This article argues that the Populist legacy is embodied by the constrained conception of democracy underlying the American state, which restricts popular sovereignty from the economic sphere. Charles Macune led the Farmers’ Alliance according to a robust conception of democracy that insisted on subordinating economic law to popular sovereignty. Macune's distinct economic thought marked a departure from previous antimonopoly movements, but his reliance on an inductive, empirical, institutionalist economic methodology was shared by the founders of the American Economic Association. Populism did not fail because it relied on outdated economic theory; it was defeated because it represented a coherent and credible threat to the established order. A successful campaign established the hegemony of the deductive method, which posited that manmade laws must serve the natural, universally valid laws of economics and that popular sovereignty must therefore be restrained from the economic realm. Without the means to conceive an alternative relationship between the state and economy, the path of twentieth-century American political development has been limited to those possibilities available under a constrained conception of democracy. This article articulates Macune's political strategy and highlights its underlying principles in order to present a more robust conception of democracy and illustrate the mechanisms by which it was defeated.

Dartmouth College v. Woodward is taken to be the seminal case in the rise of the corporation. In recognizing a charter as a contract that vested private rights against many forms of state regulation, the case paved the way for the private business corporation and helped usher in large-scale commercial development against Jeffersonian agrarianism. In this “classical liberal story,” Dartmouth College is understood to have preserved a private corporation against public interference. Yet this understanding of Dartmouth College neglects what the actual case was about and erases an important moment of constitutional development. American colleges in the colonial period were church–state schools forged when the church and state were not separated. The Dartmouth College case was part of a wider constitutional debate over what many saw as a public institution that, in the wake of the American Revolution, needed to be “disestablished” from the church. Doing so was part of a revolutionary constitutionalism that would help frame how we understood the relationship between public and private, church and state. This was a conflict about recasting institutions and embedding them in constitutional ideas. While advocates failed to solidify Dartmouth as a “public” institution, they succeeded in forging distinctions between public and private that shape how we think today.

As conventional thinking once had it, Vormärz Prussia and the antebellum United States mapped out opposite ends of a “strong-state, weak-state” spectrum. But several decades of research have rendered both images increasingly untenable. Revisions began on the American side in the 1940s when a group of scholars set out to re-evaluate the state governments' role in antebellum American industrialization. These studies of state legislation and political rhetoric—the first to take federalism seriously, one might say—collectively laid to rest the myth of laissez-faire during the antebellum period. Since then scholars of the antebellum political economy have examined the American state from another angle, shifting attention to the role of the state and federal courts in economic growth. Others, mean-while, have taken a closer look at the federal government's role before the Civil War and discerned interventionist tendencies in the federal legislature and executive as well. The cumulative effect is clear: it has become impossible to speak of laissez-faire in the antebellum American context. On the Prussian side, too, historians have begun to rethink the state's role in industrialization as mounting evidence has undermined the conventional image. Initially, few historians questioned the extent of the state's involvement in economic activity during the first half of the 19th century; instead, they debated its consequences—beneficial or not, intended or not. On balance the first round of revisions judged Vormdrz Prussian policies to have been rather contradictory in nature, some encouraging industrialization but others either hampering economic change or proving irrelevant.5 Historian Clive Trebilcock has gone a step further, however, debunking what he labels “myths of the directed economy” in nineteenth-century Germany.

Policing is a prominent but understudied part of American politics. This article asks: Why did some, but not all, American states adopt a state police force in the early twentieth century? The state police force—a statewide policing agency with general jurisdiction over crimes throughout a state—was a prized progressive policy reform for decades. Yet many states declined to adopt the innovation. That puzzle becomes even more interesting given that all forty-eight states adopted the closely related innovation of a state highway patrol during the same period. This article applies diffusion theory to explain the origins of a familiar feature of American policing. Using a multimethod research design, I found that labor-capital struggles and regional pressures for diffusion were most important in shaping the adoption of state police forces. By contrast, adoptions of highway patrols appear to have been influenced by factors such as urbanization and fiscal capacity.

After nearly two decades under U.S. rule, the 1917 Jones Act granted American citizenship to Puerto Ricans. I argue that the United States strategically granted collective citizenship in order to strengthen its colonial rule. The convergence of two conditions prompted the grant of citizenship: Congress determined that the islands were strategically valuable to the United States; and Congress registered an independence movement on the island that could threaten colonial control. When Puerto Ricans demanded independence, Congress enveloped them in a bear hug that granted citizenship to weaken their movement. While citizenship was an attractive solution to many of the problems of colonial rule, there were strong objections within the United States to granting citizenship to a population considered to be nonwhite. As a result, Congress created a workaround by disentangling citizenship from statehood and from many of the rights and privileges that typically accompany it. Though citizenship is often associated with democracy and equality, American officials turned citizenship into a mechanism of control for the empire they were building. This work uncovers strategies of American territorial expansion and colonial governance and confronts deeply held notions about American citizenship and political community.

On the opening day of the 1972 Democratic convention, the women's caucus gave George McGovern a standing ovation. Its first meeting was packed, with 700 female delegates in attendance, exuberant over their numbers at the convention—triple the representation from four years earlier—and their new clout in presidential politics. Of all of the presidential candidates appearing, only Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to run for president, was greeted with enthusiasm comparable to the warm reception for McGovern. Most of the women at the meeting were fervently anti-war and respected McGovern for his early and courageous stance on Vietnam. However, the size of the gathering attested to another of McGovern's achievements: his chairing of the reform commission that had rewritten the Democratic Party's rules on delegate selection, leading to the huge leap in the representation of women. As Liz Carpenter, a former White House aide to LBJ, put it when introducing McGovern, “We know we wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for you.”

Taken as a group, the three commentaries reveal many of the difficult challenges, as well as opportunities, that confront social scientists exploring issues of temporality. Although the three authors take quite different stances, each highlights important issues for further work sensitive to historical process. Here I begin with Amy Bridges's more critical commentary before turning to the responses of Jervis and Thelen.

A recognized strength of modern constitutional democracies is their ability to insure legitimate political succession through the use of elections.For a review of the contribution of democratic theory to the succession problem, see: Peter Calvert, “The Theory of Political Succession” in The Process of Political Succession, ed. Peter Calvert (London: Macmillan, 1987), 245–66. We do not challenge this assessment; rather, we suggest that the process of producing a legitimate leader is a complex social construction with numerous variations. The pathway to political legitimacy can be conceived thus as a passage through a series of “gateways” and “rituals” that, when successfully confronted, confer political authority. The public, the press, and political elites participate in the process of conferring legitimacy on the “winner.” The 2000 presidential election is a prime illustration of this process because its contested nature clarifies and highlights gateways that have been less visible in other elections. We present an analysis of the social construction of legitimacy in the post-election and early weeks of George W. Bush's presidency, including examples of strategies designed to negotiate successful passage through these rituals. Finally, we note the capacity of these rituals to produce legitimate successions even when irregular events pose a challenge to democratic theory.

This essay examines the development of Andrew Jackson's ideas about nationalism, citizenship, and sovereignty within the southern borderlands of the post-Revolutionary United States. It argues that he was in many respects a conventional borderlands leader—that is, someone with little sense of attachment to any particular polity, who speculated in Indian lands while pursuing commercial ventures through American, Spanish, and Native jurisdictions. But an especially devastating war between the settlers of Middle Tennessee and some Cherokee warriors during the 1790s forced Jackson and others to articulate their attachment to the United States in new ways. Bitterly rejecting a Federalist model of citizenship that assumed clear territorial limits, they invented a new “protection covenant,” whereby the people themselves, imagined within a brutal state of nature, retained full sovereignty to deploy violence. In addition to a fresh look at Jackson, the article demonstrates the importance of international as well as Constitutional law in the formation of early American nationalism.

John Gerring's methodological critique of American political development can be viewed from at least three perspectives. First and most generally, Gerring proposes procedural and analytical standards that should apply to all the social and natural sciences. As a methodological virtue, for instance, conceptual clarity strengthens the underpinnings of knowledge, regardless of the substantive focus. Rigorous specification of causal relations is equally universal. From a second perspective, Gerring invites his readers to at least entertain the possibility that methodological rigor might vary over the lifespan of a research field. From this angle, seminal work often involves more relaxed methodological styles because initial exploration of a topic or area, almost by definition, must be unguided by research conventions and norms. Such conventions and norms only emerge if and when that exploration attracts a self-sustaining community of scholars.

“Rebuilding the American State” was written in the manner of a bozzetto: it is a sketch drawn to reshape interlocking analytical and historiographical conversations and to suggest pathways joining the era of Roosevelt to the qualities and conundrums of postwar Democratic party liberalism. We underscored the key role of what might be called the long 1940s, stretching from the economic and political crisis faced by the New Deal in 1937–38 to the election in 1952 of the first Republican president since Hoover. We claimed that institutional and policy decisions taken across a number of domains in this period coherently recast the state and, in so doing, the contours and possibilities of American politics. We argued as well that old and new institutionalist approaches to state capacity have shared an unfortunate propensity to inventory organizational resources without regard to the normative and practical policy visions that define the content of what it is the state actually is meant to accomplish. In this light, simple dichotomous distinctions between weak and strong states appear as too blunt to sharply etch our understanding of the past half-century of American political development.

In what sense were the 1940s a turning point for the postwar development of the American state? This is an odd question since the decade is not usually considered a moment of lasting political transformation, as were the New Deal and the Great Society. Rather, it is more characteristically rendered as a period of political stalemate, memorably captured by Samuel Lubell's description of Harry Truman as “The Man Who Bought Time.” Yet the choices of the 1940s have been recently characterized by Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski as far more significant than hitherto understood. Out of the conflict and debate over the New Deal emerge, they argue, a rather “crisp choice … about the character of the national state,” one that decided between alternative models of state-economy relationships.

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were convinced that their meeting represented the last great chance to save the Union from dismemberment.See, for example, the following observations by George Washington, Elbridge Gerry, and Edmund Randolph, respectively:That something is necessary, none will deny; for the situation of the general government, if it can be called a government, is shaken to its foundation, and liable to be overturned by every blast. In a word, it is at an end; and, unless a remedy is soon applied, anarchy and confusion, will inevitably ensue. (Letter of George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, May 30, 1787, repr. in Max Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, rev. ed., 4 vols. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937] 3:31)The object of this Meeting is very important in my Mind unless a System of Government is adopted by Compact, Force I expect will plant the Standard: for such an anarchy as now exists cannot last long. (Letter of Elbridge Gerry to James Monroe, June 11, 1787, ibid., 45)Are we not on the eve of war, which is only prevented by the hopes from this convention. (Opening remarks of Edmund Randolph as recorded by James McHenry of Maryland, May 29, 1787, ibid., 1:26. By the same token, they recognized that the constitution they were to draft would determine the fate of the states composing the Union. In a letter to Edmund Randolph in advance of the Convention, James Madison highlighted the dichotomous nature of the task confronting the delegates intent on strengthening the national government without eliminating the states as political entities.

This article revisits Nelson Polsby's classic article “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives” fifty years after its publication, to examine whether the empirical trends that Polsby identified have continued. This empirical exploration allows us to place Polsby's findings in broader historical context and to assess whether the House has continued along the “institutionalization course”—using metrics that quantify the degree to which the House has erected impermeable boundaries with other institutions, created a complex institution, and adopted universalistic decision-making criteria. We empirically document that careerism plateaued right at the point Polsby wrote “Institutionalization,” and that the extension of the careerism trend has affected Democrats more than Republicans. The House remains complex, but lateral movement between the committee and party leadership systems began to reestablish itself a decade after “Institutionalization” was published. Finally, the seniority system as a mechanism for selecting committee chairs—the primary measure of universalistic decision-making criteria—has been almost thoroughly demolished. Thus, most of the trends Polsby identified have moderated, but have not been overturned. We conclude by considering the larger set of interpretive issues that our empirical investigation poses.

The continuing repression by jurists and scholars of the role of Dred Scott in our constitutional history has given that case a pervasive influence that is rarely, if ever, acknowledged. The following discussion will abstract from the moral embarrassment of Dred Scott in order to treat its jurisprudence as the missing link that connects the underlying framework of Marshallian constitutionalism with later struggles over the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Without such a link the Civil War is left as a constitutional silence, perhaps a second American Revolution, separating two discontinuous systems of government. That silence can be filled only by acknowledging the fundamental continuities between our present conceptions of constitutional equality and the system of government that could permit the existence of slavery.

Roughly twenty years after passage of Germany's—the world's first—national system of social insurance, Henry Axel Bueck, the chief executive of its most powerful capitalist organization, the Central Association of German Industrialists, remarked that the accident, health, and pension laws of the 1880s had failed to turn the working class away from the socialist labor movement. Bueck had correctly predicted that Kaiser Wilhelm I and chancellor Otto von Bismarck were in for disappointment in thinking that the laws could “conciliate the masses.” Nevertheless, Bueck supported the legislation then and through the following two decades. Looking back, he said,

[w]ith worker insurance the German Reich has accomplished, with incomparable boldness and most tenacious endurance, a work of civilization (Kulturarbeit) of the highest order, which will for all time . . . bring it renown. The edifice erected has proved worthy of its founders, the great Kaiser and his trusted advisor, the first imperial chancellor.

During the 2020 election, voting by mail greatly expanded due to concerns with COVID-19. While voting by mail is relatively easy for most individuals, who have United States Postal Service (USPS) residential mail service, it is much more difficult for those with nonstandard mail service. In this article, we examine how decisions made by the USPS in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have resulted in deeply entrenched structural inequities in the access to mail services on the Navajo Nation in Arizona when compared to rural nonreservation communities. Most (89 percent) of current Post Offices were established during the settler colonial period, during which sites were chosen primarily to advance military objectives and serve the interests of Anglo-American settlers. The resulting inequitable pattern of postal access remains, resulting in inferior mail service on the Navajo Nation and adversely impacting many aspects of life. Post Offices are fewer and farther from each other on reservation communities; there are fewer service hours; and we show in a mail experiment that letters posted on reservations are slower and less likely to arrive. This research fits within the growing body of American political development research on path-dependent processes and “spatial racism” within geography.

From today's vantage point, the radical potential originally envisioned for parcel post is hard to imagine. One historian facilely characterized postal savings banks (1910) and parcel post (1912) as small incremental advances in the evolution of state action: “From legislation designed to restrain harmful practices in big business, it was but a step for the government to embark in business on its own accord.” Yet parcel post marked a dramatic departure in public-sector initiatives: it put the federal government in the transportation business to compete with well-established private firms. That the United States started parcel post so late – it was the last major industrialized nation to do so – suggests the extent to which the service raised fundamental questions about the proper sphere of state action.

A growing body of scholarship explores processes of gradual but transformative institutional change, classifying patterns of change into several categories. I argue that policymakers themselves actively contest the appropriate institutional frames for understanding changes as they seek to guide institutional change, and show that judicial determinations of statutory meaning are sensitive to judgments about which institutional perspective is most compelling. A process-tracing examination of institutional changes in the Glass–Steagall Act over the law's whole life span, from 1933 to 1999, provides a concrete example of how the dynamics of contestation can play out. Those who conceived of Glass–Steagall as the institutional embodiment of the separation between commercial and investment banking argued that expansion of commercial bank powers represented institutional drift. Alternatively, those who came to see Glass–Steagall as just one set of statutory imperatives to be handled within the larger institutional context of American banking law, including banking regulators, interpreted regulatory changes as constructive acts of conversion adapting to novel economic challenges. I document the slow process through which courts came to accept the second framing while noting how the fixity of statutory text nevertheless continued to limit available adaptations.

I wish, first, to thank Michael Brown, Kenneth Finegold, and David Plotke for their thoughtful and provocative responses to my book. Historians and political scientists, even those who work on similar issues, exchange views far too seldom. This discussion, therefore, offers an opportunity to consider not only reactions to my book, but also some of the connections (and differences) between our two disciplines.