Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati
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Prisoners of Myth
The Leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933-1990
by Erwin C. Hargrove
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
“Prisoners of Myth” is the first comprehensive history of the Tennessee Valley Authority from its creation to the present day. It is also a telling case study of organizational evolution and decline. Building on Philip Selznick's classic work “TVA and the Grass Roots” (1949), a seminal text in the theoretical study of bureaucracy, Erwin Hargrove analyzes the organizational culture of the TVA by looking at the actions of its leaders over six decades-from the heroic years of the New Deal and World War II through the postwar period of consolidation and growth to the time of troubles from 1970 onward, when the TVA ran afoul of environmental legislation, built a massive nuclear power program that it could not control, and sought new missions for which there were no constituencies.
The founding myth of multipurpose regional development was inappropriately pursued in the 1970s and '80s by leaders who became "prisoners of myth" in their attempt to keep the TVA heroic. A decentralized organization, which had worked well at the grass roots, was difficult to redirect as the nuclear genius spun out of control. TVA autonomy from Washington, once a virtue, obscured political accountability. This study develops an important new theory about institutional performance in the face of historical change.
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Imperiled Innocents
Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America
by Nicola Kay Beisel
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 1998 Distinguished Scholarship Award, Collective Behavior and Social Movement Section of the American Sociological Association" Nicola Beisel is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University.
Moral reform movements claiming to protect children began to emerge in the United States over a century ago, most notably when Anthony Comstock and his supporters crusaded to restrict the circulation of contraception, information on the sexual rights of women, and "obscene" art and literature. Much of their rhetoric influences debates on issues surrounding children and sexuality today. Drawing on Victorian accounts of pregnant girls, prostitutes, Free Lovers, and others deemed "immoral," Nicola Beisel argues that rhetoric about the moral corruption of children speaks to an ongoing parental concern: that children will fail to replicate or exceed their parents' social position. The rhetoric of morality, she maintains, is more than symbolic and goes beyond efforts to control mass behavior. For the Victorians, it tapped into the fear that their own children could fall prey to vice and ultimately live in disgrace.
In a rare analysis of Anthony Comstock's crusade with the New York and New England Societies for the Suppression of Vice, Beisel examines how the reformer worked on the anxieties of the upper classes. One tactic was to link moral corruption with the flood of immigrants, which succeeded in New York and Boston, where minorities posed a political threat to the upper classes. Showing how a moral crusade can bring a society's diffuse anxieties to focus on specific sources, Beisel offers a fresh theoretical approach to moral reform movements. "An exemplary work of cultural analysis--as well as a delightful read.... Imperiled Innocents persuasively demonstrates the empirical power of cultural analysis and its significance for at least one core theoretical question in the discipline, the production and reproduction of class.... Beisel has constructed both an elegant work of cultural analysis and a powerful theoretical lens through which to reconsider the moral controversies of our own time."---Elisabeth S. Clemens, American Journal of Sociology "This provocative, clearly written addition to the literature on comparative urban reform illustrates the insights that a historical sociologist can bring to a familiar topic.... Challenging conventional interpretations of comstockery, it sheds new light on the process of upper-class formation and the role of gender and sexuality in reform."---Steven Mintz, Journal of American History "A thoughtfully provocative work of analysis." "Not only is Imperiled Innocents good sociology and good history, it also addresses timely public issues and is a pleasure to read. This is an exemplary work of historical sociology."-William H. Sewell, Jr., University of Chicago
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Social Policy in the United States
Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective
by Theda Skocpol
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
Theda Skocpol is Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. Among her many works are Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States and States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China.
Health care, welfare, Social Security, employment programs--all are part of ongoing national debates about the future of social policy in the United States. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Theda Skocpol shows how historical understanding, centered on governmental institutions and political alliances, can illuminate the limits and possibilities of American social policymaking both past and present. Skocpol dispels the myth that Americans are inherently hostile to social spending and suggests why President Clinton's health care agenda was so quickly attacked despite the support of most Americans for his goals. "An important, provocative, and often persuasive argument."
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The Regime Question
Foundations of Democratic Governance in Europe and the United States
by Amel Ahmed
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
Ongoing struggles over core principles of democratic governance
The regime question-often boiled down to "democracy or autocracy?"-has been central to democratic politics from the start. This has entailed not only fights over the extent of the franchise but also, crucially, ongoing struggles over core principles of democracy, the "rules of the game." In this timely study, Amel Ahmed examines the origins and development of the regime question in Western democracies and considers the implications for regime contention today. She argues that battles over the regime question were so foundational and so enduring that they constitute a dimension of politics that polarized political opponents across the regime divide.
Ahmed investigates four historical cases in the study of democratic development: the United Kingdom between the Reform Act of 1832 and World War II (1832–1939), Imperial and Weimar–era Germany (1876–1933), the French Third Republic (1870–1939), and the United States before World War II (1789–1939). Focusing on legislative politics as an essential site of democratic governance and key to understanding long-term democratic endurance, she shows that when the regime question became salient, it hindered the formation of viable legislative coalitions along the left-right policy spectrum. This failure opened the door to executive encroachment, destabilizing the regime. Ahmed shows that the resurgence of the regime question today is not, as is often assumed, a break with prior trajectories of political development but a new instantiation of battles fought in previous eras. Amel Ahmed is associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Democracy and the Politics of Electoral System Choice: Engineering Electoral Dominance. "A bold and innovative study with clear and important implications for contemporary politics. This book will be a major contributor to debates over democracy, democratic backsliding, American political development, and comparative historical institutionalism."-David Bateman, Cornell University
"After decades of taking democratic stability for granted in the West, the future of democracy is once again being debated. Amel Ahmed's The Regime Question provides well-needed historical context to these debates. This book reminds us how much this question structured Western political development up through 1945 and how much political stability after 1945 depended on its repression. Ahmed also shows that it brings in its train polarization, zero-sum politics, gridlock, and other divisive trends that impede effective governance. This book should be of immense interest to anyone trying to understand the challenges facing democracy today."-Sheri Berman, Barnard College
"An important contribution to the literature on historical democratization. The book's argument supersedes and improves upon the structural functionalist literature very significantly."-Giovanni Capoccia, University of Oxford
"An ambitious, sweeping account, spanning Europe and North America, from the nineteenth century to the present. With this book, Amel Ahmed distinguishes herself as an important and innovative voice on the history of democracy itself."-Daniel Ziblatt, coauthor of How Democracies Die "Interesting and innovative. . . . [The Regime Question] really contributes something different in a way that adds to the conversation"---Justin Kempf, Democracy Paradox
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Divergent Democracy
How Policy Positions Came To Dominate Party Competition
by Katherine Krimmel
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
An innovative examination of the shift by American political parties toward issue-based differentiation
Recent Democratic and Republican party platforms display clear differences on such issues as abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, gun control, and the environment. These distinctions reflect a programmatic party system-that is, one in which policy positions serve as a key basis of electoral competition. Yet party politics were not always so issue-oriented; the rise of policy positions as the dominant marker of party appeal occurred largely over the last fifty years. In Divergent Democracy, Katherine Krimmel examines this transformation of the American party system, using innovative machine learning techniques to develop and present the first measure of party differentiation on issues since Democrats and Republicans began competing with each other in 1856.
Why did the shift to issue-based party competition take more than a century to materialize? Krimmel offers a groundbreaking theory, focusing on what aids and constrains parties' abilities to do the difficult, conflict-ridden work of developing issue positions. She argues that clientelistic subnational party organizations, promising material support or jobs in return for votes, long impeded programmatic partisanship while the growth of national party organizations facilitated it. Moreover, institutions and agents of racial oppression extended the life of nonprogrammatic practices, as they attempted to shield discriminatory laws and institutions from interparty competition. Following the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, space opened for programmatic competition to grow.
Using both quantitative and qualitative tools, Krimmel offers a vital view of the foundations of today's issue-based party competition and its alternatives. Katherine Krimmel is assistant professor in the department of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. "Divergent Democracy provides a genuinely new take on polarization, and what makes today's partisan differences so distinctive in US history. It is an impressive achievement."-David Bateman, Cornell University
"The most historically and institutionally sophisticated treatment of national party divergence yet published."-Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University
"Katherine Krimmel's invaluable and thought-provoking research invites us to consider whether today's divisive partisan conflicts over competing policy visions still represent necessary progress from the issue-averse, patronage-fueled parties of the past. This persuasive book shows that the American party system has not only become polarized-it has been fundamentally transformed."-David A. Hopkins, Boston College
"This book is a significant advancement in how we should understand-conceptually, methodologically, even normatively-the changing relationship between political parties and the role of policy in American political life."-Chloe Thurston, Northwestern University "Innovative. . . . [A] rich trove of evidence regarding party history and the present state of American party politics." "An interesting. . . . [and] excellent book."---Allison G. S. Knox, International Social Science review
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The Power of Separation
American Constitutionalism and the Myth of the Legislative Veto
by Jessica Korn
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1997" Jessica Korn, a Freedom Forum Fellow (1997-1998), is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Columbia University.
Jessica Korn challenges the notion that the eighteenth-century principles underlying the American separation of powers system are incompatible with the demands of twentieth-century governance. She demostrates the continuing relevance of these principles by questioning the dominant scholarship on the legislative veto. As a short-cut through constitutional procedure invented in the 1930s and invalidated by the Supreme Court's Chadha decision in 1983, the legislative veto has long been presumed to have been a powerful mechanism of congressional oversight. Korn's analysis, however, shows that commentators have exaggerated the legislative veto's significance as a result of their incorrect assumption that the separation of powers was designed solely to check governmental authority. The Framers also designed constitutional structure to empower the new national government, institutionalizing a division of labor among the three branches in order to enhance the government's capacity.
By examining the legislative vetoes governing the FTC, the Department of Education, and the president's authority to extend most-favored-nation trade status, Korn demonstrates how the powers that the Constitution grants to Congress made the legislative veto short-cut inconsequential to policymaking. These case studies also show that Chadha enhanced Congress's capacity to pass substantive laws while making it easier for Congress to preserve important discretionary powers in the executive branch. Thus, in debunking the myth of the legislative veto, Korn restores an appreciation of the enduring vitality of the American constitutional order. "Jessica Korn has done a masterful and convincing job of pointing out some common misconceptions about the way our Constitutional separation of powers works and what the well-known Supreme Court decision in INS v. Chadha actually accomplished."-Derek Bok, Harvard University "In this superb study, Jessica Korn not only explodes several myths about the legislative veto, but captures many timeless truths about America's Madisonian system of governance. The story is fascinating and the news is good: American government can adapt to new challenges without weakening the separation of powers.... Scholars, journalists, students, and average citizens who care about the future of American politics ought to read this book."-John J. DiIulio, Jr., Princeton University/Brookings Institution
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Rough Draft of History
A Century of US Social Movements in the News
by Edwin Amenta
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year" Edwin Amenta is professor of sociology and political science at the University of California, Irvine. His books include When Movements Matter and Bold Relief (both Princeton). Twitter @EdwinAmenta Neal Caren is associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Twitter @HaphazardSoc
A comprehensive account of the media's coverage of social movements in the United States
A new view of twentieth-century US social movements, Rough Draft of History examines how national newspapers covered social movements and the organizations driving them. Edwin Amenta and Neal Caren identify hundreds of movement organizations, from the Women's Christian Temperance Union to Occupy Wall Street, and document their treatment in the news. In doing so, Amenta and Caren provide an alternative account of US history from below, as it was refracted through journalistic lenses.
Iconic organizations in the women's rights, African American civil rights, and environmental movements gained substantial media attention. But so too did now-forgotten groups, such as the German-American Alliance, Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and Peace and Freedom Party. Amenta and Caren show why some organizations made big news while others did not, why some were treated well while others were handled roughly. They recover forgotten stories, including that of the Townsend Plan, a Depression-era organization that helped establish Social Security. They also reveal that the media handled the civil rights movement far more harshly than popular histories recount. And they detail the difficulties movements face in today's brave new media world.
Drawing from digitized newspapers across a century and through to the present, Rough Draft of History offers insights for those seeking social and political change and those trying to make sense of it.
"A comprehensive, compelling analysis of print media's coverage of social movements, Rough Draft of History is a great read for activists and social movement scholars alike. Amenta and Caren explore the central role of media and the factors that influence the coverage social movements receive. This careful investigation extends our understanding of the role of the Fourth Estate in movement politics."-Lee Ann Banaszak, Pennsylvania State University
"Rough Draft of History is an evocative, often surprising consideration of the links between social movements and the press. Combining historical sweep with analytical sensibilities, this fascinating account of media attention and the notice-seeking strategies of movements illuminates critical trends and developments."-Ira Katznelson, Columbia University
"Scholars use newspaper articles to understand social movements, but rarely have they sought to systematically understand the dynamics of press coverage. In this important and innovative book, Amenta and Caren do just that, offering a rich, historically sensitive portrait of American social movements as seen through the often-distorting lens of the country's newspapers."-Doug McAdam, Stanford University "This exciting and important book breaks fresh ground in the study of political movements. Amenta and Caren look at four major newspapers from 1900 forward, to learn which movements got coverage, what kinds of coverage they got, when they got it, and why. Rough Draft of History has much to teach us."-James Morone, Brown University
"Examining a century of media coverage, Amenta and Caren offer a panoramic perspective on social movements. The results are eye-opening, informing our understanding of how movements gain traction, and why some succeed and others fail. A very impressive work of social science."-Paul Pierson, University of California, Berkeley "Rough Draft of History combines a new theory along with some very interesting data to show how media coverage of social movements is a function of
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The Substance of Representation
Congress, American Political Development, and Lawmaking
by John S. Lapinski
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
John S. Lapinski is associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and the deputy director of elections at NBC News. He is the coeditor of The Macropolitics of Congress (Princeton).
Lawmaking is crucial to American democracy because it completely defines and regulates the public life of the nation. Yet despite its importance, political scientists spend very little time studying the direct impact that the politics surrounding a particular issue has on lawmaking. The Substance of Representation draws on a vast range of historical and empirical data to better understand how lawmaking works across different policy areas. Specifically, John Lapinski introduces a theoretically grounded method for parsing policy issues into categories, and he shows how policymaking varies in predictable ways based on the specific issue area being addressed.
Lapinski examines the ways in which key factors that influence policymaking matter for certain types of policy issues, and he includes an exhaustive look at how elite political polarization shifts across these areas. He considers how Congress behaves according to the policy issue at hand, and how particular areas--such as war, sovereignty issues, and immigration reform--change legislative performance. Relying on records of all Congressional votes since Reconstruction and analyzing voting patterns across policy areas from the late nineteenth to late twentieth centuries, Lapinski provides a comprehensive historical perspective on lawmaking in order to shed light on current practices.
Giving a clear picture of Congressional behavior in the policymaking process over time, The Substance of Representation provides insights into the critical role of American lawmaking. "Lapinski develops a new tool kit to measure and analyze an expansive set of legislation and lawmakers' policy preferences from 1877 to 2010. His key contribution to the study of the American national legislature is his coding approach and the data development, which develops a deeper understanding of lawmaking. Through these, Lapinski offers findings about polarization, elite leadership in Congress, and the influence and impact of members of Congress and their policy preferences across different areas. This work will certainly contribute to developing a new discussion within the legislative studies field and give future political scientists new possibilities of expanding the research in the area." "He offers an astutely crafted schema that seems to this observer to avoid the trap of time boundedness and enables the APD enterprise to more systematically track the evolution of policy."---Ross K. Baker, Congress & The Presidency "Students of Congress think they are studying what government does when they examine roll call votes. In this powerful and original contribution to legislative and policy studies and American political development, John Lapinski shows otherwise. The substance of policy-what sorts of laws members of Congress are voting on-makes an enormous difference for theory, method, American political history, and our conclusions about how Congress works."-Jacob S. Hacker, Yale University "I salute John Lapinski for this innovative work on American lawmaking. The book offers deft history, a good measure of the significance of laws, and a helpful categorization of laws by substantive area. In a welcome move, it annexes Congress to the study of American political development."-David Mayhew, author of Partisan Balance "The Substance of Representation is a provocative book. Lapinski urges scholars to incorporate the substance of policy into models of lawmaking and shows us with impressive historical sweep how this can be fruitfully done."-Sarah Binder, George Washington University "This important book will force scholars to adopt a higher standard of analysis when discussing policymaking in the American system. It challenges the power and accuracy of a widely used measure of ideolog
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How Policies Make Citizens
Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State
by Andrea Louise Campbell
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
Andrea Louise Campbell is Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at Yale University from 2001-2003.
Some groups participate in politics more than others. Why? And does it matter for policy outcomes? In this richly detailed and fluidly written book, Andrea Campbell argues that democratic participation and public policy powerfully reinforce each other. Through a case study of senior citizens in the United States and their political activity around Social Security, she shows how highly participatory groups get their policy preferences fulfilled, and how public policy itself helps create political inequality.
Using a wealth of unique survey and historical data, Campbell shows how the development of Social Security helped transform seniors from the most beleaguered to the most politically active age group. Thus empowered, seniors actively defend their programs from proposed threats, shaping policy outcomes. The participatory effects are strongest for low-income seniors, who are most dependent on Social Security. The program thus reduces political inequality within the senior population--a laudable effect--while increasing inequality between seniors and younger citizens.
A brief look across policies shows that program effects are not always positive. Welfare recipients are even less participatory than their modest socioeconomic backgrounds would imply, because of the demeaning and disenfranchising process of proving eligibility. Campbell concludes that program design profoundly shapes the nature of democratic citizenship. And proposed policies--such as Social Security privatization--must be evaluated for both their economic and political effects, because the very quality of democratic government is influenced by the kinds of policies it chooses. "This is a persuasively argued, well-researched, and nicely written work that makes a key contribution to our understanding of the politics of Social Security retirement insurance. Because of the singular importance of Social Security as a domestic federal program, . . . Campbell's study fills a significant gap."---Gary Mucciaroni, Perspectives on Politics "Many political scientists share a hunch that Big Government has a large influence on civic engagement, but there are precious few studies that offer convincing evidence of this impact and even fewer that trace individual-level policy feedback effects over time. In this meticulous yet creative analysis of political mobilization around the Social Security program, Andrea Campbell demonstrates empirically just how powerful a force American government has become in the lives of citizens. In so doing, she advances a compelling framework for future research on the links between public policy and political participation. This excellent book will be read with great interest by scholars of political behavior, the policymaking process, and American political development."-Eric Patashnik, University of Virginia, author of Putting Trust in the U.S. Budget "Beautifully written and organized, this book makes a very important contribution to our understanding of the linkages between citizen participation and public policy. The writing is clear and jargon-free, the scholarship is sound, the analysis is sophisticated and innovative, and the topic is timely."-Christine L. Day, University of New Orleans, author of What Older Americans Think
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Building the Judiciary
Law, Courts, and the Politics of Institutional Development
by Justin Crowe
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
Justin Crowe is assistant professor of political science at Williams College.
How did the federal judiciary transcend early limitations to become a powerful institution of American governance? How did the Supreme Court move from political irrelevance to political centrality? Building the Judiciary uncovers the causes and consequences of judicial institution-building in the United States from the commencement of the new government in 1789 through the close of the twentieth century. Explaining why and how the federal judiciary became an independent, autonomous, and powerful political institution, Justin Crowe moves away from the notion that the judiciary is exceptional in the scheme of American politics, illustrating instead how it is subject to the same architectonic politics as other political institutions.
Arguing that judicial institution-building is fundamentally based on a series of contested questions regarding institutional design and delegation, Crowe develops a theory to explain why political actors seek to build the judiciary and the conditions under which they are successful. He both demonstrates how the motivations of institution-builders ranged from substantive policy to partisan and electoral politics to judicial performance, and details how reform was often provoked by substantial changes in the political universe or transformational entrepreneurship by political leaders. Embedding case studies of landmark institution-building episodes within a contextual understanding of each era under consideration, Crowe presents a historically rich narrative that offers analytically grounded explanations for why judicial institution-building was pursued, how it was accomplished, and what--in the broader scheme of American constitutional democracy--it achieved. "Crowe takes the position that, despite the conventional wisdom that the institutional legitimacy of the federal judiciary is a product of its own decisions, the growth of the institutional development and legitimacy of the national courts is a result of continued and strategic decisions made by political actors outside the judiciary. This interesting, important, and timely thesis is supported by the author's use of events through history. Crowe proves to be a master storyteller; the book is excellently researched and written, and the thesis is strongly and articulately supported. . . . Scholars interested in the judiciary, American political development, Congress, and U.S. history will benefit from this thoughtful book." "Building the Judiciary is excellently written and accessible to readers who may have no background in American politics. I highly recommend the book to comparative judicial politics scholars who want to learn about the institutional development of the American federal judiciary."---Maria Popova, Perspectives on Politics "To illustrate the political process of constructing federal judicial institutions, Crowe has composed a book of remarkable architectural elegance."---Stephen M. Engel, Tulsa Law Review "With the arrival of this book, the idea that elected politicians and unelected judges operate in separate spheres finally has to be put aside. A blockbuster work, this magnificent rendition of how Congress has built federal judicial power invites us to recognize the national judiciary as a central actor in American politics, placed there by continuous legislative design."-Rick Valelly, Swarthmore College "Building the Judiciary reveals a fascinating paradox of American political development: the courts are periodically pulled into partisan rancor and interbranch warfare, and yet these episodes have resulted in the building of an autonomous and powerful judiciary. This pathbreaking book is a major contribution to understanding how judges have participated in institutional reforms that have forged a unique American state and is a must read for understanding the politics of judicial statecraft."-Sidney Milkis, University of Virginia "Accurate
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When Movements Anchor Parties
Electoral Alignments in American History
by Daniel Schlozman
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 2016 Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association" Daniel Schlozman is assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.
Throughout American history, some social movements, such as organized labor and the Christian Right, have forged influential alliances with political parties, while others, such as the antiwar movement, have not. When Movements Anchor Parties provides a bold new interpretation of American electoral history by examining five prominent movements and their relationships with political parties.
Taking readers from the Civil War to today, Daniel Schlozman shows how two powerful alliances-those of organized labor and Democrats in the New Deal, and the Christian Right and Republicans since the 1970s-have defined the basic priorities of parties and shaped the available alternatives in national politics. He traces how they diverged sharply from three other major social movements that failed to establish a place inside political parties-the abolitionists following the Civil War, the Populists in the 1890s, and the antiwar movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Moving beyond a view of political parties simply as collections of groups vying for preeminence, Schlozman explores how would-be influencers gain influence-or do not. He reveals how movements join with parties only when the alliance is beneficial to parties, and how alliance exacts a high price from movements. Their sweeping visions give way to compromise and partial victories. Yet as Schlozman demonstrates, it is well worth paying the price as movements reorient parties' priorities.
Timely and compelling, When Movements Anchor Parties demonstrates how alliances have transformed American political parties. "Many groups make up party coalitions, but few have the influence and endurance to anchor parties. This exceptionally well-written book explains the complex political networking and alliance building activities that can help movements secure permanence within political parties." "This study deepens what is known about how party coalitions are shaped by the efforts of groups and the entrepreneurs that lead them, making it mandatory reading for any serious scholar of American politics or history."---Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, Perspectives on Politics "This rigorous and stimulating book reveals how the labor and Christian Right movements joined direct action with partisan maneuver-and transformed American politics. When Movements Anchor Parties peers through the rancorous politics of our time to provide a fresh interpretation of how the Democratic and Republican Parties have become so polarized over the past half century. Schlozman has written a thought-provoking study of American democracy."-Sidney M. Milkis, University of Virginia "A brilliant and beautifully crafted scholarly study destined to join the pantheon of classics in American political development. Schlozman theorizes and analyzes how some social movements form durable alliances with parties-labor and the Democrats, conservative evangelicals and the Republicans-and why others fail. When Movements Anchor Parties enriches contemporary debates about polarization, party networks, ideology, and coalition building."-Thomas E. Mann, Brookings Institution "Scholars increasingly realize that political parties and social movements cannot be fully understood in isolation from one another. When Movements Anchor Parties offers a richly informed and insightful account of two fateful and durable alliances: the labor movement with FDR's Democrats and the Christian Right with Reagan's Republicans. Schlozman's illuminating book highlights the influence of these developments on contemporary American politics."-David Karol, University of Maryland "This is a book of remarkable insight and impressive historical scope. The extensiveness of Schlozman'
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Dividing Lines
The Politics of Immigration Control in America
by Daniel J. Tichenor
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the Gladys M. Kammerer Award" Daniel J. Tichenor is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. He has published extensively in leading journals on immigration policy.
Immigration is perhaps the most enduring and elemental leitmotif of America. This book is the most powerful study to date of the politics and policies it has inspired, from the founders' earliest efforts to shape American identity to today's revealing struggles over Third World immigration, noncitizen rights, and illegal aliens. Weaving a robust new theoretical approach into a sweeping history, Daniel Tichenor ties together previous studies' idiosyncratic explanations for particular, pivotal twists and turns of immigration policy. He tells the story of lively political battles between immigration defenders and doubters over time and of the transformative policy regimes they built.
Tichenor takes us from vibrant nineteenth-century politics that propelled expansive European admissions and Chinese exclusion to the draconian restrictions that had taken hold by the 1920s, including racist quotas that later hampered the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust. American global leadership and interest group politics in the decades after World War II, he argues, led to a surprising expansion of immigration opportunities. In the 1990s, a surge of restrictionist fervor spurred the political mobilization of recent immigrants. Richly documented, this pathbreaking work shows that a small number of interlocking temporal processes, not least changing institutional opportunities and constraints, underlie the turning tides of immigration sentiments and policy regimes. Complementing a dynamic narrative with a host of helpful tables and timelines, Dividing Lines is the definitive treatment of a phenomenon that has profoundly shaped the character of American nationhood. "Daniel Tichenor's Dividing Lines is one of the best books on U.S. immigration policy to appear in the past decade. Political scientists, sociologists, historians, and nonacademic readers will all find it illuminating."-Martin Shefter, Cornell University "This is an excellent book. It constitutes a superb narrative history of American immigration policy and reform, makes sense of the trajectory of this development, and connects the politics and history of immigration reform to a set of larger theoretical claims in the field of American political development. It thus makes a number of important contributions, not only to immigration history but also to American political development and the historical-institutional study of politics generally."-Robert C. Lieberman, Columbia University
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Reforms at Risk
What Happens After Major Policy Changes Are Enacted
by Eric M. Patashnik
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 2009 Louis Brownlow Book Award, National Academy of Public Administration" Eric M. Patashnik is associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia. His books include Putting Trust in the US Budget: Federal Trust Funds and the Politics of Commitment.
Reforms at Risk is the first book to closely examine what happens to sweeping and seemingly successful policy reforms after they are passed. Most books focus on the politics of reform adoption, yet as Eric Patashnik shows here, the political struggle does not end when major reforms become enacted. Why do certain highly praised policy reforms endure while others are quietly reversed or eroded away?
Patashnik peers into some of the most critical arenas of domestic-policy reform--including taxes, agricultural subsidies, airline deregulation, emissions trading, welfare state reform, and reform of government procurement--to identify the factors that enable reform measures to survive. He argues that the reforms that stick destroy an existing policy subsystem and reconfigure the political dynamic. Patashnik demonstrates that sustainable reforms create positive policy feedbacks, transform institutions, and often unleash the ''creative destructiveness'' of market forces.
Reforms at Risk debunks the argument that reforms inevitably fail because Congress is prey to special interests, and the book provides a more realistic portrait of the possibilities and limits of positive change in American government. It is essential reading for scholars and practitioners of U.S. politics and public policy, offering practical lessons for anyone who wants to ensure that hard-fought reform victories survive. "Tremendous effort is invested by political scientists in an attempt to understanding the conditions that produce significant policy change. In this important book, Patashnik considers the fate of major policy changes."---S.Q. Kelly, Choice "Eric M. Patashnik's excellent book . . . is an important book, for obvious reasons--as the Obama Administration settles in to a long, hard slog of reform across the broad swath of government activity, it will need to understand not only how to get reforms passed, but how to make sure they're carried out."---Elaine Kamarck, Democracy "[Patashnik] produces not only a helpful primer for policy entrepreneurs on how to design reforms with self-reinforcing features, but also a fine-grained scholarly analysis of the limits of previous work on policymaking. It is an instant classic that will be widely read by practitioners and scholars alike. . . . Eric Patashnik has written a fascinating and enormously important book that tells us how policy designs help shape the long-term sustainability of general-interest reforms. . . . It is a brilliant book that confirms Patashnik's place among the top scholars examining the interaction between political science and public policy."---Andrea Louise Campbell, Journal of Policy History "This is a very fine book--an example of American political science at its best, which is to say, very good indeed. . . . Fine scholarship informs and leaves the reader arguing with it throughout; by these two measures this is fine scholarship."---Michael Moran, Governance "As the Obama administration and Congressional leaders address these and other challenges, they would do well to read Eric Patashnik's new book, Reforms at Risk. It is a book that adds to our base of knowledge and also provides insights that can be used to improve public policy."---John Hoornbeek, Journal of Politics "[I]n contrast to portions of the political science literature that try to portray post-reform politics as a matter of cycles, or coalitions, or institutional design, Patashnik provides a more complex and, to me, more realistic account of the political dynamics, including the importance of timing, historical circumstance, and learning from experience."---J. Samuel Fitch, Policy Sciences "Important reforms may be enacted, but what happ
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Fighting for the Speakership
The House and the Rise of Party Government
by Jeffery A. Jenkins
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"One of Choice's Editors' Picks for 2013" Jeffery A. Jenkins is associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia. Charles Stewart III is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the most powerful partisan figure in the contemporary U.S. Congress. How this came to be, and how the majority party in the House has made control of the speakership a routine matter, is far from straightforward. Fighting for the Speakership provides a comprehensive history of how Speakers have been elected in the U.S. House since 1789, arguing that the organizational politics of these elections were critical to the construction of mass political parties in America and laid the groundwork for the role they play in setting the agenda of Congress today.
Jeffery Jenkins and Charles Stewart show how the speakership began as a relatively weak office, and how votes for Speaker prior to the Civil War often favored regional interests over party loyalty. While struggle, contention, and deadlock over House organization were common in the antebellum era, such instability vanished with the outbreak of war, as the majority party became an "organizational cartel" capable of controlling with certainty the selection of the Speaker and other key House officers. This organizational cartel has survived Gilded Age partisan strife, Progressive Era challenge, and conservative coalition politics to guide speakership elections through the present day. Fighting for the Speakership reveals how struggles over House organization prior to the Civil War were among the most consequential turning points in American political history. "An excellent look at the history of majority party leadership in the House." "[T]his is, overall, a sound and illuminating analysis."---R. Scott Burnet, Historian "The Speaker of the House is the third-highest constitutional office in the United States. Yet political scientists and historians have largely ignored how the House chooses the holder of this exalted position. No longer-Jenkins and Stewart have convincingly placed the contest for the speakership at the center of the historical development of Congress."-Nolan McCarty, Princeton University "The development of an 'organizational cartel' has been central to the evolution of political parties in the U.S. House. The parties control access to committee and leadership slots. Whether this has allowed parties to control policy is a separate and contingent matter. Jenkins and Stewart press this theoretical distinction and offer much else in this excellent and authoritative work of congressional history."-David Mayhew, Yale University "This is an ambitious and impressive piece of scholarship with extraordinary historical sweep. Urging scholars to move beyond the study of the majority party's procedural control of the agenda, Jenkins and Stewart grapple with the organizational evolution of the House and the starring role ultimately played in that institutional drama by the majority party caucus. This is a must-read for students of Congress and America's political development."-Sarah Binder, George Washington University and the Brookings Institution "Fighting for the Speakership makes a new and important contribution to our knowledge of the role of speakership contests in the development of party organization in the House of Representatives. Most previous scholarship begins with the observation that majority parties firmly control the House's top organizational positions. Jenkins and Stewart show that this was not always the case."-Steven S. Smith, author of Party Influence in Congress
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Shaping Race Policy
The United States in Comparative Perspective
by Robert Lieberman
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 2006 Best Book on Public Policy Award, Race, Ethnicity and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association" Robert C. Lieberman is Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is the author of Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State.
Shaping Race Policy investigates one of the most serious policy challenges facing the United States today: the stubborn persistence of racial inequality in the post-civil rights era. Unlike other books on the topic, it is comparative, examining American developments alongside parallel histories of race policy in Great Britain and France.
Focusing on on two key policy areas, welfare and employment, the book asks why America has had such uneven success at incorporating African Americans and other minorities into the full benefits of citizenship. Robert Lieberman explores the historical roots of racial incorporation in these policy areas over the course of the twentieth century and explains both the relative success of antidiscrimination policy and the failure of the American welfare state to address racial inequality. He chronicles the rise and resilience of affirmative action, including commentary on the recent University of Michigan affirmative action cases decided by the Supreme Court. He also shows how nominally color-blind policies can have racially biased effects, and challenges the common wisdom that color-blind policies are morally and politically superior and that race-conscious policies are merely second best.
Shaping Race Policy has two innovative features that distinguish it from other works in the area. First, it is comparative, examining American developments alongside parallel histories of race policy in Great Britain and France. Second, its argument merges ideas and institutions, which are usually considered separate and competing factors, into a comprehensive and integrated explanatory approach. The book highlights the importance of two factors--America's distinctive political institutions and the characteristic American tension between race consciousness and color blindness--in accounting for the curious pattern of success and failure in American race policy. "Lieberman's book is well worth reading-and debating. . . . [T]his book sets its sights on a big, interesting question and tackles it. . . . It is a book that should open up significant space for debate and for future research."---Erik Bleich, Ethics and International Affairs "This is a deep, wide, valuable book that demonstrably advances research in racial politics, comparative public policy, and the social science analysis of political history. That is an impressive achievement for one volume."---Jennifer L. Hochschild, Ethnic and Racial Studies "How have and will we resolve the fundamental tension between our race consciousness and our color-blind ideals? Robert Lieberman breaks new and important ground in resolving this basic American dilemma, focusing on how shifting coalitions and tensions between ideas and institutions have produced varying welfare and discrimination policies, all richly informed by comparisons with French and British experience. The result helps us understand not only how we got to the current crossroads but also where we must aspire to head. We must all hope that the nation will learn the lessons Lieberman teaches."-Anthony W. Marx, President, Amherst College "Shaping Race Policy advances existing scholarly discussion by bringing together issues normally only addressed by either country specialists or policy specialists. The book integrates these literatures and in the process provides a fresh account of how race-mediated through political institutions, patterns of group-state linkages and cultural patterns-has fashioned different political trajectories. Thoroughly researched, theoretically elegant, and persuasive, it is an outstanding exercise in comparative politics."-Desmond King, Nu
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Electing the Senate
Indirect Democracy before the Seventeenth Amendment
by Wendy J. Schiller
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
Wendy J. Schiller is associate professor of political science and public policy at Brown University. Charles Stewart III is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
How U.S. senators were chosen prior to the Seventeenth Amendment-and the consequences of Constitutional reform
From 1789 to 1913, U.S. senators were not directly elected by the people-instead the Constitution mandated that they be chosen by state legislators. This radically changed in 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving the public a direct vote. Electing the Senate investigates the electoral connections among constituents, state legislators, political parties, and U.S. senators during the age of indirect elections. Wendy Schiller and Charles Stewart find that even though parties controlled the partisan affiliation of the winning candidate for Senate, they had much less control over the universe of candidates who competed for votes in Senate elections and the parties did not always succeed in resolving internal conflict among their rank and file. Party politics, money, and personal ambition dominated the election process, in a system originally designed to insulate the Senate from public pressure.
Electing the Senate uses an original data set of all the roll call votes cast by state legislators for U.S. senators from 1871 to 1913 and all state legislators who served during this time. Newspaper and biographical accounts uncover vivid stories of the political maneuvering, corruption, and partisanship-played out by elite political actors, from elected officials, to party machine bosses, to wealthy business owners-that dominated the indirect Senate elections process. Electing the Senate raises important questions about the effectiveness of Constitutional reforms, such as the Seventeenth Amendment, that promised to produce a more responsive and accountable government. "Schiller and Stewart develop a database of breathtaking proportions to provide insight into the politics of indirect election of senators, and the consequences of direct and indirect election on electoral responsiveness. Rather than a dusty account of a long-forgotten reform, this book has implications for understanding the modern Senate." "With the Seventeenth Amendment back in the news, Schiller and Stewart reexamine how state legislatures elected U.S. senators, to determine whether indirect elections were as unsavory and ineffective as charged, and whether popular elections have worked as well as reformers predicted. Their findings may surprise those on both sides of the ongoing debate."-Donald A. Ritchie, author of The U.S. Congress: A Very Short Introduction "This eye-opening book examines some of the most important questions in the development of representative government in the United States. It explores the often disastrous consequences of the original Constitutional scheme, the ways in which party politics and corruption can overtake deliberative processes, the unfulfilled promises of reformers, and the institutional conditions that foster government responsiveness and accountability. Everyone interested in American politics must read this book."-Steven S. Smith, Washington University in St. Louis "This is a fine book by two of the most accomplished and able scholars studying the U.S. Congress. Their findings will undoubtedly become the definitive work on how the indirect election of U.S. senators by individual state legislatures influenced the upper chamber of Congress and American politics."-Richard Bensel, Cornell University "The U.S. Senate is front and center in determining policy in America, and given its importance, it is critical to understand the relationship of its members to constituents. Based on a careful and massive collection of original data, this excellent book provides a clear picture of indirect Senate elections and their consequences." -John Lapinski, U
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The Road to Nowhere
The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security
by Jacob S. Hacker
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Co-Winner of the 1997 Louis Brownlow Book Award, National Academy of Public Administration" Jacob S. Hacker is a Guest Scholar in Governmental Studies at the Brookings Institution, a doctoral candidate in political science at Yale University, and a Robert M. Leylan Fellow in Social Sciences at Yale University.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, health care reform became a hot issue, paving the way for one of the most important yet ill-fated social policy initiatives in American history: Bill Clinton's 1993 proposal for comprehensive coverage under "managed competition." Here Jacob Hacker not only investigates for the first time how managed competition became the president's reform framework, but also illuminates how issues and policies emerge. He follows Clinton's policy ideas from their initial formulation by policy experts through their endorsement by medical industry leaders and politicians to their inclusion--in a new and unexpected form--in the proposal itself. Throughout he explores key questions: Why did health reform become a national issue in the 1990s? Why did Clinton choose managed competition over more familiar options during the 1992 presidential campaign? What effect did this have on the fate of his proposal?
Drawing on records of the President's task force, interviews with a wide range of key policy players, and many other sources, Hacker locates his analysis within the context of current political theories on agenda setting. He concludes that Clinton chose managed competition partly because advocates inside and outside the campaign convinced him that it represented a unique middle road to health care reform. This conviction, Hacker maintains, blinded the president and his allies to the political risks of the approach and hindered the development of an effective strategy for enacting it. "Mr. Hacker brings commendable clarity to a subject that has usually encouraged jargon and convolution."---David Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review "Hacker's assessment is measured and balanced.... This book will be read by two audiences: those who are interested in health policy per se and those who are interested in the policymaking process. It is equally instructive for both."---Mary E. Guy, American Political Science Review "As an intellectual history, his narrative is unrivaled.... Hacker's book raises many provocative questions ... and it is for that reason that it is immensely valuable."---Flint J. Wainess, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law "[Hacker] is particularly adept at showing how top policymakers used the media to sell ideas, not just to the public, but to each other.... A fascinating portrait."---Julian E. Zelizer, Reviews in American History
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Why Movements Succeed or Fail
Opportunity, Culture, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage
by Lee Ann Banaszak
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
Wyoming became the first American state to adopt female suffrage in 1869, a time when no country permitted women to vote. When the last Swiss canton enfranchised women in 1990, few countries barred women from the polls. Why did pro-suffrage activists in the United States and Switzerland have such varying success? Comparing suffrage campaigns in forty-eight American states and twenty-five Swiss cantons, Lee Ann Banaszak argues that movement tactics, beliefs, and values are critical in understanding why political movements succeed or fail. The Swiss suffrage movement's beliefs in consensus politics and local autonomy and their reliance on government parties for information limited their tactical choices, often in surprising ways. In comparison, the American suffrage movement, with its alliances to the abolition, temperance, and progressive movements, overcame beliefs in local autonomy and engaged in a wider array of confrontational tactics in the struggle for the vote.
Drawing on interviews with sixty Swiss suffrage activists, detailed legislative histories, census materials, and original archival materials from both countries, Banaszak blends qualitative historical inquiry with informative statistical analyses of state and cantonal level data. The book expands our understanding of the role of political opportunities and how they interact with the beliefs and values of movements and the societies they seek to change.
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Parting at the Crossroads
The Emergence of Health Insurance in the United States and Canada
by Antonia Maioni
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
Antonia Maioni is Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University.
As almost all newspaper or magazine readers know, Canada figured prominently in the turbulent U.S. debates over health care reform in the early Clinton presidency. Furthermore, future news analysts and policymakers will undoubtedly again use Canada to cite the "good" and the "bad" aspects of single-payer national health insurance. Beyond the debate about the desirability of Canadian-style health care reforms, Antonia Maioni sees another question: Why did the United States and Canada, alike in so many ways, part "at the crossroads" to produce such different systems of health insurance? She answers this previously neglected query so interestingly that her book will hold the attention of anyone concerned with health care in either country or both.
The author explores the development of health insurance in the United States and Canada, from the emergence of health care as a political issue in the 1930s to the passage of federal health insurance legislation in the 1960s. Focusing on how political institutions influence policy development, she shows that Canada's federal structure and its parliamentary institutions encouraged a social-democratic third party that became pivotal in demonstrating the feasibility of universal, public health insurance. Meanwhile, the constraints of the U.S. political system forced health care reformers to temper their own ideas to appeal to a wide coalition within the Democratic party. Even readers previously unfamiliar with Canadian politics will find in this book important clues about the "realm of the possible" in the uncertain future of U.S. health care.
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When Movements Matter
The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security
by Edwin Amenta
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
Edwin Amenta is professor of sociology and history at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Professor Baseball and Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy (Princeton).
When Movements Matter accounts for the origins of Social Security as we know it. The book tells the overlooked story of the Townsend Plan--a political organization that sought to alleviate poverty and end the Great Depression through a government-provided retirement stipend of $200 a month for every American over the age of sixty.
Both the Townsend Plan, which organized two million older Americans into Townsend clubs, and the wider pension movement failed to win the generous and universal senior citizens' pensions their advocates demanded. But the movement provided the political impetus behind old-age policy in its formative years and pushed America down the track of creating an old-age welfare state.
Drawing on a wealth of primary evidence, historical detail, and arresting images, Edwin Amenta traces the ups and downs of the Townsend Plan and its elderly leader Dr. Francis E. Townsend in the struggle to remake old age. In the process, Amenta advances a new theory of when social movements are influential.
The book challenges the conventional wisdom that U.S. old-age policy was a result mainly of the Depression or farsighted bureaucrats. It also debunks the current view that America immediately embraced Social Security when it was adopted in 1935. And it sheds new light on how social movements that fail to achieve their primary goals can still influence social policy and the way people relate to politics. "Compelling. . . . Grounded in impressive archival research that easily makes it the best book on the Townsend Plan ever published. . . . The book is well-written and the balance between its theoretical and historical components is excellent."---Daniel Béland, Contexts "Amenta's sharp theoretical analysis of the Townsend mobilization and his rigorous excavation of the historical evidence sets a high standard for future research."---Joseph E. Luders, Perspectives on Politics "When Movements Matter is clearly written and is the most detailed history of the Townsend Plan published."---Raymond Richards, Journal of American History "First-class scholarship. . . . When Movements Matter is beautifully written, well argued, and systematically researched. This is state of the art theory and research. . . . If you have any interest in why and how social movements succeed or fail, you must read Amenta."---Nella Van Dyke, Contemporary Sociology "The best history we have of both the Townsend Plan and the pension movement from the Great Depression to 1950. More generally, it is one of the finest accounts to date of any movement of 'challengers' over a long era of economic and political turbulence."---W. Elliot Brownlee, Business History Review "This is the best crafted book I have seen in awhile. It is a delightfully written (and at times even humorous) account of the rise and fall of the Townsend Movement.... I recommend this book strongly to all people interested in understanding the dynamics of social movements and not only those interested in movement consequences."---Sarah A. Soule, Mobilization "This is historical sociology at its best, written by one of the field's best practitioners."-Edward Berkowitz, George Washington University
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Facing Up to the American Dream
Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation
by Jennifer L. Hochschild
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 1996 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Sociology and Anthropology, Association of American Publishers" "Winner of the 2000 David Easton Award, American Political Science Association" Jennifer L. Hochschild is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Among her other works are The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation and What's Fair?: American Beliefs about Distributive Justice.
The ideology of the American dream--the faith that an individual can attain success and virtue through strenuous effort--is the very soul of the American nation. According to Jennifer Hochschild, we have failed to face up to what that dream requires of our society, and yet we possess no other central belief that can save the United States from chaos. In this compassionate but frightening book, Hochschild attributes our national distress to the ways in which whites and African Americans have come to view their own and each other's opportunities. By examining the hopes and fears of whites and especially of blacks of various social classes, Hochschild demonstrates that America's only unifying vision may soon vanish in the face of racial conflict and discontent.
Hochschild combines survey data and vivid anecdote to clarify several paradoxes. Since the 1960s white Americans have seen African Americans as having better and better chances to achieve the dream. At the same time middle-class blacks, by now one-third of the African American population, have become increasingly frustrated personally and anxious about the progress of their race. Most poor blacks, however, cling with astonishing strength to the notion that they and their families can succeed--despite their terrible, perhaps worsening, living conditions. Meanwhile, a tiny number of the estranged poor, who have completely given up on the American dream or any other faith, threaten the social fabric of the black community and the very lives of their fellow blacks.
Hochschild probes these patterns and gives them historical depth by comparing the experience of today's African Americans to that of white ethnic immigrants at the turn of the century. She concludes by claiming that America's only alternative to the social disaster of intensified racial conflict lies in the inclusiveness, optimism, discipline, and high-mindedness of the American dream at its best. "Jennifer Hochschild bravely tries to disassemble the central elements that are bound up in that vague but still politically and ideologically potent thing, `the American dream.' . . . She wants to iron out the defects of the dream rather than to overturn it, and she feels the good health of our society depends not only on belief in the American dream but on its realization, and in particular on repairing its central failure, which is the inability of some many black Americans to participate in what it promises. . . . [T]here is a division between the way American blacks and American whites see our great racial problem, and it is very unsettling that this division is so great. . . ."---Nathan Glazer, The New Republic "Drawing on a rich lode of polling data, policy studies and popular journalism, Hochschild probes the essential questions suggested by this book's title. . . . Without new politics to alleviate race and class injustice, she warns, we face abandonment of the dream, perhaps leading to a formalization of American hierarchy and a separatist black nationalism." "At the center of U.S. ideology rests the promise that all Americans have a reasonable chance at success, however defined; Hochschild demonstrates how that promise now faces severe challenge from real and perceived barriers of race and class. . . . Overall, she shows that shared disaffections and hardening black and white views of each other threaten to rend the nation's social fabric. Her work demands thoughtful reading and earnest discussion." "A major study of current public opinion that o
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Bound by Our Constitution
Women, Workers, and the Minimum Wage
by Vivien Hart
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
What difference does a written constitution make to public policy? How have women workers fared in a nation bound by constitutional principles, compared with those not covered by formal, written guarantees of fair procedure or equitable outcome? To investigate these questions, Vivien Hart traces the evolution of minimum wage policies in the United States and Britain from their common origins in women's politics around 1900 to their divergent outcomes in our day. She argues, contrary to common wisdom, that the advantage has been with the American constitutional system rather than the British.
Basing her analysis on primary research, Hart reconstructs legal strategies and policy decisions that revolved around the recognition of women as workers and the public definition of gender roles. Contrasting seismic shifts and expansion in American minimum wage policy with indifference and eventual abolition in Britain, she challenges preconceptions about the constraints of American constitutionalism versus British flexibility. Though constitutional requirements did block and frustrate women's attempts to gain fair wages, they also, as Hart demonstrates, created a terrain in the United States for principled debate about women, work, and the state, and a momentum for public policy, unparalleled in Britain. Hart's book should be of interest to policy, labor, women's, and legal historians, to political scientists, and to students of gender issues, law, and social policy.
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Political Organizations
by James Q. Wilson
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
James Q. Wilson is the James Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of many books and has served on numerous national commissions concerned with public policy.
A major work by one of America's eminent political scientists, Political Organizations has had a profound impact on how we view the influence of interest groups on policymaking. James Wilson wrote this book to counter two ideas: that popular interests will automatically generate political organizations and that such organizations will faithfully mirror the opinions and interests of their members. Moreover, he demonstrated that the way in which political organizations (including parties, business groups, labor unions, and civil rights associations) are created and maintained has a profound impact on the opinions they represent and the tactics they use. Now available for the first time in paperback, this book has broadened its scope to include recently developed organizations as it addresses many of today's concerns over the power of such groups as special-interest lobbies.
In 1973, when this book was first published, the press and public were fascinated by the social movements of the 1960s, thinking that the antiwar and civil rights movements might sweep aside old-fashioned interest-group lobbies. Wilson argued, however, that such movements would inevitably be supplanted by new organizations, ones with goals and tactics that might direct the course of action away from some of the movements' founding principles. In light of the current popular distress with special-interest groups and their supposed death-grip on Congress, Wilson again attempts to modify a widely held view. He shows that although lobbies have multiplied in number and kind, they remain considerably constrained by the difficulty they have in maintaining themselves.
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Experts and Politicians
Reform Challenges to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago
by Kenneth Finegold
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
Kenneth Finegold is Associate Professor of Government at Eastern Washington University.
During the Progressive Era, reform candidates in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago challenged the status quo--with strikingly different results: brief triumph in New York, sustained success in Cleveland, and utter failure in Chicago. Kenneth Finegold seeks to explain this phenomenon by analyzing the support for reform in these cities, especially the role of an emerging class of urban policy professionals in each campaign. His work offers a new way of looking at urban reform opposition to machine politics.
Drawing on original research and quantitative analysis of electoral data, Finegold identifies three distinct patterns of support for reform candidates: traditional reformers drew support from native-stock elites; municipal populists found support among stock immigrant groups and segments of the working class; and progressive candidates won the backing of coalitions made up of traditional reform and municipal populist voters. The success of these reform efforts, Finegold shows, depended on the different ways in which experts were incorporated into city politics. This book demonstrates the significance of expertise as a potential source of change in American politics and policy, and of each city's electoral and administrative organizations as mediating institutions within a national system of urban political economies. "For those who believe that we can only understand urban politics today by knowing yesterday's outcomes, Finegold's careful blend of historical understanding and empirical analysis is an important contribution to the literature." "A provocative, well-researched, and well-written book on a topic of enduring interest." "Fingold's bold and provocative book is an important contribution to our understanding of Progressive reform . . . . A new and useful synthesis that helps make sense of a remarkably wide range of historical outcomes."-Stephen Skowronek, Yale University
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The Unsolid South
Mass Politics and National Representation in a One-Party Enclave
by Devin Caughey
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 2019 Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award Political Organizations and Parties Section of the American Political Science Association" Devin Caughey is the Silverman (1968) Family Career Development Chair and associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During the Jim Crow era, the Democratic Party dominated the American South, presiding over a racially segregated society while also playing an outsized role in national politics. In this compelling book, Devin Caughey provides an entirely new understanding of electoral competition and national representation in this exclusionary one-party enclave. Challenging the notion that the Democratic Party's political monopoly inhibited competition and served only the Southern elite, he demonstrates how Democratic primaries-even as they excluded African Americans-provided forums for ordinary whites to press their interests.
Focusing on politics during and after the New Deal, Caughey shows that congressional primary elections effectively substituted for partisan competition, in part because the spillover from national party conflict helped compensate for the informational deficits of elections without party labels. Caughey draws on a broad range of historical and quantitative evidence, including archival materials, primary election returns, congressional voting records, and hundreds of early public opinion polls that illuminate ideological patterns in the Southern public. Defying the received wisdom, this evidence reveals that members of Congress from the one-party South were no less responsive to their electorates than members from states with true partisan competition.
Reinterpreting a critical period in American history, The Unsolid South reshapes our understanding of the role of parties in democratic theory and sheds critical new light on electoral politics in authoritarian regimes. "[The Unsolid South] contributes significantly to our understanding of several important questions, including how representation can be witnessed in nondemocratic, one-party states; how lawmakers translate constituent preferences into legislative action; and, more broadly, how politics in the American South developed.-Zachary D. Baumann, Political Science Quarterly" "The distinctive politics of the South has long been a specter haunting American politics. No one has brought more clarity or analytical acuity to the study of Southern politics and its central role in the long history of American democracy than Devin Caughey."-Robert C. Lieberman, Johns Hopkins University "The Unsolid South is fresh, convincing, and written with the utmost skill, intelligence, and knowledge of the historical territory. Caughey takes on a big topic and does it large justice."-David R. Mayhew, author of The Imprint of Congress "By demonstrating the democratic basis of the Southern wing of the 'conservative coalition,' this excellent book mounts a serious challenge to scholars of Southern history and political parties."-Robert Mickey, author of Paths out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944–1972 "In this prodigiously researched, theoretically sophisticated book, Devin Caughey offers a nuanced reinterpretation of politics in the so-called Solid South. Focusing on Southern members of Congress, their rivals, and their constituents, Caughey not only revises the standard portrait of one-party politics in the Jim Crow South, but sheds abundant new light on the ways that Southern politics shaped national policy and political economy."-Bruce J. Schulman, Boston University "V. O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation has an almost sacred place in the literature on American politics. Caughey's book, with far better data, examines many of the same themes. Most, but not all, of Key's insights are supported by this comprehensive analysis. Confining his attention to the mostly white
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Disjointed Pluralism
Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress
by Eric Schickler
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the Fenno Prize" Eric Schickler is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
From the 1910 overthrow of "Czar" Joseph Cannon to the reforms enacted when Republicans took over the House in 1995, institutional change within the U.S. Congress has been both a product and a shaper of congressional politics. For several decades, scholars have explained this process in terms of a particular collective interest shared by members, be it partisanship, reelection worries, or policy motivations. Eric Schickler makes the case that it is actually interplay among multiple interests that determines institutional change. In the process, he explains how congressional institutions have proved remarkably adaptable and yet consistently frustrating for members and outside observers alike.
Analyzing leadership, committee, and procedural restructuring in four periods (1890-1910, 1919-1932, 1937-1952, and 1970-1989), Schickler argues that coalitions promoting a wide range of member interests drive change in both the House and Senate. He shows that multiple interests determine institutional innovation within a period; that different interests are important in different periods; and, more broadly, that changes in the salient collective interests across time do not follow a simple logical or developmental sequence. Institutional development appears disjointed, as new arrangements are layered on preexisting structures intended to serve competing interests. An epilogue assesses the rise and fall of Newt Gingrich in light of these findings.
Schickler's model of "disjointed pluralism" integrates rational choice theory with historical institutionalist approaches. It both complicates and advances efforts at theoretical synthesis by proposing a fuller, more nuanced understanding of institutional innovation--and thus of American political development and history. "This is a very good read for students of Congress who puzzle over the institution's configuration. . . . An excellent examination of institutional change." "If we know anything about the U.S. Congress it is this: Congress is a dynamic, ever-changing institution. . . . Alas, for good reasons our theories of congressional organization tend to the static and our empirical analyses tend to the cross-sectional. Eric Schickler's fine book joins a growing set of efforts to understand how and why Congress changes."---Garry Young, Political Science Quarterly "This book is essential reading for those interested in internal legislative politics, and an important contribution to the more general literature on American politics."---Keith E. Whittington, Congress and the Presidency "This is an excellent piece of work, which will be influential. Both rational choice and developmental theorists and congressional scholars will read it. This book will be required reading for all Americanists in political science. It should win several prizes for its thoughtfulness, appropriateness, and careful, knowledgeable use of history."-David Brady, Stanford University "This is an ambitious piece of work on an important topic. I am impressed with the exhaustive search for sources and the splendid, integrated account of so much of Congress's institutional development. It is a remarkable achievement."-Steven S. Smith, University of Minnesota
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The Transformation of American Politics
Activist Government and the Rise of Conservatism
by Paul Pierson
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
Paul Pierson holds the Avice Saint Chair of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University.
The contemporary American political landscape has been marked by two paradoxical transformations: the emergence after 1960 of an increasingly activist state, and the rise of an assertive and politically powerful conservatism that strongly opposes activist government. Leading young scholars take up these issues in The Transformation of American Politics. Arguing that even conservative administrations have become more deeply involved in managing our economy and social choices, they examine why our political system nevertheless has grown divided as never before over the extent to which government should involve itself in our lives.
The contributors show how these two closely linked trends have influenced the reform and running of political institutions, patterns of civic engagement, and capacities for partisan mobilization--and fueled ever-heightening conflicts over the contours and reach of public policy. These transformations not only redefined who participates in American politics and how they do so, but altered the substance of political conflicts and the capacities of rival interests to succeed. Representing both an important analysis of American politics and an innovative contribution to the study of long-term political change, this pioneering volume reveals how partisan discourse and the relationship between citizens and their government have been redrawn and complicated by increased government programs.
The contributors are Andrea Louise Campbell, Jacob S. Hacker, Nolan McCarty, Suzanne Mettler, Paul Pierson, Theda Skocpol, Mark A. Smith, Steven M. Teles, and Julian E. Zelizer. "This smart collection of essays, unlike most such compilations, is as coherent as the title advertises."---Andrew Hartman, Michigan Historical Review "I would recommend this book to everyone who is interested in the geological history of our planet. . . . The book is written in an easy and understandable language." "This excellent volume is recommended for all scholars of conservatism and anyone who studies the American national government, particularly American political development scholars interested in state building and transformation."---Richard J. Meagher, The Americas "This book offers a remarkably wide-ranging analysis of the politics of conservatism from some of the best and brightest. This book stands out for charting the impact of political conservatism on voting and elections and its reshaping of voluntary associations, pressure groups, and government institutions and policy."-Lawrence R. Jacobs, University of Minnesota "The Transformation of American Politics has so much going for it. The contributors to this volume are well-known experts in their fields. There are obvious and important connections among the chapters, adding to the coherence of the whole. The volume effectively shows how historical perspectives can shed light not just on eras long ago but on contemporary debates. It's a winner."-Christopher Howard, author of The Welfare State Nobody Knows
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The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement
The Battle for Control of the Law
by Steven M. Teles
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 2009 Joseph J. Spengler Prize for Best Book in the History of Economics, History of Economics Society" "Co-Winner of the 2009 Herbert Jacob Book Prize, Law and Society Association" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009" Steven M. Teles is associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow at the New America Foundation.
Starting in the 1970s, conservatives learned that electoral victory did not easily convert into a reversal of important liberal accomplishments, especially in the law. As a result, conservatives' mobilizing efforts increasingly turned to law schools, professional networks, public interest groups, and the judiciary--areas traditionally controlled by liberals. Drawing from internal documents, as well as interviews with key conservative figures, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement examines this sometimes fitful, and still only partially successful, conservative challenge to liberal domination of the law and American legal institutions.
Unlike accounts that depict the conservatives as fiendishly skilled, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement reveals the formidable challenges that conservatives faced in competing with legal liberalism. Steven Teles explores how conservative mobilization was shaped by the legal profession, the legacy of the liberal movement, and the difficulties in matching strategic opportunities with effective organizational responses. He explains how foundations and groups promoting conservative ideas built a network designed to dislodge legal liberalism from American elite institutions. And he portrays the reality, not of a grand strategy masterfully pursued, but of individuals and political entrepreneurs learning from trial and error.
Using previously unavailable materials from the Olin Foundation, Federalist Society, Center for Individual Rights, Institute for Justice, and Law and Economics Center, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement provides an unprecedented look at the inner life of the conservative movement. Lawyers, historians, sociologists, political scientists, and activists seeking to learn from the conservative experience in the law will find it compelling reading. "In a terrific new book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, professor Steven M. Teles charts the success of the conservative legal establishment over the past several decades. Digging past liberal clichés about an all-powerful Federalist Society tree fort, Teles charts a complicated countermobilization that took place in legal academia and conservative public-interest law, against law schools and a government in thrall with liberal ideas. He chronicles the rise of a multifaceted organizational and institutional structure that has become the only game in town."---Dahilia Lithwick, Slate "Teles's book is . . . a piece of first-rate scholarship based on archival research and many interviews. . . . [T]he Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement is a fine piece of historical scholarship and an important contribution to understanding strategies for combating entrenched political and intellectual elites."---Charlotte Allen, The Weekly Standard "Steven Teles . . . examines a complex phenomenon still playing itself out in The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement. He does so thoughtfully and provocatively, and with access to key insiders and archival material. His book should be interesting to readers across the political spectrum. . . . Teles's book provides a panoramic, nonpartisan portrait of the sober and serious side of the conservative legal movement. In doing so, it can hopefully lead toward a respectful, constructive dialogue about the role of law in society."---Ronald Goldfarb, Washington Lawyer "I am recommending Teles's book to all my liberal and progressive colleagues. . . . Perhaps if liberals and progressives pay enough attention to the lessons about problem-solving and adaptation taught in this valuable b
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The Origins of the Urban Crisis
Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
by Thomas J. Sugrue
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 1998 Bancroft Prize in American History" "Winner of the 1997 Philip Taft Prize in Labor History" "Winner of the 1996 President's Book Award, Social Science History Association" "Winner of the 1997 Best Book in North American Urban History Award, Urban History Association" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1997" Thomas J. Sugrue is the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton) and Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.
The reasons behind Detroit's persistent racialized poverty after World War II
Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America's racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today's urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II.
This Princeton Classics edition includes a new preface by Sugrue, discussing the lasting impact of the postwar transformation on urban America and the chronic issues leading to Detroit's bankruptcy. "Praise for Princeton's previous edition:"[Sugrue's] disciplined historical engagement with a complex, often inglorious, past offers a compelling model for understanding how race and the Rust Belt converged to create the current impasse."" "Praise for Princeton's previous edition: "A splendid book that does no less than transform our understanding of United States history after 1940."" "Praise for Princeton's previous edition: "[A] first-rate account . . . . With insight and elegance, Sugrue describes the street-by-street warfare to maintain housing values against the perceived encroachment of blacks trying desperately to escape the underbuilt and overcrowded slums."" "Praise for Princeton's previous edition: "Perhaps by offering a clearer picture of how the urban crisis began, Sugrue brings us a bit closer to finding a way to end it."" "Praise for Princeton's previous edition: "[T]he most interesting, informative, and provocative book on modern Detroit."" "Praise for Princeton's previous edition: "Superbly researched and engagingly written."" "Praise for Princeton's previous edition: "[A] devastating critique of the currently fashionable 'culture of poverty' thesis. Must reading for anyone concerned about the current urban crisis.""---Jacqueline Jones, Lingua Franca
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Paths Out of Dixie
The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972
by Robert Mickey
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 2016 J. David Greenstone Book Prize, Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association" "Winner of the 2017 V.O. Key Award, Southern Political Science Association" Robert Mickey is associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan.
The transformation of the American South--from authoritarian to democratic rule--is the most important political development since World War II. It has re-sorted voters into parties, remapped presidential elections, and helped polarize Congress. Most important, it is the final step in America's democratization. Paths Out of Dixie illuminates this sea change by analyzing the democratization experiences of Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
Robert Mickey argues that Southern states, from the 1890s until the early 1970s, constituted pockets of authoritarian rule trapped within and sustained by a federal democracy. These enclaves--devoted to cheap agricultural labor and white supremacy--were established by conservative Democrats to protect their careers and clients. From the abolition of the whites-only Democratic primary in 1944 until the national party reforms of the early 1970s, enclaves were battered and destroyed by a series of democratization pressures from inside and outside their borders. Drawing on archival research, Mickey traces how Deep South rulers--dissimilar in their internal conflict and political institutions--varied in their responses to these challenges. Ultimately, enclaves differed in their degree of violence, incorporation of African Americans, and reconciliation of Democrats with the national party. These diverse paths generated political and economic legacies that continue to reverberate today.
Focusing on enclave rulers, their governance challenges, and the monumental achievements of their adversaries, Paths Out of Dixie shows how the struggles of the recent past have reshaped the South and, in so doing, America's political development. "Paths Out of Dixie is the rare gem of American politics destined to be a touchstone across political science subfields."---Jason Brownlee, Journal of Politics "Mickey's work rests on an exhaustive treasure of archival research that displays a stunning commitment to the best traditions of American political development scholarship. Paths Out of Dixie is a worthy and indeed more rigorous successor to Key's (1949) Southern Politics."---Kimberley Johnson, Journal of Politics "Mickey's work should be valued by students of the modern American South. Like recent historians who are arguably the new gold standards for studying this subject, he reveals fresh ways of understanding political change in the Deep South."---Anthony B. Newkirk, Arkansas Review "In this remarkable book, Mickey focuses on Southern politics after the great public reversal of black disenfranchisement-and boldly compares that politics to authoritarianism. He grounds his compelling claims and narratives in an exceptionally confident handling of evidence, resulting in a major milestone in American political science. This vivid and profoundly illuminating book is certain to change views not just of Southern politics, but of the country we have been-and the national democracy we have become."-Rick Valelly, Swarthmore College "This is an impressive account of political change in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia, from one-party authoritarian regimes in the 1890s to democracies in the 1970s. Mickey's analyses of the constellation of forces in each state are powerful. Paths out of Dixie will be a revelation to political scientists."-Amy Bridges, University of California, San Diego "This is one of the most significant books on this critical region to appear in decades. Mickey situates this work in the comparative democratization literature and analyzes political accommodation to civil rights from the perspective of elites and parties. There is nothing else quite like it."-Elizabeth Sanders,
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The Hollow Parties
The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics
by Daniel Schlozman
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
A major history from the Founding to our embittered present that "explains the void" (Politico) at the center of America's political parties
Featured on The Ezra Klein Show and The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
America's political parties are hollow shells of what they could be, locked in a polarized struggle for power and unrooted as civic organizations. The Hollow Parties takes readers from the rise of mass party politics in the Jacksonian era through the years of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Today's parties, at once overbearing and ineffectual, have emerged from the interplay of multiple party traditions that reach back to the Founding.
Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld paint unforgettable portraits of figures such as Martin Van Buren, whose pioneering Democrats invented the machinery of the mass political party, and Abraham Lincoln and other heroic Republicans of that party's first generation who stood up to the Slave Power. And they show how today's fractious party politics arose from the ashes of the New Deal order in the 1970s. Activists in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention transformed presidential nominations but failed to lay the foundations for robust, movement-driven parties. Instead, modern American conservatism hollowed out the party system, deeming it a mere instrument for power.
Party hollowness lies at the heart of our democratic discontents. With historical sweep and political acuity, The Hollow Parties offers powerful answers to pressing questions about how the nation's parties became so dysfunctional-and how they might yet realize their promise. Daniel Schlozman is associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton). Sam Rosenfeld is associate professor of political science at Colgate University. He is the author of The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era. "Schlozman and Rosenfeld provide an ambitious and novel account of the country's contemporary political crises: the authoritarian threat from the Republican right, the listlessness of the Democrats, and the widening gulf between them. Provocative and insightful, The Hollow Parties makes a powerful argument that the defense of American democracy requires parties to again become central institutional actors in civic life."-David A. Bateman, author of Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France
"This is a wonderful and necessary book rooted in a sense of urgency and a wise understanding of American history. The Hollow Parties argues persuasively and passionately that political parties are essential to a healthy democracy, and that their salvation lies not in raising gobs of money but in rooting themselves in the daily civic lives and bread-and-butter concerns of local communities. It's also a joy to read a pathbreaking work of political science written in eloquent and elegant prose."-E. J. Dionne Jr., author of Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country
"This masterful book marks a landmark and paradigm-shifting study of American political parties. It is ambitious in the best sense of the word and is an argument with which anyone interested in American politics will have to contend."-Lily Geismer, author of Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality
"The most sweeping and most incisive history of party organization I have ever read. Schlozman and Rosenfeld have crafted a narrative that captures the drama and nuances of political behavior with the kind of zestful eloquence found in the work of the best historians. Nearly every page includes observations that made me reflect anew about matters I have been writing and teaching about for a long time. This is a truly impressive book."-Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to W
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Backlash Presidents
From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History
by Julia R. Azari
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
How most presidents avoid upsetting the racial status quo-and why those who do pave the way for lawless, norm-violating successors
When Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, becoming the nation's first Black president, the stage was set for Donald Trump's eventual rise to power. Backlash Presidents shows how, throughout American history, administrations that challenge the country's racial status quo are followed by presidents who deal in racially charged politics and presidential lawlessness, culminating in impeachment crises.
In this incisive book, Julia Azari traces the connections between racially transformative presidents and their successors, examining the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and Obama and Trump. When he signed long-awaited civil rights legislation in 1964, Lyndon Johnson unleashed a perfect political storm that swept Nixon into the White House. Azari demonstrates how Nixon's rhetoric, relationship to Congress, and attitudes about executive power exhibit striking parallels with Andrew Johnson and Trump. She discusses how their actions are linked to race and racialized institutions-the Department of War during Reconstruction, the FBI during the Nixon years, and elections today-and looks at what happens after impeachment, describing how the rush to establish a new order perpetuates many of the same problems as the old.
Challenging the conventional wisdom about the role of norms in American democracy, Backlash Presidents reveals how normal presidential politics upholds unsustainable racial hierarchy that in turn gives rise to intense periods of instability. Julia R. Azari is professor of political science at Marquette University. She is the author of Delivering the People's Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate and the editor (with Lara M. Brown and Zim G. Nwokora) of The Presidential Leadership Dilemma: Between the Constitution and a Political Party. Her work has been featured widely in the media, including The New York Times, MSNBC, Politico, and FiveThirtyEight. "In Backlash Presidents, Julia Azari provides a rich historical account of the relationship between presidential transformations of the racial order and presidential impeachment. This book offers a deeper understanding of the complex relationship of formal institutions, backlash politics, and accountability-and is a must-read for anyone interested in crises of democracy."-Didi Kuo, author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't
"This impressive and important book offers a new and convincing interpretation of presidential history, showing a recurrent pattern of racial transformation and backlash in presidential politics. In revealing the connections among presidential power, race, norms, and impeachment, Julia Azari has made one of the most essential contributions to explaining the roots of the Trump era."-John A. Dearborn, Vanderbilt University
"Backlash Presidents brings together an impressive array of themes and literatures: race, the presidency, populism, political orders. With impeachment as its fulcrum, this sweeping reinterpretation convincingly demonstrates just how the tools of American political development can illuminate past and present together."-Daniel Schlozman, coauthor of The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Political Parties
"An innovative, interesting, and important historical analysis of the heretofore unappreciated significance of racial politics in presidential impeachments. On top of the book's creative and fresh take on impeachment, it's beautifully written and easily accessible to audiences beyond academia."-Michael Tesler, University of California, Irvine "Good evidence that racism, preferably unaddressed, remains an ongoing undercurrent in America."
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Black and Blue
African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party
by Paul Frymer
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 2009 Best Book Award in Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, American Political Science Association" Paul Frymer is associate professor of politics and director of the Legal Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America (Princeton).
In the 1930s, fewer than one in one hundred U.S. labor union members were African American. By 1980, the figure was more than one in five. Black and Blue explores the politics and history that led to this dramatic integration of organized labor. In the process, the book tells a broader story about how the Democratic Party unintentionally sowed the seeds of labor's decline.
The labor and civil rights movements are the cornerstones of the Democratic Party, but for much of the twentieth century these movements worked independently of one another. Paul Frymer argues that as Democrats passed separate legislation to promote labor rights and racial equality they split the issues of class and race into two sets of institutions, neither of which had enough authority to integrate the labor movement.
From this division, the courts became the leading enforcers of workplace civil rights, threatening unions with bankruptcy if they resisted integration. The courts' previously unappreciated power, however, was also a problem: in diversifying unions, judges and lawyers enfeebled them financially, thus democratizing through destruction. Sharply delineating the double-edged sword of state and legal power, Black and Blue chronicles an achievement that was as problematic as it was remarkable, and that demonstrates the deficiencies of race- and class-based understandings of labor, equality, and power in America. "Black and Blue is an exceptional study of the relationships between the civil rights and labor movements during the second half of the twentieth century...His study of the particular details of this struggle, as well as the institutional circumstances that guided the struggle will be discussed for years to come."---Mark Graber, Balkinization "Paul Frymer's Black and Blue is an important book, precisely because it takes what should be so obvious to scholars and makes it appear as such. At least since the mid-1980s, scholars have debated the 'rise and fall' of the labor-civil rights movement and its relationship to the power and authority of the Democratic party. Combining the methodologies of politics, the law, and history, Frymer's interdisciplinary work should help settle this long-running debate and contribute to new (and perhaps even more productive) avenues of inquiry."---Peter F. Lau, Journal of American History "Black and Blue is a powerful demonstration of how a different theoretical paradigm can result in new interpretations of not only historical events, but current understandings of both racism and judicial legitimacy. Although there are many unanswered questions resulting from this intriguing book, it offers some fruitful new directions for the burgeoning scholarship in intersectionality, as well as continuing in the traditions of American Political Development and New Institutionalism."---Michelle D. Deardorff, Law and Politics Book Review "[T]his is an exceptionally interesting book. Frymer makes new arguments, uses fresh evidence, and addresses important questions. He casts new light on the historical relationship between labor and the civil rights movement."---Michael P. Hanagan, American Journal of Sociology "Black and Blue is an important contribution to the interdisciplinary literature on race and the U.S. labor movement. Its evidence is fresh and stimulating, its arguments original and compelling, and its conclusions matter. This is a book not only scholars but also activists should read."---Nancy MacLean, Industrial and Labor Relations Review "Frymer fruitfully subjects courts to the kind of institutional analysis generally reserved for the political branches. His conclusion t
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Three Worlds of Relief
Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal
by Cybelle Fox
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Co-Winner of the 2014 Barrington Moore Book Award, Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association" "Winner of the 2013 Distinguished Book Award, Latina/o Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association" "Winner of the 2013 Thomas and Znaniecki Best Book Award, International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association" "Co-Winner of the 2013 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association" "Winner of the 2012 Award for Best Book in Latino Politics, Latino Caucus of the American Political Science Association" "Winner of the 2012 C. Wright Mills Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems" Cybelle Fox is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the coauthor of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings.
Three Worlds of Relief examines the role of race and immigration in the development of the American social welfare system by comparing how blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants were treated by welfare policies during the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Taking readers from the turn of the twentieth century to the dark days of the Depression, Cybelle Fox finds that, despite rampant nativism, European immigrants received generous access to social welfare programs. The communities in which they lived invested heavily in relief. Social workers protected them from snooping immigration agents, and ensured that noncitizenship and illegal status did not prevent them from receiving the assistance they needed. But that same helping hand was not extended to Mexicans and blacks. Fox reveals, for example, how blacks were relegated to racist and degrading public assistance programs, while Mexicans who asked for assistance were deported with the help of the very social workers they turned to for aid.
Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Fox paints a riveting portrait of how race, labor, and politics combined to create three starkly different worlds of relief. She debunks the myth that white America's immigrant ancestors pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, unlike immigrants and minorities today. Three Worlds of Relief challenges us to reconsider not only the historical record but also the implications of our past on contemporary debates about race, immigration, and the American welfare state. "Thoroughly researched and well written, the book enhances the literature on immigration and ethnicity." "Three Worlds of Relief covers new territory in social welfare history and will interest academics and students in the field. Of particular importance to the social work profession is the author's attention to the role that social workers played in advocating both for progressive legislation and practice, except in the West and Southwest."---Marguerite G. Rosenthal, Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare "Three Worlds of Relief reminds us that welfare policies must be measured by their implementation and effects as well as their intent. State and local authorities have the power to accentuate or to mute ethnic and racial biases in ways that undermine or enhance the mission of dispensing benefits impartially. Students, scholars, and practitioners concerned with the problem of inequality in the welfare state will find this book illuminating."---Lara Vapnek, Journal of Children and Poverty "Fox's scholarship provides a detailed and rich portrait of how racism and race-based nativism, in conjunction with political and economic interests, shaped the design and implementation of U.S. welfare policies. . . . [T]his book is necessary reading for advanced scholars of U.S. social policy, welfare, poverty, and race and immigration and is highly recommended for graduate courses on these topics as well as historical and comparative methods."---Ellen Reese and Michael Walker, American Journal of Sociology "Fox has set a scholarly agenda for a new social history of
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Racial Realignment
The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965
by Eric Schickler
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 2017 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, American Political Science Association" "Co-Winner of the 2017 J. David Greenstone Book Prize, Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association" Eric Schickler is the Jeffrey and Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Disjointed Pluralism and Filibuster (both Princeton).
Few transformations in American politics have been as important as the integration of African Americans into the Democratic Party and the Republican embrace of racial policy conservatism. The story of this partisan realignment on race is often told as one in which political elites-such as Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater-set in motion a dramatic and sudden reshuffling of party positioning on racial issues during the 1960s. Racial Realignment instead argues that top party leaders were actually among the last to move, and that their choices were dictated by changes that had already occurred beneath them. Drawing upon rich data sources and original historical research, Eric Schickler shows that the two parties' transformation on civil rights took place gradually over decades.
Schickler reveals that Democratic partisanship, economic liberalism, and support for civil rights had crystallized in public opinion, state parties, and Congress by the mid-1940s. This trend was propelled forward by the incorporation of African Americans and the pro-civil-rights Congress of Industrial Organizations into the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, Republican partisanship became aligned with economic and racial conservatism. Scrambling to maintain existing power bases, national party elites refused to acknowledge these changes for as long as they could, but the civil rights movement finally forced them to choose where their respective parties would stand.
Presenting original ideas about political change, Racial Realignment sheds new light on twentieth and twenty-first century racial politics. "Racial Realignment is a genuinely illuminating book."---Rich Yeselson, Dissent "Very impressive. . . . [A] masterful historical analysis."---David T. Canon, Congress & The Presidency "How did the Democrats become America's civil rights party? This book is the authoritative statement on that question. With a sure touch, Schickler clocks the evolution from the 1930s onward, using a rich variety of new data, not to mention his vast knowledge of the territory. His deep penetration of congressional politics in the 1930s and '40s is a major achievement."-David Mayhew, Yale University "Few questions on American political growth are as important as those that ask how our major political parties developed their distinctive commitments on race and how those commitments shape broader policy agendas. This book supplants the conventional explanation for America's racial realignment and establishes itself as the account with which all future research must grapple."-Nolan McCarty, Princeton University "Deftly mixing quantitative and historical scholarship with his deep knowledge of the U.S. Congress and American political parties, Schickler rewrites the civil rights fault lines of the twentieth century. He shows that America's partisan racial realignment commenced not in the 1950s and '60s, but in the New Deal itself. A triumph of historical political science that provides fresh insight on the foundations and troubles of our current party system."-Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University "In Racial Realignment, Eric Schickler turns his expert analytical abilities to previously unmined historical data and explains how the New Deal Democratic Party turned itself into the protector of civil rights while racial conservatives became ensconced in what had long been the 'Party of Lincoln.' Upending long-established interpretations, the result is a riveting and powerful look at political change in the United States."-Suzanne Mettler, Cornell University
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The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy
Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928
by Daniel Carpenter
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the Levine Memorial Book Prize" "Winner of the Gladys M. Kammerer Award" Daniel P. Carpenter is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He has also taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. This book is based upon his dissertation, which won the 1998 Harold Lasswell Award of the American Political Science Association, and includes a chapter that won the 1995 Herbert Kaufman Award of the APSA.
Until now political scientists have devoted little attention to the origins of American bureaucracy and the relationship between bureaucratic and interest group politics. In this pioneering book, Daniel Carpenter contributes to our understanding of institutions by presenting a unified study of bureaucratic autonomy in democratic regimes. He focuses on the emergence of bureaucratic policy innovation in the United States during the Progressive Era, asking why the Post Office Department and the Department of Agriculture became politically independent authors of new policy and why the Interior Department did not. To explain these developments, Carpenter offers a new theory of bureaucratic autonomy grounded in organization theory, rational choice models, and network concepts.
According to the author, bureaucracies with unique goals achieve autonomy when their middle-level officials establish reputations among diverse coalitions for effectively providing unique services. These coalitions enable agencies to resist political control and make it costly for politicians to ignore the agencies' ideas. Carpenter assesses his argument through a highly innovative combination of historical narratives, statistical analyses, counterfactuals, and carefully structured policy comparisons. Along the way, he reinterprets the rise of national food and drug regulation, Comstockery and the Progressive anti-vice movement, the emergence of American conservation policy, the ascent of the farm lobby, the creation of postal savings banks and free rural mail delivery, and even the congressional Cannon Revolt of 1910. "Carpenter's book is intellectually arresting--weaving quantitative and qualitative empiricism through an impressive array of theoretical propositions toward an attractive theory of bureaucratic autonomy in the administrative state . . . . [A]dmirably successful in adding to our narrative of the development of the American administrative state."---Anthony Bertelli, Public Administration Review "The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy is a major work sure to influence future understandings of progressivism, state-building, and American political development. Carpenter delves into the highly variable world of bureaucratic entrepreneurship and innovation in organization to explain the emergence of scattered pockets of administrative autonomy within the executive branch of American government. His carefully crafted analysis of the conditions under which administrators have gained control over the political authorities that ostensibly control them presents a formidable challenge to the assumptions of political scientists, and it should prompt some equally careful rethinking of the operations of American democracy more generally."-Stephen Skowronek, Yale University "Although we tend to discuss the strength, or weakness, of state autonomy as though it were the same for every agency, the fact of the matter is that autonomy varies considerably from agency to agency. In this excellent book, Daniel Carpenter is among the first to make this observation and explore its implications."-Graham K. Wilson, University of Wisconsin-Madison "Whether we regard the modern state as fair as Athena, stepping fully formed from the brow of Zeus, or as foul as Frankenstein, sutured on a scientist's table, there had to be a time of quickening when the limbs began to twitch and the brain began to spark. In a splendid reinterpretation of the classic period of American state formation, Dan Carpenter demonstrates that
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California Greenin'
How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader
by David Vogel
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize, Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics Section of the American Political Science Association" David Vogel is professor emeritus in the Haas School of Business and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His many books include The Politics of Precaution (Princeton) and The Market for Virtue.
A political history of environmental policy and regulation in California, from the Gold Rush to the present
Over the course of its 150-year history, California has successfully protected its scenic wilderness areas, restricted coastal oil drilling, regulated automobile emissions, preserved coastal access, improved energy efficiency, and, most recently, addressed global climate change. How has this state, more than any other, enacted so many innovative and stringent environmental regulations over such a long period of time? The first comprehensive look at California's history of environmental leadership, California Greenin' shows why the Golden State has been at the forefront in setting new environmental standards, often leading the rest of the nation.
From the establishment of Yosemite, America's first protected wilderness, and the prohibition of dumping gold-mining debris in the nineteenth century to sweeping climate- change legislation in the twenty-first, David Vogel traces California's remarkable environmental policy trajectory. He explains that this pathbreaking role developed because California had more to lose from environmental deterioration and more to gain from preserving its stunning natural geography. As a result, citizens and civic groups effectively mobilized to protect and restore their state's natural beauty and, importantly, were often backed both by business interests and bystrong regulatory authorities. Business support for environmental regulation in California reveals that strict standards are not only compatible with economic growth but can also contribute to it. Vogel also examines areas where California has fallen short, particularly in water management and the state's dependence on automobile transportation.
As environmental policy debates continue to grow more heated, California Greenin' demonstrates that the Golden State's impressive record of environmental accomplishments holds lessons not just for the country but for the world. "[A] truly fabulous book, one of the best I've read this year."---Alice Evans, London School of Economics Review of Books "So, while California Greenin' is a must read, expect more scholarship on this intriguing and important subject."---Thomas J. Osborne, Environmental History "David Vogel's thoughtful, engaging historical work explains how California evolved into an environmental policy leader, as competing economic interests and unusual alliances came together in reaction to serious pollution problems and threats to California's scenic beauty. This is a timely book for all who want to understand why California is at the forefront of current national efforts to slow climate change and protect the environment."-Bruce Cain, Stanford University "David Vogel pioneered the term 'California effect' and demonstrated its enormous impact on numerous areas of environmental policy. This important book explains the historical and political factors that have underpinned the Golden State's enduring commitment to environmental protection and that continue to position it for national and global influence."-Barry Rabe, University of Michigan "Timely and significant, California Greenin' examines why the state's environmental policies have long been so distinctive and influential. David Vogel offers insights into how California managed the tension between economic growth and environmental protection during the postwar era, and how other U.S. states can develop innovative environmental policies at a time when Washington politicians are seeking to roll back environmental standards."
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Still a House Divided
Race and Politics in Obama's America
by Desmond King
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012" Desmond S. King is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government at the University of Oxford. His many books include The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation. Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His many books include Stories of Peoplehood.
Why race remains the central political issue in America today
Why have American policies failed to reduce the racial inequalities still pervasive throughout the nation? Has President Barack Obama defined new political approaches to race that might spur unity and progress? Still a House Divided examines the enduring divisions of American racial politics and how these conflicts have been shaped by distinct political alliances and their competing race policies. Combining deep historical knowledge with a detailed exploration of such issues as housing, employment, criminal justice, multiracial census categories, immigration, voting in majority-minority districts, and school vouchers, Desmond King and Rogers Smith assess the significance of President Obama's election to the White House and the prospects for achieving constructive racial policies for America's future.
Offering a fresh perspective on the networks of governing institutions, political groups, and political actors that influence the structure of American racial politics, King and Smith identify three distinct periods of opposing racial policy coalitions in American history. The authors investigate how today's alliances pit color-blind and race-conscious approaches against one another, contributing to political polarization and distorted policymaking. Contending that President Obama has so far inadequately confronted partisan divisions over race, the authors call for all sides to recognize the need for a balance of policy measures if America is to ever cease being a nation divided.
Presenting a powerful account of American political alliances and their contending racial agendas, Still a House Divided sheds light on a policy path vital to the country's future. "[King and Smith] accurately survey the history and the evolution of American thinking on race."---Richard D. Kahlenberg, New Republic "Still a House Divided is quite an achievement. . . . This is an outstanding work." "Essential reading for scholars of race, politics and policy. It provides a rich and textured analysis that is accessible and theoretically driven. . . . The individual sections are master classes in each policy era and will help guide individual scholars with interests in those eras. With that, the book is an instant classic by two scholars who routinely produce work of this quality."---Mark Sawyer, Ethnic and Racial Studies "Hopefully, there will be an intellectually synergistic effect from the publication of Still a House Divided. As American politics scholars in these camps move forward, they might be able to see some working in the middle and refine their scholarship."---Katherine Tate, Political Science Quarterly "Presenting a powerful account of American political alliances and their contending racial agendas, Still a House Divided sheds light on a policy path vital to the country's future." "Still a House Divided deftly lays to rest the idea of postracialism in American politics and, through the concept of rival racial-policy coalitions, reveals the modern potency of the dispute between color-blind and race-conscious camps. King and Smith make a compelling case that competing visions over the role of race continue to define the core of American political life, and their bold and meticulously researched book offers new and much-needed leverage on a frustratingly durable problem."-Lawrence D. Bobo, Harvard University "This is an important book by two very insightful scholars. King and Smith take on issues, both historical and current, necessary to understanding and intervening in the raci
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Laboratories Against Democracy
How National Parties Transformed State Politics
by Jacob M. Grumbach
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
As national political fights are waged at the state level, democracy itself pays the price.
Over the past generation, the Democratic and Republican parties have each become nationally coordinated political teams. American political institutions, on the other hand, remain highly decentralized. Laboratories against Democracy shows how national political conflicts are increasingly flowing through the subnational institutions of state politics, with profound consequences for public policy and American democracy.
Jacob Grumbach argues that as Congress has become more gridlocked, national partisan and activist groups have shifted their sights to the state level, nationalizing state politics in the process and transforming state governments into the engines of American policymaking. He shows how this has had the ironic consequence of making policy more varied across the states as red and blue party coalitions implement increasingly distinct agendas in areas like health care, reproductive rights, and climate change. The consequences don't stop there, however. Drawing on a wealth of new data on state policy, public opinion, money in politics, and democratic performance, Grumbach traces how national groups are using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself.
Required reading for this precarious moment in our politics, Laboratories against Democracy reveals how the pursuit of national partisan agendas at the state level has intensified the challenges facing American democracy, and asks whether today's state governments are mitigating the political crises of our time-or accelerating them.
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How the Heartland Went Red
Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics
by Stephanie Ternullo
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
How local contexts help us understand why White voters in America's heartland are shifting to the right
Over the past several decades, predominantly White, postindustrial cities in America's agriculture and manufacturing center have flipped from blue to red. Cities that were once part of the traditional Democratic New Deal coalition began to vote Republican, providing crucial support for the electoral victories of Republican presidents from Reagan to Trump. In How the Heartland Went Red, Stephanie Ternullo argues for the importance of place in understanding this rightward shift, showing how voters in these small Midwestern cities view national politics-whether Republican appeals to racial and religious identities or Democrat's appeals to class-through the lens of local conditions.
Offering a comparative study of three White blue-collar Midwestern cities in the run-up to the 2020 election, Ternullo shows the ways that local contexts have sped up or slowed down White voters' shift to the right. One of these cities has voted overwhelmingly Republican for decades; one swung to the right in 2016 but remains closely divided between Republicans and Democrats; and one, defying current trends, remains reliably Democratic. Through extensive interviews, Ternullo traces the structural and organizational dimensions of place that frame residents' perceptions of political and economic developments. These place-based conditions-including the ways that local leaders define their cities' challenges-help prioritize residents' social identities, connecting them to one party over another. Despite elite polarization, fragmented media, and the nationalization of American politics, Ternullo argues, the importance of place persists-as one of many factors informing partisanship, but as a particularly important one among cross-pressured voters whose loyalties are contested. Stephanie Ternullo is assistant professor of government at Harvard University. "By demonstrating the importance of local organizations in shaping partisan commitments, Ternullo's original and timely book accomplishes what few other studies of Trump support have done: it illuminates the meso-level mechanisms that connect individual-level attitudes with macro-level political outcomes. In so doing, this carefully designed and expertly executed comparative study helps us understand how distinct placed-based identities lead otherwise similar towns along sharply divergent paths. Engagingly written and rigorously researched, this multicausal account is a must-read for anyone interested in the radicalization of contemporary democratic politics. It belongs in the canon of essential books on the Trump era-and American political change more broadly."-Bart Bonikowski, New York University
"How the Heartland Went Red calls academics, politicians, policymakers, and others to grapple with the degree to which politics take novel shape in specific locales, and with how the contexts in which one is embedded can shape one's politics. This book promises to change how all of us think and talk about the adoption of partisan attachments."-Japonica Brown-Saracino, Boston University
"This book is a good reminder that what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat is something that people figure out through interaction with each other, in particular places. Ternullo's sociological approach is invaluable. Her intensive fieldwork and careful theorizing illuminate the complex ways that structure and culture shape communities' and individuals' attempts to make sense of their place in the world and their choices about public affairs. The result is a valuable deepening of the conversation around the contemporary link between place and partisanship."-Katherine Cramer, University of Wisconsin–Madison "A powerful argument that economic, cultural, and political developments at the local level still matter a great deal. . . . [How the Heartland Went
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The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State
Institutions and Interest Group Power in the United States, France, and Japan
by Adam D. Sheingate
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2001" Adam D. Sheingate is Assistant Professor of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University.
A long-dominant reading of American politics holds that public policy in the United States is easily captured by special interest groups. Countering this view, Adam Sheingate traces the development of government intervention in agriculture from its nineteenth-century origins to contemporary struggles over farm subsidies. His considered conclusion is that American institutions have not given agricultural interest groups any particular advantages in the policy process, in part because opposing lobbies also enjoy access to policymakers. In fact, the high degree of conflict and pluralism maintained by American institutions made possible substantial retrenchment of the agricultural welfare state during the 1980s and 1990s. In Japan and France--two countries with markedly different institutional characters than the United States--powerful agricultural interests and a historically close relationship between farmers, bureaucrats, and politicians continue to preclude a roll-back of farm subsidies.
This well-crafted study not only puts a new spin on agricultural policy, but also makes a strong case for the broader claim that the relatively decentralized American political system is actually less prone to capture and rule by subgovernments than the more centralized political systems found in France and Japan. Sheingate's historical, comparative approach also demonstrates, in a widely useful way, how past institutional developments shape current policies and options. "A good read on the origin, evolution, and contemporary politics of agricultural-support policies in the United States, France and Japan." "A splendid comparative study of agricultural policy processes in the US, France, and Japan." "This historical and comparative analysis is well executed. . . . The book makes a contribution by virtue of its historical sweep and the quality of research. . . . A helpful addition to the growing body of historical institutionalist literature that demonstrates the influence of macro- and sectoral-level institutions on policymaking."---Grace Skogstad, American Political Science Review "This is a splendid book with many admirable qualities. It makes a provocative but convincing argument that cuts against the conventional wisdom on the capacity of American institutions to withdraw established benefits. It makes an important contribution to the supremely important theoretical debate on when or whether institutions make a difference. Finally, the book displays admirable scholarship. Sheingate clearly understands the details of complicated policies during an extended period in three different countries; this is itself a major achievement."-Graham K. Wilson, author of Only in America? American Politics in Comparative Perspective
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American Bonds
How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation
by Sarah L. Quinn
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the Viviana Zelizer Award for Best Book, Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association" "Honorable Mention for the Theory Prize, Theory Section of the American Sociological Association" Sarah L. Quinn is associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington.
How the American government has long used financial credit programs to create economic opportunities
Federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities have gained widespread attention in recent years because of the 2008 financial crisis, but issues of government credit have been part of American life since the nation's founding. From the 1780s, when a watershed national land credit policy was established, to the postwar foundations of our current housing finance system, American Bonds examines the evolution of securitization and federal credit programs. Sarah Quinn shows that since the Westward expansion, the U.S. government has used financial markets to manage America's complex social divides, and politicians and officials across the political spectrum have turned to land sales, home ownership, and credit to provide economic opportunity without the appearance of market intervention or direct wealth redistribution.
Highly technical systems, securitization, and credit programs have been fundamental to how Americans determined what they could and should owe one another. Over time, government officials embraced credit as a political tool that allowed them to navigate an increasingly complex and fractured political system, affirming the government's role as a consequential and creative market participant. Neither intermittent nor marginal, credit programs supported the growth of powerful industries, from railroads and farms to housing and finance; have been used for disaster relief, foreign policy, and military efforts; and were promoters of amortized mortgages, lending abroad, venture capital investment, and mortgage securitization.
Illuminating America's market-heavy social policies, American Bonds illustrates how political institutions became involved in the nation's lending practices. "In American Bonds, Quinn performs an improbable alchemy. With superb insight, she transforms the seemingly arid technical terrain of credit markets into a vivid political, sociological, and moral territory. This book will attract not only specialists but also anyone interested in learning why and how government policy has shaped American lending practices." -Viviana Zelizer, author of Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy "American Bonds traces the historical development of the U.S. mortgage market over two centuries, and with it the evolution of credit as a powerful lever of statecraft. Quinn's meticulously researched account shows how credit has long been central to policymakers' attempts to resolve particularly American dilemmas of growth and distribution. This satisfying, accomplished book elaborates as no other work has done the ways in which credit organizes the American state and polity."-Greta R. Krippner, University of Michigan "In compelling detail, Quinn shows that credit is a durable, supple, but often invisible tool of domestic statecraft. For more than two centuries, the U.S. government's regulation of finance spurred development and dramatically refashioned America's social and economic landscape. With this insightful analysis, we can appreciate how credit became a key site of social and political conflict."-Bruce Carruthers, Northwestern University
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The Hidden Welfare State
Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States
by Christopher Howard
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
Christopher Howard is Assistant Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary.
Despite costing hundreds of billions of dollars and subsidizing everything from homeownership and child care to health insurance, tax expenditures (commonly known as tax loopholes) have received little attention from those who study American government. This oversight has contributed to an incomplete and misleading portrait of U.S. social policy. Here Christopher Howard analyzes the "hidden" welfare state created by such programs as tax deductions for home mortgage interest and employer-provided retirement pensions, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit. Basing his work on the histories of these four tax expenditures, Howard highlights the distinctive characteristics of all such policies. Tax expenditures are created more routinely and quietly than traditional social programs, for instance, and over time generate unusual coalitions of support. They expand and contract without deliberate changes to individual programs.
Howard helps the reader to appreciate the historic links between the hidden welfare state and U.S. tax policy, which accentuate the importance of Congress and political parties. He also focuses on the reasons why individuals, businesses, and public officials support tax expenditures. The Hidden Welfare State will appeal to anyone interested in the origins, development, and structure of the American welfare state. Students of public finance will gain new insights into the politics of taxation. And as policymakers increasingly promote tax expenditures to address social problems, the book offers some sobering lessons about how such programs work. "Mr. Howard's book is not meant for the reader with a casual interest in his subject. But. . . it stimulates all sorts of radical thoughts--some of them perhaps more radical than the author intended."---David Frum, The Wall Street Journal
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Governing the American State
Congress and the New Federalism, 1877-1929
by Kimberley S. Johnson
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
Kimberley S. Johnson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University.
The modern, centralized American state was supposedly born in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Kimberley S. Johnson argues that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Cooperative federalism was not born in a Big Bang, but instead emerged out of power struggles within the nation's major political institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Examining the fifty-two years from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the Great Depression, Johnson shows that the "first New Federalism" was created during this era from dozens of policy initiatives enacted by a modernizing Congress. The expansion of national power took the shape of policy instruments that reflected the constraints imposed by the national courts and the Constitution, but that also satisfied emergent policy coalitions of interest groups, local actors, bureaucrats, and members of Congress.
Thus, argues Johnson, the New Deal was not a decisive break with the past, but rather a superstructure built on a foundation that emerged during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Her evidence draws on an analysis of 131 national programs enacted between 1877 and 1930, a statistical analysis of these programs, and detailed case studies of three of them: the Federal Highway Act of 1916, the Food and Drug Act of 1906, and the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921. As this book shows, federalism has played a vital but often underappreciated role in shaping the modern American state. "Kimberly S. Johnson offers a welcome reminder to historians of the modern United States: New Deal policy making was not a seamless transition to more centralized policy making in Washington. Rather, it was based on a federalist heritage of power sharing among the states and the national government that stretched back to the nineteenth century. In an era when many Americans view government as the problem, this book reminds us that the current state of affairs emerged from a complex, nuanced mixture of constitutional forces, interest group pressures, and congressional developments."---William R. Childs, Journal of American History "Not only is Johnson's thesis and argument intriguing and fresh in its approach, so too are her methods of analysis. . . . Johnson has provided a valuable analysis and corrective to the American political development accounts of national-state intergovernmental relations. She has also added a convincing case for the role of Congress in structuring the first New Federalism."---Cindy Simon Rosenthal, APSA Booknotes "This book makes a clear contribution to the literatures on American political development and on federalism. I am thoroughly convinced by the author's assertion that the institution of federalism was critical to the development of a wide variety of important policies, and to the development of administrative capacity."-Bertram Johnson, Middlebury College "In Governing the American State, Kimberley Johnson challenges the received view that the modern system of intergovernmental relations emerged only after the earlier, more fragmented system of Dual Federalism collapsed, because it was unable to handle the crisis of the Great Depression. She establishes that changes in the U.S. federal system emerged not simply from major exogenous shocks to the political system, but also from considerations and processes that are endogenous to 'politics-as-usual' in the United States."-Martin Shefter, Cornell University, author of Political Parties and the State
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Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places
Why State Constitutions Contain America's Positive Rights
by Emily Zackin
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2014" Emily Zackin is assistant professor of political science at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Unlike many national constitutions, which contain explicit positive rights to such things as education, a living wage, and a healthful environment, the U.S. Bill of Rights appears to contain only a long list of prohibitions on government. American constitutional rights, we are often told, protect people only from an overbearing government, but give no explicit guarantees of governmental help. Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places argues that we have fundamentally misunderstood the American rights tradition. The United States actually has a long history of enshrining positive rights in its constitutional law, but these rights have been overlooked simply because they are not in the federal Constitution.
Emily Zackin shows how they instead have been included in America's state constitutions, in large part because state governments, not the federal government, have long been primarily responsible for crafting American social policy. Although state constitutions, seemingly mired in trivial detail, can look like pale imitations of their federal counterpart, they have been sites of serious debate, reflect national concerns, and enshrine choices about fundamental values. Zackin looks in depth at the history of education, labor, and environmental reform, explaining why America's activists targeted state constitutions in their struggles for government protection from the hazards of life under capitalism.
Shedding much-needed light on the variety of reasons that activists pursued the creation of new state-level rights, Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places challenges us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the American constitutional tradition. "This is an excellent contribution to the literature and yet another compelling reason that scholars should not limit themselves to only the federal Constitution and courts." "I am hopeful that Zackin's thoughtful and timely book will invigorate the debate, reminding readers along the way of the vibrant role states have played, and should continue to play, in defining new statutory and constitutional rights. Whether 'we want more' rights or not, we would be lucky to have more scholarship from Zackin about the states' essential role in the American constitutional law tradition."---Jeffrey S. Sutton, Harvard Law Review "Emily Zackin argues that the United States has a long history of positive rights protection, created and fostered by political outsiders who wanted to change society and disrupt the status quo. We will find this tradition not in the federal constitution, but in our country's many state constitutions. This is a crucially important book revealing an unjustly neglected feature of America's constitutional traditions."-Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School "Zackin has written a major challenge to conventional wisdom that American constitutionalism is committed to negative rights only. Her exceptional research and analysis has resulted in a work that will be both a classic of American state constitutionalism and American constitutional development."-Mark Graber, University of Maryland "This is an extremely important book that will be widely discussed. One of the pathologies of the standard approach to American constitutionalism is its exclusive focus on the U.S. Constitution and the concomitant ignorance of the rich materials to be found in the literally dozens of American state constitutions. This book will be an extremely important wake-up call for most readers."-Sanford Levinson, author of Constitutional Faith "This splendid book single-handedly establishes positive rights as core elements of the American constitutional tradition. Using a comparative case study of rights in education, labor, and the environment, Zackin overturns conventional wisdom by documenting a rich legacy of positive rights
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Building an American Empire
The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion
by Paul Frymer
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 2018 J. David Greenstone Book Prize, Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association" "Winner of the 2018 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship, Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association" Paul Frymer is professor of politics and director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America and Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party (both Princeton).
How American westward expansion was governmentally engineered to promote the formation of a white settler nation
Westward expansion of the United States is most conventionally remembered for rugged individualism, geographic isolationism, and a fair amount of luck. Yet the establishment of the forty-eight contiguous states was hardly a foregone conclusion, and the federal government played a critical role in its success. This book examines the politics of American expansion, showing how the government's regulation of population movements on the frontier, both settlement and removal, advanced national aspirations for empire and promoted the formation of a white settler nation.
Building an American Empire details how a government that struggled to exercise plenary power used federal land policy to assert authority over the direction of expansion by engineering the pace and patterns of settlement and to control the movement of populations. At times, the government mobilized populations for compact settlement in strategically important areas of the frontier; at other times, policies were designed to actively restrain settler populations in order to prevent violence, international conflict, and breakaway states. Paul Frymer examines how these settlement patterns helped construct a dominant racial vision for America by incentivizing and directing the movement of white European settlers onto indigenous and diversely populated lands. These efforts were hardly seamless, and Frymer pays close attention to the failures as well, from the lack of further expansion into Latin America to the defeat of the black colonization movement.
Building an American Empire reveals the lasting and profound significance government settlement policies had for the nation, both for establishing America as dominantly white and for restricting broader aspirations for empire in lands that could not be so racially engineered. "Groundbreaking. . . . The book's central contribution is to show how the adaptations of American institutions intersected with America's racial orders.. . . . It will be essential reading for scholars and students, graduate and undergraduate, of APD, American politics, and of the legacies and contemporary practices of settler colonialism in other countries."---David Bateman, Journal of Politics "Paul Frymer has written one of the best available accounts of the United States' long and troubled history as a white settler nation. For anyone wanting to know why that particular form of nationalism continues to resonate so forcefully today, Building an American Empire should be required reading."---Eliga Gould, Diplomatic History "Building an American Empire is, in short, a terrific book-important, thoughtful, provocative, and seminal."---Todd Estes, American Political Thought "Paul Frymer's excellent new book interrogates our most enduring myth-the 'Taming of the West'-and in its place delivers a rich analysis of how U.S. leaders decided which territories and peoples would be included in the American civilizational project. His account puts original insights about space and race . . . at the center of our national story."---Thomas Ogorzalek, Political Science Quarterly "Building an American Empire is a valuable contribution to the conversation on the rise of the American national state."---William H. Bergmann, American Historical Review "Ranging across a wide arra
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Southern Nation
Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction
by David Bateman
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 32nd D. B. Hardeman Prize, LBJ Foundation" "Winner of the V.O. Key Award, Southern Political Science Association" David A. Bateman is assistant professor of government at Cornell University. Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University. His books include Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. John S. Lapinski is the Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor, professor of political science, and faculty director of the Fox Leadership Program and the Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and director of elections at NBC News. His books include The Substance of Representation: Congress, American Political Development, and Lawmaking (Princeton).
How southern members of Congress remade the United States in their own image after the Civil War
No question has loomed larger in the American experience than the role of the South. Southern Nation examines how southern members of Congress shaped national public policy and American institutions from Reconstruction to the New Deal-and along the way remade the region and the nation in their own image.
The central paradox of southern politics was how such a highly diverse region could be transformed into a coherent and unified bloc-a veritable nation within a nation that exercised extraordinary influence in politics. This book shows how this unlikely transformation occurred in Congress, the institutional site where the South's representatives forged a new relationship with the rest of the nation. Drawing on an innovative theory of southern lawmaking, in-depth analyses of key historical sources, and congressional data, Southern Nation traces how southern legislators confronted the dilemma of needing federal investment while opposing interference with the South's racial hierarchy, a problem they navigated with mixed results before choosing to prioritize white supremacy above all else.
Southern Nation reveals how southern members of Congress gradually won for themselves an unparalleled role in policymaking, and left all southerners-whites and blacks-disadvantaged to this day. At first, the successful defense of the South's capacity to govern race relations left southern political leaders locally empowered but marginalized nationally. With changing rules in Congress, however, southern representatives soon became strategically positioned to profoundly influence national affairs.
"Southern Nation is a lively and engaging history of the American South's influence on national politics after Reconstruction. It is also an illuminating analysis of how congressional policies and procedures are exploited to advance factional agendas. Bateman, Katznelson, and Lapinski have written a book that will be of great value to historians, political scientists, and engaged citizens."
-E. J. Dionne Jr., coauthor of One Nation after Trump
"Southern Nation is the most comprehensive and penetrating analysis we have of how southern legislators rebuilt their power in Congress between 1880 and 1930 and, in the process, bent the entire country to their will. This revelatory and chilling tale compels us to reckon in new ways with the deep roots of America's political dysfunction."
-Gary Gerstle, author of Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present
"This book offers a major new interpretation of congressional politics and policymaking from the end of Reconstruction to the New Deal. Readers will be impressed by the sheer encyclopedic scope of the work as well as its profound implications for theories of congressional lawmaking and accounts of American political development."
-Frances Lee, University of Maryland
"This ambitious book shows just how deeply entrenched white subjugation of blacks has been throughout southern political history. Southern Nation will bring new perspectives to younger generations about the see
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Faithful and Fearless
Moving Feminist Protest inside the Church and Military
by Mary Fainsod Katzenstein
Part of the Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparati series
"Winner of the 1999 Victoria Schuck Award, American Political Science Association" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1999" Mary Fainsod Katzenstein is a professor of government and a member of the faculty of the Women's Studies Program at Cornell University. She is the author of Ethnicity and Equality: The Shiv Sena Party and Preferential Policies in Bombay and has cowritten and coedited several books, including, with Carol McClurg Mueller, The Women's Movements of the United States and Europe.
Riots and demonstrations, the lifeblood of American social and political protest in the 1960s, are now largely a historical memory. But Mary Fainsod Katzenstein argues that protest has not disappeared--it has simply moved off the streets into the country's core institutions. As a result, conflicts over sexual harassment, affirmative action, and the rights of women, gays and lesbians, and people of color now touch us more than ever in our daily lives, whether we are among those seeking change or those threatened by its prospects. No one is more aware of this than women demanding change from within the United States military and the American Catholic church.
Women in uniform are deeply patriotic and women active in the church are devoted to their callings. Yet Katzenstein shows that these women often feel isolated and demeaned, confronted by challenges as subtle as condescension and as blatant as career obstruction. Although faithful to their institutions, many have proved fearless in their attempts to reshape them. Drawing on interviews with over a hundred women in the military and the church--including senior officers, combat pilots, lay activists, and nuns--this book gives voice to the struggles and vision of these women as they have moved protest into the mainstream.
Katzenstein shows why the military and the church, similarly hierarchical and insistent on obedience, have come to harbor deeply different forms of protest. She demonstrates that women in the military have turned to the courts and Congress, whereas feminists in the church have used "discursive" protests--writing, organizing workshops and conferences--to rethink in radical ways the meanings of faith and justice. These different strategies, she argues, reflect how the law regulates the military but leaves the church alone.
Faithful and Fearless calls our attention to protest within institutions as a new stage in the history both of feminism and of social movements in America. The book is an inspiring account of strength in the face of adversity and a groundbreaking contribution to the study of American feminism, social protest, and the historical development of institutions in American society. "Katzenstein ... has done a great service to those working for equality inside the sacred and secular fortresses.... Clearly written, it is easy to read. I recommend that before the next pope takes office, all women in the church should have this book thoroughly digested as a cure for naiveté."---Ruth McDonough Fitzpatrick, National Catholic Reporter "The feelings of the many women Katzenstein interviewed come through loud and clear, giving an insightful glimpse into how they view their predicaments."