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.

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.

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.

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.

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.