Although American Political Development is one of the more sociological corners of political science, for the most part sociologists have not been attuned to its contributions. Even among historical sociologists, the central conversations have been motivated by classic questions about transitions to capitalism and revolution in Europe rather than by puzzles of American exceptionalism.Much of political sociology has focused on individual voting behavior and public opinion; social movements research focuses heavily on the most recent decades in American history. Consequently, a review of the impact of Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State within sociology reveals a sharply delimited set of direct influences beyond the research already well known to scholars in American Political Development, largely the work of Theda Skocpol (1992) and her many students and collaborators (e.g., Orloff and Skocpol 1984). A rereading, by contrast, highlights the importance of the book for contemporary discussions of the forms and processes of institutional change.

This article explores labor transnationalism in the Brazilian auto sector. It argues that industrial structure, state institutions and practices, and labor ideologies affect the form and frequency of labor transnationalism. In Brazil in the 1980s, labor transnationalism was mostly limited to information exchange and occasional economic support, and political pressure in the form of letters of solidarity from foreign unionists. By the 1990s, when Brazil opened itself to world trade in the auto sector by dramatically lowering tariffs and domestic content requirements, labor began to pursue new strategies. Yet while facing similar challenges in the same industry and at times within the same corporation, unions of opposing political tendencies pursued different strategies. Conservative unions responded to economic globalization by deepening their ties with the government and the business sector, while left-oriented unions increasingly made use of new forms of transnational actions. By the early 2000s, in Ford and Volkswagen, solutions to labor conflicts were achieved after Brazilian auto unionists traveled to the headquarters of the auto firms in Detroit and Wolfsburg and negotiated directly with corporate headquarters.

During my first year of graduate school (1982–83), Louis Galambos congratulated me for having the courage to go into a dying field. Naïveté, not courage, had propelled me to leave my position as deputy director of income maintenance programs for the New York City Department of Social Services and study political history at The Johns Hopkins University. Although contact with the job market four years later would confirm my adviser’s warnings, at the time he issued this “heads up” I did wonder what Dr. Galambos had been smoking. After all, it seemed to me that politics, and particularly its bureaucratic incarnation, touched the lives of Americans more of ten and more forcefully than ever before. How could interest in this topic be declining? What’s more, by my third year in graduate school, I had mastered a rich body of literature that confirmed the centrality of politics.The Progressive synthesis, dating back to James Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington, was under fire but still compelled elegant work that had begun to focus less on Progressive presidents and more on the fate of liberalism as it engaged racism, sought to reconcile local preferences with national agendas, and grappled with Americans’ increasing distrust of the centrally directed programs that the New Deal and the Great Society spawned (Brinkley 1982, 1995; Chafe 1980; Gerstle 1989, 2001; McGirr 2001; Sugrue 1996).

Stephen Skowronek’s Building aNew American State remains one of the most influential books in political science and history of the past two decades. In political science, Building engendered a set of deep disciplinary transformations that simultaneously sent scholars sprinting into the history books for new cases with which to ply and test theory, goaded them into rethinking what it meant for the United States to possess a “state,” and welcomed them in embracing the study of institutions as a worthwhile endeavor in political science. In history, Skowronek’s book challenged scholars to reconceive the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as a fundamentally distinct period of governance, a peculiar challenge to the institutional forms that had dominated nineteenth-century American politics. Two decades later, historians and political scientists are still laboring to answer Skowronek’s call.

Before Julian Zelizer called with the idea for this forum, I had marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Building a New American State as just one more entry on a growing list of reminders of the swift passage of time. Now, as I read the reflections of scholars who have risen to prominence during this period in political science, sociology, and history, the fullness of these years is readily apparent. Building a New American State has aged gracefully as the symbol of a larger enterprise, one that Julian Zelizer, Elizabeth Clemens, Dan Carpenter, and Brian Balogh have done much to expand, sustain, and enrich. Reflecting back on my own experience, I realize that my inclination as author to find something of critical significance on every page of the book gave way some time ago to admiration for the growing corpus of work that was engaging its themes and pushing its arguments in new directions. I count myself lucky to have had this work seized upon by a generation of scholars ready to rethink the development of American government and politics, and I am grateful to them for giving it a life of its own.