Labor, gender and, class have each been identified as important reconstructive forces of the American constitutional order, but rarely has a single organization provided an opportunity to directly study the interrelationship of all these forces during a critical period of constitutional change. This article examines one such organization during the years leading up to the New Deal: The Women's Trade Union League. The WTUL, which uniquely mixed middle-class and working-class membership, was founded in 1903 to facilitate trade union organizing by women. Its labor approach, however, would ultimately fail, pushing the league to more fully embrace its connections to the middle-class leadership of the women's movement, thereby transforming its strategic approach and constitutional outlook away from the anti-statist voluntarism of the labor movement to the pragmatic and statist maternalism of the women's movement. The WTUL would subsequently become an important contributor to the legislative program of progressive reformers flourishing during this period under the gendered exception to free contract liberty won in Muller v. Oregon in 1908. This strategic organizational transformation would create tensions within the league and between the league and women workers, as well as invite constitutional consequences for women workers that would resonate for years, long past the constitutional revolution of 1937 and the apparent constitutional reintegration of male and female labor. This case study, therefore, provides a unique lens through which to view not only the constitutional tradeoffs of the adoption of the gendered Constitution as an alternative to the labor Constitution, but also the impact of the resource-conscious decision making of social-movement actors that is often overlooked by constitutional scholars preoccupied with judicial decision making.

Institutional survival can be a concern for any organization, but for long-standing and well-established institutions such as major political parties survival is usually taken for granted. When a party suffers crushing defeat in a national election, alarmist journalists may attract attention with head-lines suggesting its imminent demise, but not since the Civil War has the viability of the Democrats and Republicans been seriously in question. Therefore, the conditions under which a major party maintains itself has not been a focus of scholarship regarding American political parties.

This article examines the origins and influence of ideological index scores—where liberal and conservative interest groups rate legislator performance on selected roll call votes. Two such groups founded in the mid-twentieth century—the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the Americans for Constitutional Action (ACA)—were crucial to the development of this type of metric, transforming roll call analysis from detailed tabular scorecards into streamlined percentage scores showing how often a lawmaker voted “right.” ADA and ACA scores have been heavily utilized in political science as proxies for liberalism and conservatism and used to demonstrate the growing polarization of the congressional parties. Archival evidence suggests, however, that those scores were intended to create the very phenomenon they have been used to measure. They were deeply political rather than objective metrics, which the ADA and ACA used to guide their electoral activities in accordance with an increasingly partisan strategic plan. Each group directed campaign resources toward incumbent lawmakers they rated highly, but they did so unevenly—with the ADA favoring liberal Democrats over Republicans and the ACA showing a preference for conservative Republicans over time. By rewarding favored lawmakers in their preferred party, and using scores to highlight and discourage ideological outliers, they hoped to reshape the parties along more distinct and divided ideological lines—to create more “responsible” parties, as prominent political scientists then desired.

Comparison of Canadian and American state security legislation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals striking similarities. This is somewhat surprising, given the political and constitutional gulf between the loyalist British provinces of Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec) and the revolutionary U.S. republic. Indeed, Murray Greenwood's study of treason laws and their administration in the United States, Lower Canada, and Great Britain during the period of the French Revolution highlights the contrasts between the liberal American approach and the repressive alarmism of Pitt's government which was taken even further by British colonial administrators in Lower Canada.F.M. Greenwood, “Judges and Treason Law in Lower Canada, England, and the United States during the French Revolution, 1794–1800,” in Canadian State Trials: Law, Politics and Security Measures, 1608–1837, ed. F.M. Greenwood and B. Wright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 241. Differences extended to other matters related traditionally to state security, such as the availability of habeas corpus and formal protections of judicial independence from executive and partisan influence.

Every ten years, the United States “constructs” itself politically. On a decennial basis, U.S. Congressional districts are quite literally drawn, physically constructing political representation in the House of Representatives on the basis of where one lives. Why does the United States do it this way? What justifies domicile as the sole criteria of constituency construction? These are the questions raised in this article.

Contrary to many contemporary understandings of representation at the founding, I argue that there were no principled reasons for using domicile as the method of organizing for political representation. Even in 1787, the Congressional district was expected to be far too large to map onto existing communities of interest. Instead, territory should be understood as forming a habit of mind for the founders, even while it was necessary to achieve other democratic aims of representative government.

In 2019, nearly 70 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries received their health insurance coverage through a private, managed care organization (MCO). Twenty-five years earlier, 9.5 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries were enrolled in MCOs. This dramatic growth in Medicaid managed care enrollment represents the delegation of significant power by federal and state governments over a critical social program to private actors and market forces. Medicare, too, experienced a similar pattern of transformation. Together, Medicaid and Medicare, two critical pillars of American social policy, paid more than half a trillion dollars to private insurance companies in 2019 to provide public health insurance to 75 million people. This manuscript examines the policy consequences of building private firms directly into the structure of American social policies. In contrast to existing work on “submerged” or “delegated” policies, this manuscript highlights the structural power that such policies bestow on the government's private partners and develops a new theory of structural power in which firms are able to constrain health policy reform through their threats to disrupt the delivery of public policies and social benefits to millions of people across the United States.

There is a standard historical lore of the Supreme Court's role in the economy and it runs as follows. The due process clause, like the rest of the Fourteenth Amendment, was enacted after the Civil War to help blacks. The Supreme Court proceeded to empty the amendment of its protections for minorities and then, from the turn of the century on, used the due process clause to protect business from government regulation. It did so (1) by interpreting the word person in the amendment to include the corporation and (2) by finding that the clause not only for-bade the government from interfering with private property unless it followed fair procedures, but also forbade the government to do so unless it had a good, substantive reason. Substantive due process meant that no statute regulating property was constitutional unless it was reasonable, and the Court was the final arbiter of reasonableness. The Court's approach to reasonableness was that free market laissez-faire was the rule, and government regulation the exception.

There is perhaps no political topic that has been given such relentlessly comparative treatment as the American labor movement. It is rare to read any comprehensive political or historical study of organized labor that is not cast, implicitly or explicitly, against the greater class consciousness of European counterparts. The explanations advanced for the uniqueness or the lack of vigor in the American strain—abundance of land, immigration, early suffrage, a revolutionary heritage of “republicanism”—constitute most of what exists in the way of theories about American labor politics.

The human services have come to occupy a vital position in the modern welfare state, penetrating nearly all its activities and institutions. Beyond providing a minimum level of support, these services seek to restructure the behavior of their clients so they can better cope with the demands and challenges of modern life. To realize this goal social personnel employ an approach that can most accurately be defined as therapeutic: the situation of the client is viewed as a condition that must be diagnosed; the caseworker establishes a helping relationship; a suitable treatment plan is designed and implemented. Although the middle class voluntarily avails itself of therapeutic services, public intervention by social personnel has a distinctly lower-class bias and an authoritarian character. The middle class purchases therapeutic services from private providers. The state focuses on marginal populations and its subjects usually have no choice about assuming a client status.

The literature on the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 is curiously at odds with our understanding of the politics of the Gilded Age. Labels like “the party period” and phrases such as “the triumph of organizational politics” and the “full flowering of the American party state” attest to the vibrant partisan life of the late 19th century. Stephen Skowronek offers one important reason for this state of affairs: The nature of electoral competition in these years further extended the hegemony of party concerns over governmental operations. More than ever before, the calculations of those in power were wedded to the imperatives of maintaining efficiency in state and local political machines and of forging a national coalition from these machines for presidential elections.

Taming the Prince has a claim on our attention not only for its theoretical qualities and for its politics but because at one time both would have been considered extreme. As a theory it is possibly the first attempt to compose a philosophical discourse about a singular political office, variously named kingship, prince, executive, or president, and to situate it within the con-text of (what used to be confidently called) “the history of political philosophy.” Mansfield's treatise is distinctive, not as a history of an idea or of a concept, indeed not historical in the usual understanding of that term, but as the passionate assertion of an expansive conception of the executive, virtually Gaullist in its grandeur, in its contempt for interest-politics, its dismissive silence about parties, and its scorn for democracy.

The 1970s saw a dramatic increase in the success rate of U.S. women's organizations pursuing congressional support of legislation designed to remove barriers to the progress of women in economic, political, and social arenas. While women's organizations, including both older organizations such as the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs (NFBPWC) and newer organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), had lobbied Congress before 1970, that year saw their first major lobbying success. House passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1970 was followed in 1972 by full congressional passage of the ERA and Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act (prohibiting sex discrimination in education), the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Women's Educational Equity Act in 1974, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the (unprecedented) congressional extension of the ratification period for the ERA in 1978, as well as a host of measures prohibiting sex discrimination in federal programs. The legislative success of women's organizations has continued, albeit with some fits and starts, into the 1980s and 1990s with pension equity reform, child support enforcement legislation, child care subsidies, and parental leave legislation as important examples. As documented by numerous scholars, in all these cases women's organizations provided the primary lobbying support for the successful legislation.

In his influential 1968 biography, Arthur Larson suggested that President Eisenhower's beliefs and commitments underwent a far-reaching transformation as his experience at managing the economy matured. The “modern Republican” of the 1952 campaign had, by 1958, abandoned the aspiration toward an enlightened but restrained liberalism, and set his course by the sort of inflexible conservative policies associated with the Republican Old Guard:

We are honored to have the opportunity to serve as the latest editors of Studies in American Political Development. We wish to thank and credit Anthony Chen and Eric Schickler for their outstanding service and contributions. First established by Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek in 1986 as a space for theoretical, methodological, and substantive commitments intrinsic in the study of American political development (APD), we look forward to maintaining the journal's esteemed reputation as a place for important questions and empirically rich and theoretically innovative answers.

Comparative studies of capitalist political economies have settled on a new understanding of how historical choices about electoral rules were constitutive of the current varieties of capitalism that are distinguished by their strategies of growth and adjustment to competitive conditions. The countries that have “coordinated market economies” typically have well-organized unions and employers with distinct partisan representation under multiparty electoral rules, and they have more egalitarian outcomes. The countries that have “liberal market economies” have arms-length market-based relationships under the plurality rule that are more conflictual, and they have inegalitarian outcomes. This article develops the analysis of electoral rules and industrial order by taking another look at the United States, which has always been taken as a case of plurality and liberal market economy. In contrast, New York had multiparty politics for most of the twentieth century, in part because of its cross-endorsement fusion rule of nominations. This article argues that fusion operated in a similar way to proportional representation to enable labor–management collaboration and social regulation. Collaboration in New York City was a constitutive element of the New Deal's laboristic politics. The later disruption of this American version of coordination transformed the U.S. political economy into a liberal market economy.

For students of American Political Development, the emergence of globalization and Americanization as themes of inquiry has spurred a growing interest in explaining America's rise as “a legal-economic and geopolitical hegemon.” An important episode in this rise came during the American occupation of Germany after World War II. In postwar Germany, America's military government realized that the American public remained unwilling to support (over the long term) the global projection of what Michael Mann has called “despotic power.” To achieve its fundamental goal of reorienting Germany toward a peaceful coexistence with the Unites States, military government turned instead to what Mann has called “infrastructural power” (power projected “through” society by state institutions). In pivoting from despotic to infrastructural power, three important consequences followed for the occupation. (1) Because it relied on the development of new infrastructures within a new German state, the occupation saw institutional “genesis” in which the Germans themselves influenced the pathway and timing of military government policy. (2) In creating new state institutions, military government performed “policy bricolage,” creatively reconstructing institutions “from” the ruins of war-torn Europe (as opposed to “on” its ruins). (3) Financial policy took a central place in military government's focus because it allowed for “increasing returns” in advancing military government's interests. Collectively, military government's experience provided lessons for an American state in the world.

This article provides an institutional and legal history of passport denial in the United States from World War I to the early Cold War. Identifying the Passport Division as a central institution of the national security state, the article shows that the state was deeply invested in regulating the international movement of people and in monopolizing international connections in a globalizing age. It also analyzes the rise of the Passport Division as an authoritative and autonomous bureaucracy to provide new insight into the institutional development of the national security state. It emphasizes particularly the ways that the executive branch, the Congress, and the Passport Division mutually constituted travel policy as a field of state action in a decades-long process stretching from World War I to the Cold War. It explores the centrality of the reputation of the Passport Division, as personified by its head, Ruth Shipley, in facilitating its rise as an authoritative institution in the field of travel policy. And by analyzing the ways that the Passport Division was able to survive civil libertarian challenges in the 1950s, it explores the surprising longevity of national security bureaucracies.

Republican support for the 1982 Voting Rights Act (VRA) extension is a puzzle for scholars of racial policy coalitions. The extension contained provisions that were manifestly antithetical to core principles of the “color-blind” policy alliance said to dominate the GOP. Recent scholarship has explained this puzzling decision by arguing that conservatives were confident that the VRA's most objectionable provisions could be undone by the federal bureaucracy and judiciary, while absolving Republicans of the blame of being against voting rights. This article suggests that the picture is more complicated. Applying the concept of “critical junctures” to the 1982 VRA extension, the article highlights the importance of actors’ contingent decisions and reveals a wider range of choices available to political entrepreneurs than has been conventionally understood. Highlighting differing views within the Reagan administration, this article also identifies a wider range of reasons why Republicans supported the act's extension, including career ambition, party-building, policy agenda advancement, and genuine commitment, rather than simply a defensive stance as implied by recent histories.

Interest in the politics of constitutional amendment has increased dramatically over the past decade. In particular, there have been a number of recent works addressing the causes and consequences of the Seventeenth Amendment. Daniel Wirls is to be commended for his contribution regarding regional differences in interest and attitudes toward the direct versus indirect election of senators.

In his introduction to the 1991 edition of Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, journalist Tom Wicker noted its relevance for understanding the ambivalent appeal of values that had led both to the downfall of communism and to the “demonization” of Saddam Hussein. Wicker also noted that Hartz's synoptic use of “liberal” as encompassing what is commonly referred to in American political discourse as “liberal” and “conservative” ideologies might “add to some Americans' confusion” about the already “confused and abused” use of the term. As we reach the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Hartz's book, it is important to reassess the work, especially in light of what might seem an obvious parallel between his concerns in the context of the Cold War and contemporary worries about the relationship between American foreign policy and domestic politics that has evolved since 2001. Whether the valence has been negative or positive, Hartz's image of a liberal consensus in the United States has created a picture that has held the academic mind captive and shaped its approach to both scholarship and political analysis.