Few transformations have been more significant in American politics in recent decades than the Democratic Party's embrace of racial liberalism and Republicans' adoption of a more conservative stance towards civil rights-related policies. We hypothesize that pressure to embrace a liberal position on civil rights was much stronger among northern Democrats and their coalitional partners than among northern Republicans and their affiliated groups by the mid-1940s, as the Democrats became firmly identified as the party of economic liberalism and labor unions. To test this hypothesis and develop a more fine-grained understanding of the dynamics of party positioning on civil rights, we collect and analyze a new data source: state political party platforms published between 1920 and 1968. These unique data suggest that Democrats had generally become the more liberal party on civil rights by the mid-to-late 1940s across a wide range of states. Our findings – which contradict Carmines and Stimson's prevailing issue evolution model of partisan change – suggest that there were strong coalitional and ideological pressures that led the Democrats to embrace racial liberalism. This finding not only leads to a revised perspective on the civil rights revolution, but also to new insights into the dynamics of partisan realignment more generally.

In this essay I argue that in the Gilded Age (the last quarter of the nineteenth century), delegates to constitutional conventions in the western territories designed state governments to manage, as best they could, the development of their economies. They were, and understood themselves to be, citizens of the periphery of the United States. Delegates to the conventions hoped to shield their states from the worst possible outcomes of that peripheral relationship, and foster the best ones. My arguments contribute to our understanding of state constitutions and, more broadly, to central concerns of American political development—regionalism, labor law, and state building.

Between 1850 and 1930, demographic upheaval in the United States was connected to reorganization of the racial order. Socially and politically recognized boundaries between groups shifted, new groups emerged, others disappeared, and notions of who belonged in which category changed. All recognized racial groups—blacks, whites, Indians, Asians, Mexicans and others—were affected. This article investigates how and why census racial classification policies changed during this period, only to stabilize abruptly before World War II. In the context of demographic transformations and their political consequences, we find that census policy in any given year was driven by a combination of scientific, political, and ideological motivations.

Based on this analysis, we rethink existing theoretical approaches to censuses and racial classification, arguing that a nation's census is deeply implicated in and helps to construct its social and political order. Censuses provide the concepts, taxonomy, and substantive information by which a nation understands its component parts as well as the contours of the whole; censuses both create the image and provide the mirror of that image for a nation's self-reflection. We conclude by outlining the meaning of this period in American history for current and future debates over race and classification.

This essay examines the cultural dimensions of state administrative formation. Revisiting the organization of early U.S. state school administrations in the decades before the Civil War, I emphasize the culturally peculiar vocabularies of universal salvation and motherly care in which early administrators outlined an apparatus of state “designed, like the common blessings of heaven, to encompass all.” Self-consciously distinguishing themselves from a republican governing tradition that depended upon localities to administrate state policy, the Unitarian Horace Mann and his liberal Protestant allies imagined a unified state “like a mother … taking care of all its children.” Drawing from a cultural preoccupation with a motherly and infinitely forgiving God, these Massachusetts state administrators articulated a vision of a department of state government that would directly recognize all persons, and all schools, “within every part of the Commonwealth.” Such words were more than metaphor, though metaphor was crucial to the project. Rather, the organizational logic of the “motherly state” unfolded in the matrices of responsibility and communication, of surveillance and discipline and labor policy that constituted the foundational systems of early comprehensive state administration. By bringing together the insights of institutional development with the methods of cultural history, this essay ultimately suggests that government itself can be understood as a cultural artifact.

In 1933, the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution was adopted. Otherwise known as the Lame Duck Amendment, it reorganized the congressional terms of office and dates of annual convening, eliminating the short (or “lame-duck”) session that had existed up to that time. The amendment was the brainchild of Sen. George W. Norris (R-NE), who argued that lame-duck sessions posed a grave threat to democratic accountability and responsiveness, as they convened after the elections to the next Congress and thus were populated in part by members who were retiring or had lost their reelection bids. As a result, according to Norris, the potential for an agency problem in representation was great in lame-duck sessions. Using the literature on legislative shirking—especially the subliterature on last-term effects—as our theoretical backdrop, we investigate Norris's arguments in detail, examining whether his concerns regarding lame-duck sessions were justified. Using a variety of data and a number of tests, we find little systematic evidence to suggest that exiting members altered their behavior significantly (i.e., shirked) in their last terms in office. In short, the concerns that Norris expressed, such as excessive presidential influence in the legislative process and increased majority-party manipulation of the legislative agenda, were not in fact major problems in lame-duck sessions.