This article examines how Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter’s Armed Career Criminal Act attempted to respond to the 1980s crisis of state prison overcrowding while also maintaining a political commitment to get tough on crime. Although commonly thought of as a straightforward punitive sentencing bill, this article shows that the Armed Career Criminal Act was also a desperate attempt to navigate a national crisis of state prison overcrowding in the 1980s that threatened to undercut racialized “get tough” politics and the burgeoning carceral state. In doing so, this article reshapes scholarship on the history of the United States carceral state by demonstrating that the United States’ decentralized political structure and federal government hostility toward funding state correctional expansion created significant gaps between a national discourse of law and order and actual anticrime policy making in the Reagan era, suggesting a far more contested development of the United States prison nation.

Borrowed capacity builds upon institutional capacity scholarship to discuss how interactions between government agencies and interest groups can increase agency resources and scope during agency formation and development. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission scholars often note the lack of capacity to implement Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 during the first years of the agency. I argue that current assessments of the agency’s capacity between 1965 and 1968 are incomplete by expanding the definition of capacity to include borrowed and nontraditional forms of capacity, reviewing congressional allocations to the agency and agency budgets, and considering the active roles state and local agencies as well as interest groups played in the early implementation of Title VII. I demonstrate the agency amassed not only claims but also capacity during its early years.

On August 10, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, one of the largest fiscal deficit-reduction packages in US fiscal history. This law raised the top individual income tax rate from 31% to 39.6%, which increased the average effective tax rate for high-income earners and shifted the federal fiscal balance from deficit to surplus by the end of the century. Given major business interest groups’ criticism of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993’s heavy reliance on tax increases over spending cuts, how was the Democrat-controlled Congress able to pass this legislation? Drawing on archival evidence from the Clinton Presidential Library, this paper shows that the administration and Democratic committee chairs mobilized support from corporate CEOs, including Fortune 500 executives, asking them to lobby key legislators to support the bill. Thus, with business leaders’ support and lobbying efforts, the legislation was passed with a very slight majority.

This article analyzes the attitudes of Dutch employers toward social policy in the early twentieth century. Recent literature has evolved from an emphasis on power to an emphasis on preferences. Moving away from the traditional view that unions and social democrats forced social laws on employers, recent scholars suggest that firms saw specific advantages in the introduction of social laws. However, I show that the attitudes of Dutch business representatives, rather than seeking these specific advantages, merely reflected a willingness to consult, inspired by their macroeconomic view. Employers expressed the wish to attain an organized form of capitalism and accepted regulated forms of codetermination. Once the consultative platforms were in place, employers pursued strategic goals, such as labor peace and disciplining the unions. This paved the way for accepting welfare state expansion. In sum, mid-twentieth century business interests were strongly oriented toward coordinated capitalism.

In order to establish a new national budget system during the Progressive Era, Congress had to overcome an earlier convention in which it used detailed appropriations in an attempt to control the budgetary actions of federal agencies and the president served no formal role. Incremental changes to strengthen congressional budgetary controls proved inadequate but provided reformers with an opportunity to supplant the existing orthodoxy, resulting in the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. Although most studies have focused on the Act in terms of its effects on presidential power and presidential/congressional relations, this study focuses on congressional actions and debates to show how reform was rooted in long-standing congressional concerns about the need to control agency budgetary actions and was understood at the time as a culmination of those efforts, not simply as a case of Congress enhancing presidential power at its own expense.