The policy feedback literature developed in an era in which the level of polarization and the intensity of party competition were far lower than today. These background conditions narrowed the scope of many policy debates and facilitated the consolidation of programmatic expansions after their enactment. As a result, the feedback literature emphasized the ways that new policies build supportive constituencies and become entrenched. While the core insight that policies can generate major political repercussions remains solid, American political development (APD) scholars should pay greater attention to the role of negative feedback processes and backlash politics in an era of disunity. Based on a review of New York Times articles mentioning policy backlash between 1960 and 2019, I show that the 2010s was a period of heightened countermobilization. Backlash forces have diffused from civil rights into many other arenas—including health, trade, and immigration—due to partisan polarization, conflicts over cultural shifts, and the negative feedback from activist government itself.

Was the American Federation of Labor's (AFL) embrace of “voluntarism” a decisive turning point in American labor and political history? Voluntarism was the belief that trade unions should focus on “pure and simple” gains in wages and working conditions, rather than independent labor politics and industrial unionism. This belief dominated AFL strategy by 1900, and the results seem self-evident. By rejecting public health insurance, unemployment insurance, and inclusive labor regulations, the Progressive era AFL helped delay the emergence of American social welfare protections and contributed to their limited reach. By rejecting an alliance with a social democratic political party and by unionizing on the basis of broad industries rather than narrow crafts, the AFL circumscribed the scope and ambition of American labor organization. Today American trade unions provide far less inclusive representation of the workforce than is true in comparable nations,Franz Traxler, “Collective Bargaining and Industrial Change: A Case of Disorganization? A Comparative Analysis of Eighteen OECD Countries,” European Sociological Review 12 (1996):271–87; Bruce Western, Between Class and Market: Postwar Unionism in the Capitalist Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). and labor is not allied with an explicitly social democratic party as is true in virtually all other capitalist democracies.Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (1951; London: Methuen, Ltd., 1964, 20–22; Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Paty Systems: A Framework for Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 1:192; Frances Fox Piven, ed., Labor Parties in Postindustrial Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 77–109.

Broad developments in the political economy, coupled with the effects of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA) and its amendments, have weakened organized labor's position in campaign politics. The number of business-related political action committees (PACs) exploded at the end of 1975, and quickly dwarfed the number of labor PACs. More significant are trends in spending. In 1977–1978 business-related PACs outcontributed labor committees by approximately $5.6 million, and in 1979–1980 the gap grew to $17 million. In 1993–1994 business PACs outcontributed unions by $60 million, and in 1995–1996 the figure was around $68 million.The FEC's scheme for classifying PACs makes it difficult to account for all business spending. The figures presented here are based on the conservative approach taken by Edwin Epstein, who counted all corporate spending and half of the spending by PACs classified by the FEC as Trade/Membership/Health and Cooperatives as business-related. Edwin M. Epstein, “Labor's Eroding Position in American Electoral Politics,” in Charles Bulmer and John L. Carmichael, eds., Employment and Labor Relations Policy (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1980), 151–78; Epstein, “Business and Labor Under the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971,” in Michael Malbin, ed., Parties, Interest Groups, and Campaign Finance Laws (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1980), 107–51. This approach is superior to the FEC's classification, but almost certainly understates business-related PAC spending. Makinson and Goldstein's method probably exaggerates business spending, but they found over $40 million more in business PAC contributions to candidates in 1991–1992 than I found using the Epstein approach. Larry Makinson and Joshua Goldstein, Open Secrets: The Encyclopedia of Congressional Money and Politics, 3d ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1994), 22. These figures are impressive, but they probably underestimate the full dimensions of the gap between business and labor PAC spending. The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) uses a more inclusive definition of “business PACs” than the Federal Election Commission (FEC), and found that business committees outspent union PACs by $36 million in 1987–88, and nearly $100 million in 1995–1996.Larry Makinson, Open Secrets: The Dollar Power of PACs in Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1990), 19; Larry Makinson, Open Secrets: The Encyclopedia of Congressional Money and Politics, 2d ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1992), 21; Makinson and Goldstein, Open Secrets, 3d ed., 21; Center for Responsive Politics, “Business-Labor-Ideology Split in Donations from PACs,” http://www.crp.org/pubs/bigpicture/blio/bpbliopac.html. There is some dispute about the full magnitude of the differences between business and labor PAC contributions, but it is clear that there is a large and growing gap between direct contributions to candidates from business and from labor.

Proceeding inductively, starting with three standard examples of major constitutional change, this short essay offers a theory of the Constitution, derived from its historical imposition on the criminal law. The theory proposes to unite constitutional provision, structure, and operations within a single framework over time.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. federal government expanded the scope and extent of its constitutionally enumerated powers in naturalization, Indian policies, and regulation of interstate commerce. In doing so, Congress became more involved with matters of citizenship, both in defining public purposes and national identity. Citizenship had traditionally been a matter for the states, where governance rested on the features of differentiation, jurisdictional autonomy, and local control. The entry of the federal government and the federal constitutional norms of citizenship might have been expected to bring an overarching coherence to the fundamental liberal values that were declared after the Civil War. Under expanded federal power and federal citizenship, however, multiple traditions of both liberal rights of citizenship and illiberal conditions of status continued, and illiberal positions gained new footing.

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.

This article analyzes the emergence of national public health capacity in the United States. Tracing the transformation of the federal government's role in public health from the 1910s through the emergence of the CDC during World War II, I argue that national public health capacity emerged, to a great extent, out of the attempts of government officials to deal with the problem of tropical disease within the southern United States during periods of mobilization for war.

Two lessons from the 2000 presidential election stand out in particular. The first is that rules affect results. Elections are highly organized mechanisms of citizen participation. Established rules specify who can vote, where and when they can vote, what ballot form registers their vote, and what outcome constitutes winning. Rules, moreover, determine which officials count the votes, certify the victor, and declare the election to be legitimate. The rules governing election contests are not neutral in their effects. Each variant generally tends to advantage some given set of claimants and interests; therefore, the choice among election rules is often controversial, especially when the outcome hangs in the balance. The second, related lesson is that votes intended do not necessarily equal votes cast, that votes cast do not necessarily equal votes recorded, and that votes recorded do not necessarily equal the official vote total. In each case, there is the matter of translation, part of which is technical and depends on the ballot apparatus and part of which is political and depends on the discretionary decisions of those responsible for managing the electoral process. Problems of translation do not ordinarily affect who wins, but they can – and have during certain controversial episodes of U.S. electoral history.

Despite growing awareness of the American state's active role in the early nineteenth century, scholars have tended to ignore the early republic's public health apparatus. The few studies that do chronicle antebellum health initiatives confine themselves to programs intended to directly reward citizens—and particularly those who contributed politically or economically to the nation's founding and expansion. As this detailed study of the Indian Vaccination Act of 1832 makes clear, however, antebellum policymakers saw value in providing medical care to those outside their settler citizenry. Blending liberal, republican, and ascriptive ideas, the vaccination program joined two competing political logics: one emphasizing the humanity of indigenous people and the importance of providing for their welfare, and the other prioritizing the state's interest in an efficient “removal” process. Evidencing far more autonomy and administrative capacity than the average nineteenth-century bureaucracy, the War Department played a pivotal role in petitioning Congress for, and ultimately administering, the vaccination program. Unwilling to cede regulatory power over indigenous health to more proximate local governments or private parties, the War Department preferred its own military manpower—a decision that would profoundly shape the design and reception of subsequent Native health programs.

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.

How did Democrats running for federal office win in Georgia in 2020–21, but not in North Carolina, a state long regarded as more “flippable”? This article uses newly assembled organizational data to situate recent Democratic fortunes in the context of two long-running statewide campaigns for racial and economic justice—led by North Carolina's Reverend William Barber II and Georgia's Stacey Abrams. We track shifting political opportunity structures and the organizational and strategic evolution of both movements during the 2010s, with a special focus on outreach beyond major metropolitan areas. Our findings suggest that social justice campaigns aiming to increase government responsiveness to poor minority citizens do better if they engage in persistent, locally embedded voter outreach along partisan lines rather than heavily relying on morally framed, media-friendly protests. This research also demonstrates how data on organizational networks can be assembled and used to explore historical-institutional hypotheses about the development and impact of social movements.

We argue that American political development's (APD's) relentless preoccupation with the substantive problems that shape and animate American politics and how they emerge and develop over time has been a key source of the subfield's durability. We elaborate on three main payoffs to conceptualizing APD as a problem-driven enterprise: (1) it highlights APD's main comparative advantage within the American politics subfield, noting the tremendous agility APD's substantive breadth lends the enterprise; (2) it resolves the methodological debate, granting simply that the question chooses the method rather than the other way around; and (3) it reorients the critique: simply because a subfield considers itself to be problem-oriented does not mean that it is identifying the right problems to study.

Robert Dahl's “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker” has long enjoyed pride of place within American politics scholarship, especially among regime theorists. However, Dahl's views of the U.S. Supreme Court are no longer defensible. It is essential for our field to move beyond “Decision-Making in a Democracy” in order to better theorize and explain the modern Supreme Court.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.