interventions of its energetic and enterprising federal government and by incorporating subnational governments and private actors and organizations as evidence of its impressive “infrastructural” power, a generation of scholars have, collectively, described a nineteenth-century state that was both more assertive and more robust than was previously thought. Yet other scholars have begun to ask whether this interpretation has concocted a state stronger and more coherent in prospect than it was in practice. By highlighting the piecemeal and often partial nature of the nation’s institutional development and the contradictions and incoherence that accompanied its infrastructural power, these scholars have laid the foundations for a new “improvisational synthesis” that stresses the equivocal nature of American state-building and considers its enduring vulnerabilities.

Comparing European and North American policies with respect to “civil rights” is a difficult exercise for two reasons. First, it is important to emphasize that Europe and the United States are not political entities of a same nature. Granted, the fact that the nations that today comprise Europe are heirs of common history explains in part the similarities in their political behavior and distinguishes them as a group from the “New World.” Yet in the American case, despite the country's federalist structure and the existence of fifty states within the Union, we are dealing with a single nation, endowed with a central government capable of generating policies that are valid throughout the territory. Such is not the case with Europe. As is well known, the European continent is divided into two sharply contrasted spheres. On the one hand, there is the East, thrown into confusion by the devastation of communism and mired in a profound economic crisis. On the other hand, there is the West, comprised of nations that share a level of economic prosperity comparable to that of the United States but which do not form a single political entity. At present, the European Economic Community includes only twelve European states; the remaining countries, such as Switzerland, Sweden, and Austria, have yet to become members. In this essay, the question of “civil rights” will be examined specifically in light of those countries that already belong to the EEC.