The last two Republican presidents’ hostility to multilateralism has produced striking departures from postwar American foreign policy, but this position is not as new as it sometimes appears. It has deep historical roots in the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Using data on congressional voting and bill sponsorship, we show that Republicans, especially those from the party's conservative wing, have tended to oppose multilateral rules for more than a century. This position fit logically into the broader foreign policy that Republican presidents developed before World War I but posed problems in light of the changing conditions during the mid-twentieth century. The importance of multilateral cooperation for U.S. national security during the Cold War and the growing international competitiveness of American manufacturing split the party on multilateral rules, but it did not reverse the conservative wing's longstanding skepticism of them. Congressional leaders’ efforts to keep consequential choices about multilateral rules off the legislative agenda for most of the postwar era contributed to the persistence of this position. This move spared conservative members of Congress from confronting the costs of opposing multilateral institutions, giving them little incentive to challenge ideological orthodoxy.

In the 1980s, many scholars of both comparative and American politics argued that states often act autonomously from social demands. Rejecting reductionist assumptions regarding the primacy of social groups for public policy, both groups of scholars examine how government actors and preexisting institutional constraints influenced policy implementation. Since then, however, while the state has been retained as the primary unit of analysis for most studies of American political development, interest in the autonomy of the state has dwindled, and scholars have increasingly focused on how social groups and electoral outcomes explain state formation and public policy, especially in the nineteenth century. In some instances, scholars have even denied that state autonomy is a relevant concept for the study of American political development.

In keeping with the social character of the advancement of knowledge, and in spite of a strong competitive impulse among scholars to magnify small differences into warring schools of thought, the leading historical writings in the past four decades have yielded substantial agreement on the identification of critical trends that were transforming United States society in the period of the 1890s to 1916. Implicitly, at least, they may well have been anticipating the way to resolving some latest of these small differences before they get too far out of hand, such as that between “social history” and “political history” and, in a variation upon the theme, that between “society-centered” (or “movement-centered” or “interest-centered”) and “state-centered” history. The common acknowledgment of critical trends has served newcomers and veterans alike, including partisans on either side of these differences, and historians in the various genres, in the selection of authoritative frameworks of continuing research into the period. In this respect, the historical discipline shares with other disciplines, including those in the physical sciences, attributes held to be common to a “normal science.”

Between 1850 and 1868, the United States struggled through a long and bloody Civil War, attempted to reconfigure southern class and economic relations, settled much of the western prairie, and began the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. During these two decades, Americans went to the polls, whether located in hamlets swarming with Union soldiers, rural churches set in the midst of the southern cotton belt, wooden cabins so isolated that even the nearest neighbors had difficulty finding them, or saloons in the most densely populated sections of great cities. Their votes have come down to us as election returns reporting tens of millions of officially sanctioned exercises in democratic participation. Neatly collated and arrayed in columns by office, candidate, and party, these returns are routinely interpreted as more or less accurate reflections of the popular preferences of the individuals within the communities in which they were made out. Seen this way, the returns themselves appear to constitute unambiguous and overwhelming evidence of the existence of a robust popular democratic system and ethos during the mid-nineteenth century. The purpose of this article is to suggest some important caveats that must attend this conclusion.

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.

In 1978, organized labor formally abandoned its longstanding commitment to public-sector solutions to achieve universal health care. Over the following fifteen years, it embraced private-sector solutions premised on a government mandate that would require employers to pay a portion of their employees health insurance premiums. In many respects, this about-face on the part of organized labor is neither remarkable nor puzzling. After all, labor's prior commitment to national health insurance1. The term national health insurance has many meanings. As used here, it refers to health-care reform proposals modeled on the Canadian experience in which the government replaces private insurance with its own public insurance system, thus eliminating the commercial health insurers. Commonly referred to as “single-payer” plans today, proposals for national health insurance can vary enormously on important details like financing, budgeting, taxation, and the role of individual states. had coexisted with its deep and abiding attachment to the private welfare state of job-based benefits dating back to the 1940s.2. Donna Allen, Fringe Benefits: Wages or Social Obligation? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964); Joseph W. Garbarino, Health Plans and Collective Bargaining (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Raymond Munts, Bargaining for Health: Labor Unions, Health Insurance, and Medical Care (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967); Beth Stevens, “Labor Unions, Employee Benefits, and the Privatization of the American Welfare State,” Journal of Policy History 2 (1990): 233–60; and David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, “Hospitals, Insurance, and the American Labor Movement: The Case of New York in the Postwar Decades,” Journal of Policy History 9 (1997): 74–95. American labor unionists have tended to be strident pragmatists compared to their European counterparts, who have been more consistently animated by a larger social democratic vision. Furthermore, American unions have a long history of deferring to the Democratic party.3. Indeed, some analysts characterize labor's relationship with the Democratic party as a “barren marriage” or “abusive relationship.” Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), 52; and Joel Rogers, “The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: Labor and Independent Politics,” in Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social Reconstruction of America, ed. Steven Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman (Boston: Mariner, 1997), 255. Arguably, labor's support for national health insurance had been primarily rhetorical since the early 1950s, when the industrial unions began to rely on collective bargaining to achieve health-care security for their members. Once President Jimmy Carter and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) retreated from national health insurance in the face of the new anti-government, dereg- ulatory, deficit-conscious environment that emerged in the mid-to-late 1970s, one may conclude that labor “naturally” abandoned ship as well.

An enduring contribution of the new institutionalism is its affirmation of the significance of the Progressive era. As a result, we have learned not only how the “big bang” explosion of welfare legislation in the New Deal rests upon structures and precedents set in the early twentieth-century decades, but also how this early reform period continues to influence contemporary policies and politics. Alan Dawley, Bruce Ackerman, and Morton Keller, for example, point to an activist state established in the Progressive era to check a laissez-faire governing system as the foundation of subsequent New Deal accomplishments upon which reformers built “where progressives had left off.” Theda Skocpol adds a cross-national perspective, showing how the American welfare state instituted in the early twentieth century evidenced a distinctive “maternalist” dynamic oriented toward addressing women's economic needs, in contrast to “paternalistic” norms in Western European nations assisting male workers.

This article investigates an important yet poorly understood aspect of the origins of the U.S. carceral state. Many explanations attribute the rise of mass incarceration to the conservative tide in American politics beginning in the late 1960s: “tough on crime” policies advanced by southern Democrats and Republicans, white backlash against black civil rights, and the law-and-order politics of Nixon's “Southern Strategy.” But in focusing on conservatives, prevailing theories have ignored how the changing economic and political landscape of the post-WWII South shaped how policymakers thought about crime. This article examines how key elements of the carceral state emerged in the rapidly growing, metropolitan, and business-minded Sunbelt South between 1954 and 1970, using North Carolina as a test case. Drawing on a variety of archival sources, it unearths how moderate southern politicians with material links to extra-regional sources of capital, political links to northern liberal elites, and ideological links to postwar liberalism pioneered state-level carceral policy. It argues that the swift development of crime policy in midcentury North Carolina was the product of how the state's moderate elites chose to govern the emerging Sunbelt economy in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement. The problems of rampant civil disorder, racial extremism, and lawlessness, they argued, threatened the economic progress of North Carolina and required the implementation of strong yet race-neutral crime policy. This study offers an analysis of how the Sunbelt South, in shedding Jim Crow and entering the national political and economic mainstream, came to help spearhead the carceral turn in American politics.

The belief that local public discussion would strengthen national democracy has had a long history in the United States. The New England town meeting cast a long shadow over modern American democracy. In the twentieth century, democratic reformers have repeatedly struggled to invent or reinvent the social forms that would help revive public conversation, often with little knowledge of the tradition in which they worked. In seeking a “talking cure” for their democracy, these reformers have sought to affirm that democracy is not just the sum of private acts of deciding and voting, that the ability of citizens to talk civilly in public would be a crucial sign of its vitality.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Republican Party dominated American elections in all geographical areas except the former Confederacy, which remained solidly Democratic. Despite this, Southern states were consistently provided with a sizable delegation to the Republican National Convention (as much as 26 percent of the total). This raises the question: Why would a region that delivered no votes on Election Day be given a substantial say in the selection of the party's presidential candidate? Previous research on the role Southern delegates played in Republican conventions has been limited to individual cases or to studies only tangentially related to this question. We explore the continuous and sizable presence of Southern delegates at Republican conventions by conducting a historical overview of the 1880–1928 period. We find that Republican Party leaders—and particularly presidents—adopted a “Southern strategy” by investing heavily in maintaining a minor party organization in the South, as a way to create a reliable voting base at conventions. We also show that as the Republican Party's strength across the country grew under the “System of 1896,” challenges to the delegate apportionment method—and thereby efforts to minimize Southern influence at Republican conventions—increased substantially.

On 30 May 1914, Theodore Roosevelt fired the opening shots of the midterm elections against the party of Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt framed the off-year elections as a referendum on the failures of the New Freedom, the Democrats' three-pronged program to curb the power of the trusts. Rather than bringing monopolies to heal, the former president asserted, Democratic policy had simply driven the economy into recession. “[T]he Democratic party,” Roosevelt explained on another occasion “has been engaged in what is fundamentally an effort to restore the unlimited competition of two generations back and to subject this to only an ineffective and weak government control”. To all, Roosevelt's counsel was constant: the prudent course of citizens that fall was to register a vote for social and industrial progress, to support the Progressive party candidate for Congress.

It is evident now that the political structures built in the United States over the last half-century depended for their successful functioning on a set of international conditions that no longer exist. The government programs of the 1930s to protect labor organization, promote high agricultural prices, and provide cheap credit would have caused, had the gold standard not been defunct, massive gold outflows, worsening the already severe economic contraction. The postwar offspring of these programs have multiplied under conditions of international trade and finance that in effect permitted the export of excess economic demand. For the last decade, with international circumstances less obliging, the task of whittling government down or at least controlling its growth has vexed successive administrations.

One of the most difficult problems facing economic policymakers during the antebellum period was the threat of instability in the banking sector. Banks constituted not only critical sources of credit for both firms and individuals, but also the primary suppliers of money within the economy. Particularly because bank instability tended to be contagious, it was viewed as an especially vicious problem, and one that required a government solution. The challenge was to craft a policy that would be sufficiently stringent to assure a safe banking system and a secure money supply without being so stringent as to suffocate the economy, depriving it of vital credit and liquidity. Even today, this remains a formidable challenge in many developing countries.

After a protracted national discussion about racial mixture in the early 1990s, the Office of Management and Budget made the unprecedented decision in 1997 to allow Americans to “mark one or more” racial categories on the 2000 census. A small “multiracial movement” provoked this fundamental change in the way the government collects racial data. This case study shows that even very small and modest social movements can have profound effects on public policy through their unintended consequences. In winning a redefinition of how the U.S. government defines and counts by race, the multiracial movement of the 1990s set in motion a process that has both amplified and been amplified by broader structural and cultural changes in how Americans perceive race. The modest impact of a small social movement can ultimately produce very big consequences.

Steady political polarization since the late 1970s ranks among the most consequential transformations of American politics—one with far-reaching consequences for governance, congressional performance, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and citizen perceptions of the stakes of party conflict and elections. Our understanding of this polarization critically depends on measuring it. Its measurement in turn began with the invention of the NOMINATE algorithm and the widespread adoption of its estimates of the ideal points of members of Congress. Although the NOMINATE project has not been immune from technical and conceptual critique, its impact on how we think about contemporary politics and its discontents has been extraordinary and has helped to stimulate the creation of several similar scores. In order to deepen appreciation of this broadly important intellectual phenomenon, we offer an intuitively accessible treatment of the mathematics and conceptual assumptions of NOMINATE. We also stress that NOMINATE scores are a major resource for understanding other eras in American political development (APD) besides the current great polarization. To illustrate this point, we introduce readers to Voteview, which provides two-dimensional snapshots of congressional roll calls, among other data that it generates. We conclude by sketching how APD scholarship might contribute to the contemporary polarization discussion. Placing polarization and depolarization in historical perspective may powerfully illuminate whether, how, and why our current polarization might recede.

Struggles, both political and intellectual, over electoral structures – the legal arrangements, to borrow from Harold Lasswell, of who gets to vote for what, when, and how – are probably as old as democracy. Suffrage, its expansion and contraction, is no doubt the most prominent historical feature in the politics and study of electoral structures. But the “how” and “for what” of voting have also played crucial, though perhaps less understood, roles in the politics of democratization. However important the right of suffrage, political power is also allocated by both the “space,” for lack of a better word, that a vote occupies and affects (for example, districts or at-large) and the object of the vote (for example, representation or a referendum). Electoral structures are the quintessential “mobilization of bias.”E.E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: a Realist's View of Democracy in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960). See also, Benjamin Ginsberg, The Consequences of Consent: Elections, Citizen Control, and Popular Acquiescence (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1982). And they remain, in this era of universal suffrage, an ongoing object of contention even in stable regimes such as the United States.Indeed, few issues have such a consistent legal and political presence at all levels of American government. Most recently, the controversy over majority-minority districts has produced a significant political struggle involving state governments, Congress, the executive branch, and the courts, as well as a rapidly expanding scholarly debate over the rights and wrongs, and causes and effects of forms of minority representation: Abigail M. Thernstrom, Whose Votes Count?: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority (New York: Free Press, 1994); Carol M. Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); David Lublin, The Paradox of Representation: Racial Gerrymandering and Minority Interests in Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Perhaps no single aspect of the American polity has been more analyzed, discussed, cited for evidence in grand theories of American political development, and yet less understood than the role of the urban voter in the regime formation and policy innovation of the Progressive era (circa 1890–1920). One century of prolific urban political analysis has produced an abundance of evidence, theory, and keen insight, yet we still have nothing like a systematic survey of urban voting behavior using reliable multivariate methods in more than a few elections or comparatively across several cities simultaneously. As a consequence, we have built for the urban voter a city of theoretical models without an adequate empirical infrastructure.

How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as primarily a question of state-building; that is, violence experts use their skills in an attempt to regulate economic transactions or to extract and redistribute resources via protection rents either for themselves or at the behest of political elites. In an alternative view, this article demonstrates that historical gunfighters active in the late 19th-century American Southwest were actually market actors—the possessors of valuable skills cultivated through participation in the Civil War and diffused through gunfighting and reputation building in key market entrepôts. Neither solely state-builders nor state-resisters, as they have traditionally been interpreted, gunfighters composed a professional class that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s and who moved frequently between wage-paying jobs, seizing economic opportunities on both sides of the law and often serving at the behest of powerful economic, rather than political, actors. I establish this claim by examining a dataset of over 250 individuals active in the “gunfighting system” of the post-bellum West, demonstrating that the social connections forged through fighting, and diffused through social networks, helped generate a form of organized violence that helped bring “law and order” to the frontier but as a byproduct of market formation rather than as state-building.

The U.S. Army's recent embrace of counterinsurgency warfare and nation building complicates theories of military politics. For decades, critics declared the army too risk averse, too parochial, and too insulated to change, often thwarting civilian demands for greater flexibility. How should we understand these recent, unexpected changes? In this article I synthesize insights from historical institutionalism and American political development to derive a micropolitical perspective on institutional change. This approach advances two components as necessary before an institution transforms. First, mid-level agents shift the unofficial discourses through which they understand and describe the institution's core missions and capabilities. These slow and often subtle changes create a mismatch between the mid-level actors and the institution's paradigm. This erosion of institutional order provides an opportunity to reformers. The second component of transformation is the work of these reformers to forge coalitions with elites inside and outside government and press institutional leaders for change. In the rest of the article, I demonstrate the efficacy of the micropolitical approach by investigating how the army developed its AirLand Battle doctrine after the Vietnam War. My analysis of recently declassified correspondence, oral-history interviews, and the writings of officers and experts shows how mid-level officers and external reformers were able to shift the discourses of army leaders and develop an institutional paradigm that endured for decades. Indeed, AirLand Battle influenced the Weinberger criteria for deploying American troops, and it shaped U.S. conduct during the Persian Gulf War of 1991. This suggests a research program that could demonstrate why and how the U.S. Army's way of war changed during the 2000s, as well as how durable this transformation will be.

Between 1890 and 1914, the United States acquired overseas colonies, built a battleship fleet, and intervened increasingly often in Latin America and East Asia. This activism is often seen as the precursor to the country's role as a superpower after 1945 but actually served very different goals. In contrast to its pursuit of a relatively liberal international economic order after 1945, the United States remained committed to trade protection before 1914. Protectionism had several important consequences for American foreign policy on both economic and security issues. It led to a focus on less developed areas of the world that would not export manufactured goods to the United States instead of on wealthier European markets. It limited the tactics available for promoting American exports, forcing policymakers to seek exclusive bilateral agreements or unilateral concessions from trading partners instead of multilateral arrangements. It inhibited political cooperation with other major powers and implied an aggressive posture toward these states. The differences between this foreign policy and the one the United States adopted after 1945 underscore the critical importance not just of the search for overseas markets but also of efforts to protect the domestic market.