On 7 December 1998, National Review published a short piece by Stephen Moore—one in a continuing stream of articles, reports, and books emerging from the network of conservative media outlets and think tanks. The article ostensibly addressed a then-raging public debate regarding what the Federal Reserve Board could do to keep America’s economy growing, but Moore quickly seized the opportunity to shift attention toward the actions available to Congress and the president. “If there is any single enduring economic lesson of the past twenty years,” Moore observed, “it is that loose monetary policy cannot offset the negative effects of a punitive tax and regulatory regime.” In Moore’s judgment, growing levels of taxation were quickly approaching the danger zone that historically had triggered recessions. A large tax cut “would not just stimulate the U.S. economy, but would serve as an antidote to the global economic crisis.” Those actions should be paired with relieving the domestic regulatory burden on business, for environmental, consumer, and workplace regulations have “a vise grip around the economy.”

U.S. Grant was stumped: “The muddle down there is almost beyond my fathoming,” the president told the New York Herald in the summer of 1871. What had him flummoxed was the recently adjourned “Gatling Gun Convention” in New Orleans, a Republican state nominating gathering that reads like a passage from a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The run-up was punctuated by open combat in the trenches and foxholes of countless ward clubs and party conventions—the so-called “War of the Factions.” When the sitting Republican governor, the colorful and roguish Henry Clay Warmoth, hobbled by a boating accident earlier in the summer, led delegates supporting his candidacy to the designated meeting place inside the U.S. Customhouse on Canal Street, federal soldiers manning the latest in automatic weaponry turned him and his followers away when they tried to barge into a rival group's caucus. Warmoth thereupon guided his followers to another meeting hall. For the next 18 months, warring Republican factions moved in and out of opportunistic alliances with Conservative-Democrats. They divided into rival legislatures, used force to achieve quorums, and arrested and impeached their own senior leaders. If some of the more scurrilous allegations are to be believed, they even poisoned their lieutenant-governor. Were Louisiana politics on the verge of becoming “Mexicanized”—plunged into chronic crisis and political tumult? That was the question beginning to trouble Republican observers north of the Ohio River.

A nation-state defending against threats may, in the process, alter itself: some threats cannot be handled by existing political and institutional arrangements. Of course, the dynamic response undertaken to answer external, state-issued threats has been widely noted. Many students of government—if not history—understand wars between nations to be a great catalyst for state development. Interestingly, even non-state and vastly weaker threats can elicit transformative responses.

There are few scholars who would disagree with the proposition that individual economic position and economic risk play a critical role in shaping preferences for income redistribution and social insurance. There is less consensus, however, about the extent to which non-economic factors also influence individual preferences regarding social insurance provision. A number of scholars have examined how issues of race and identity have influenced the development of social insurance programs in the United States, as well as individual attitudes with respect to these programs. In a theoretical context, other authors have considered how attitudes toward income redistribution might also depend upon psychological dispositions such as the “belief in a just world.” In this article, we focus on religiosity as an important factor that can shape both individual preferences and policy outcomes regarding social insurance in the United States. To do so, we develop an argument about religion and social insurance as substitutes that draws both on existing work on the political economy of social insurance and on findings in social psychology regarding what we call the “coping effect” of religion. We test our hypothesis using historical evidence from two early social insurance policies: workers’ compensation legislation enacted by state governments between 1910 and 1930 and New Deal unemployment relief.

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.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) led the corporate attack on labor organization and government regulation in the early twentieth century. Yet NAM's deep distrust of coordination, in fact, developed years into its organizational life: at its inception, NAM organizers sought mechanisms to coordinate economic and political business activity, and held policy positions that resembled those favored by contemporaneous European manufacturers. Thus, the organization's dramatic shift in policy preferences almost a decade later was something of a sea change: suddenly NAM became committed to laissez-faire liberalism—the antithesis of coordination—and became best-known for its commitment to fighting organized labor.

Following its 1992 reorganization, the once scandal-ridden and sclerotic Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) experienced a dramatic turnaround. The agency morphed from a caricature of the ills of bureaucracy into a model of effective federal administration. Politicians who previously blamed the agency for its slow and inefficient response to disasters came to depend on the agency to lend credibility to their own efforts. After the agency’s reorganization, politicians at all levels of government purposefully appeared beside FEMA workers. As recently as 2002, FEMA’s reputation was so strong that the designers of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) included FEMA in it to lend prestige to the nascent department. Unlike other agencies so included, FEMA was allowed to keep its name, confirming the cachet of its brand.

From 1788 to 1913, the basic model for the election of U.S. senators was based on state legislatures serving as intermediaries between the people and their senators. The Framers' intent in constructing indirect elections to the U.S. Senate was to help insulate senators from sudden and drastic shifts of public opinion that could lead to senators enacting detrimental national policies (Federalist 63). Underlying this “insulation” was the supposition that indirect elections, combined with a six-year term, would create a different electoral environment for senators than for their counterparts in the House, and would thus produce a legislator who would not be directly responsive to individual constituents.

After more than a decade of membership stability, the U.S. Supreme Court experienced a pair of vacancies following its 2004–2005 term. In July 2005, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her intention to retire. It is widely believed that her own health, that of her husband, and the favorable political environment influenced her decision to step down in January 2006. In the interim, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, after struggling with ill health for many months, passed away on 3 September 2005, becoming the first sitting justice to die in more than five decades.

On 3 October 1986, the 99th Congress—acting at the behest of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—voted to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA). The passage of this bill, which placed strict economic sanctions on the white supremacist regime in South Africa, was a watershed moment in American politics for two reasons. First, veto overrides in the foreign policy-making arena are an exceedingly rare form of legislative action. More importantly, this was the first time in American history that the members of a minority group were able to use their positions within the Congress to translate a parochial desire into foreign policy against the will of a sitting president.