With the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the American labor movement cemented the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. However, the NLRA explicitly excluded the public sector. Government employees did not achieve similar legal protections until decades later, and even then, the laws varied considerably by state. Because of this, scholarly accounts of the development of public-sector unions usually start in the 1960s and emphasize how public- and private-sector unions developed along separate paths. In this article, we analyze a new dataset and show that hundreds of cities had organized workers during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, including firefighters, police, and other public-sector workers (like those in the sanitation and roads departments). By the 1950s, numerous employee unions had engaged in strikes and had achieved written agreements with their city employers. We also present evidence that public- and private-sector employee organization were correlated during this period. Thus, despite very different legal contexts before 1960, our evidence suggests that the timing and location of early public-sector organization may have had more in common with private-sector organization than is often recognized.

The United States and Canadian Conferences of Catholic Bishops chose opposite strategies of either confrontation or cooperation when their respective countries expanded abortion rights, despite their identical institutional philosophies. This paper theorizes the Conferences’ strategic divergence as a response to partisan cues during debates over contraception and abortion access in the 1960s and 1970s. In the United States, abortion rights debates coincided with the collapse of the New Deal Coalition. The Republican Party responded to increased electoral competition by adopting an antiabortion position to court Catholic voters. This strategy invited bishops to take an uncompromising stance against expanded abortion access. In contrast, Canada debated decriminalizing abortion when the Liberal Party dominated electoral politics and supported increased access. The Liberals were thus unwilling to adjust their position, so the bishops had no incentive to be confrontational. The effect of these differences lingers to the present and complicates efforts to expand public health insurance due to its link to contraceptive and abortion access. Further, the analysis demonstrates that party cues are an under-explored variable in developmental stories of religious institutions’ political positions and reveals a tendency for health expansions to revolve around the availability of reproductive care.

How have U.S. House districts changed since the Founding? When do mapmakers reshape districts—and when do they choose to preserve them? This article introduces the concept of “spatial protectionism”—the strategic minimization of district change—and develops four original measures to analyze redistricting changes from 1789 onward. I demonstrate how the strategic imperatives, racial context, and technical capabilities of mapmakers shape the magnitude and form of district change across five redistricting eras: Spatial Representation, Shifting Apportionment, Relative Stasis, Racial Redistricting, and Precision Engineering. My analysis reveals persistent low change disrupted by shifts to at-large districts; unprecedented boundary changes in the last decade; and clear associations between racial demographics, party control, and patterns of continuity and change. These findings establish the first empirical standard for judging the magnitude of district change and underscore the dual significance of stasis and dynamism in the politics of redistricting.

Today, two touchstones of the conservative legal movement are support for the unitary executive theory and skepticism of affirmative action policies. This article reveals a connection between these two positions, demonstrating how policy disputes over civil rights contributed to conservative efforts to increase and legitimize presidential control over the bureaucracy through the controversial claim that the president possesses the whole executive power under Article II. Specifically, I examine two intertwined controversies from 1983, which pit the Reagan White House and Department of Justice (DOJ) against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), two agencies that Reagan officials viewed as obstacles to pursuing its preferred civil rights agenda. Conflicts between the DOJ and EEOC led the administration to deploy the unitary executive theory to help centralize control over its civil rights litigation strategy, while clashes with the USCCR spurred the administration to assert the theory's tenets amid battles over that agency's reauthorization. While these episodes yielded mixed political and legal outcomes, the early articulations of the unitary executive theory that emerged helped to elaborate and advance a controversial constitutional doctrine about presidential power that has become increasingly consequential over time.