The Social Security Act of 1935 is widely considered to have established an American welfare state that is “two-tiered” or “two-track” in character, and which divided American social citizenship by gender.This depiction is commonplace; for a recent example of its use, see Dia ne Sainsbury, Gender Equality and Welfare States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28–29. It seems to have originated in Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minne apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 144–60 and Barbara J. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (M adison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 123–51. Scholars have generally assumed that to the extent such “gender bias” emerged in public policy, it must have been manifest in the law from the outset, inscribed in the differ ences between the work-related, contributory plans in the legislation versus the need-based, grant-in-aid public assistance programs.For example, see Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994), 253–85; also Fraser, Unruly Practices, 149–53. Yet, although the two major social programs for non-elderly American in the Social Security Act differed in such re gards, they emerged from the policymaking process in 1935 on fairly equal ground, with seemingly similar prospects for success or failure.

American politics has been transformed by the emergence of the advocacy party—a form of organization in which extraparty interest groups, advocacy organizations, and social movements substitute for the diminished institutional capacity and popular legitimacy of the formal party apparatus. Many scholars have rightly pointed to the presidential nomination reforms made by the Democratic Party's post-1968 Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection (known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission) as a key contributor to polarization by increasing the influence of ideological activists. However, I argue that polarization is not the direct result of the actions of McGovern-Fraser reformers, but rather the outcome of their pitched battle with intraparty opponents of reform, who, while failing to prevent changes to presidential nominations, were ultimately successful in defeating the party-building dimension of the reformers’ project of party reconstruction. The product of their intraparty struggle was a hybrid institutional amalgam that layered new participatory arrangements over a hollow party structure, thus setting the Democratic Party on a path toward the advocacy party and its polarizing politics.

Medicare is one of the largest social programs in the world. Did organized industry favor Medicare's passage in 1965? If it did, this would represent powerful evidence in favor of the theory that social programs typically require cross-class alliances to pass, such as alliances between business and labor. However, in a previous article in this journal, I argued that answering questions about political actors’ preferences—such as whether organized industry favored Medicare's passage—can be surprisingly difficult due to the “problem of preferences”; that is, political actors might misrepresent their true policy preferences for many reasons. For example, when their ideal proposals are not politically feasible, political actors may wish to bolster support for a more politically viable alternative to a disliked proposal—even if they do not truly support this alternative to the status quo. To better understand political actors’ true policy preferences, I argued, scholars should trace how those actors’ expressed preferences change as a function of their strategic context—just as scholars seeking to understand the impact of any other variable trace the effects of changes in it.

Upon his inauguration in 1861, Abraham Lincoln faced the greatest threat to the survival of the nation that has confronted any incoming president. His victory had been made possible by the splintering of the opposition in a four-way race; the total popular vote for his foes substantially exceeded his own.James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 232 As he assumed office, he was confronted with the secession of several states and the possibility that others would soon follow, and southern forces had seized U.S. arsenals and laid siege to Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. Within weeks, his decision to send relief to the fort had provoked the first shots of the war and additional states joined the Confederacy. Lincoln and his fellow Republican leaders now confronted the daunting task of restoring the Union.

The American knowledge economy (AKE) is not a foreordained transition in the organization of economic production, nor is it a form of political economy shaped predominately by the political demands of highly educated workers. It is a politically generated consensus for producing economic prosperity and economic advantage over other nations in which intellectual property (IP), and the businesses that produce it, play a leading role. The history of AKE development reveals as much. In the AKE's formative period, from 1980 to 1994, IP producers and a faction of neoliberal Democrats (the “Atari Democrats”), not decisive middle-class voters, played a pivotal role in reconfiguring institutions of American political economy to hasten the AKE transition. Their vision of AKE development inherently complicated the Democratic Party's attitude toward rising market power and continues to shape contemporary disputes within the party over antitrust enforcement and the validity of the AKE project itself.

The U.S. led the world in environmental policy in the 1970s, but now lags behind comparable nations and resists joining others in tackling climate change. Two embedded, entwined, and exceptional American institutions—broad private property rights and competitive federalism—are necessary for explaining this shift. These two institutions shaped the exceptional stringency of 1970s American environmental laws and the powerful backlash against these laws that continues today. American colonies ensured broad private rights to use land and natural resources for profit. The colonies and the independent state governments that followed wielded expansive authority to govern this commodified environment. In the 1780s, Congress underwrote state governance of the privatized environment by directing the parceling and transfer of federal land to private parties and of environmental governance to future states. The 1787 Constitution cemented these relationships and exposed states to interstate economic competition. Environmental laws of the 1970s imposed unprecedented challenges to the environmental prerogatives long protected by these institutions, and the beneficiaries responded with a wide-ranging counterattack. Federalism enabled this opposition to build powerful regional alliances to stymie action on climate change. These overlooked institutional factors are necessary to explain why Canadian and American environmental policies have diverged.

The precipitous decline in collective bargaining between employees and employers during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century in the United States should tell us something useful about American political development. The decline of collective bargaining is about more than waning union influence or competitive conditions in the labor market because collective bargaining was the primary expression of the regime established by the New Deal Democratic Party electoral coalition. For a generation, labor-management bargaining epitomized empowered liberal democracy which, acting through the legislative branch, established a new legal regime of industrial order. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA) shaped a pluralist industrial order by creating new rules that curbed the authority of managers and compelled business firms to participate with unions in a process of rational bargaining based on the assumption of competing employee and employer interests.I do not mean to suggest that the place of collective bargaining was uncontested. Scholars, however, launched major efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to understand how “industrial relations” fit into the emerging conception of pluralism. This was an important effort because union-management relations were central to the New Deal Democracy. For example, John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1956); Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom, Politics, Economics and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes (New York: Harper and Row, 1953); Clark Kerr, Labor Markets and Wage Determination: The Balkanization of Labor Markets and Others Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick Harbison, and Charles A. Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1966); J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1969). By the mid-1960s, industrial relations was a rare topic for political science investigation; aside from Greenstone, political science conceived “labor” and “work” to be “private interests” and not a matter of political significance. Yet collective bargaining is no longer the focal point for industrial relations, and industrial relations no longer occupies the center of governing attention. The various reasons for this trend have attracted significant scholarly attention; however, the issue is confounded by arguments that union decline is a wrongly conceived topic to investigate.

Only the United States supreme court justice has ever been impeached. In January 1804, the House of Representatives began a formal inquiry into the official conduct of Associate Justice Samuel Chase and approved eight articles of impeachment in November of that same year. The Senate held a trial of the justice in February 1805, which concluded with his acquittal on March 1. On the final article of impeachment, Chase escaped removal by four votes.

Although the concept of the “modern” presidency is not precisely defined in presidential studies, most scholars agree that a plebiscitary approach to executive leadership has dominated the American political landscape for much of the past century. The characteristics of this “plebiscitary presidency” include aggressive assertions of executive independence, direct appeals to the people, active manipulation of public opinion, and, binding all these together, a new emphasis on rhetorical prowess.Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1997); Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Theodore Lowi, The Personal President (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Richard Rose, The Post-Modern President (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1988); Ryan J. Barilleaux, The Post-Modern Presidency: The Office After Reagan (New York: Praeger, 1988). These characteristics are associated with enhanced resources for the exercise of leadership, but they stimulate, and sit in an uncertain balance with, a vast expansion of expectations for leadership.

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

Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes the formal amendment procedure, sets perhaps the highest bar to reform of any national constitution, discouraging amendment. But despite these challenges, members of Congress have proposed nearly twelve thousand constitutional amendments, with most introduced after the New Deal, raising questions about why members engage in such seemingly futile efforts. We argue that the rise of judicial power following the New Deal substantially decreased the importance of Article V as a tool for constitutional reform. But, by largely abandoning this purpose, members of Congress have repurposed Article V as a mechanism for constitutional position-taking, even though—indeed, perhaps precisely because—their efforts at formal constitutional revision have little chance for success. Through a mixed-methods approach, we first document the shifting purpose of Article V at an aggregate level by coding all 11,969 proposed constitutional amendments throughout American history. We then substantiate the shifting purpose of Article V through a series of in-depth case studies focused on polygamy, women's suffrage, Equal Rights Amendments, and Federal Marriage Amendments. Taken together, this evidence helps us understand Article V as a repurposed institution and suggests that textually static constitutional provisions nonetheless may be open to reinvention at the behavioral level in subtle but important ways.

The origins of the American university system are generally traced to a reform cycle that began in the late 1890s and culminated in the 1920s when most colleges and universities adopted institutional structures, faculty routines, and financial systems that approximated those of a modern corporation. As contemporary educational historians have rewritten the saga of higher education reform, the institutional changes that swept through colleges during this formative period have come to be viewed as a virtually inevitable functional response to the demands of political and economic modernization. The underlying historiographic theme of modernization theory is that as higher institutions expanded in size, internal diversity, and organizational complexity, university presidents responded with the only feasible administrative alternative that could restore effective control and economic efficiency to educational institutions. Indeed, Laurence Veysey's classic rendition of this scenario concludes that a corporate type of bureaucratic administration became “essential” if higher institutions were to avoid educational confusion and fiscal insolvency, while adjusting to the cultural, economic, and political demands placed on them by industrial society.

In May, 1990, a conference was held at UCLA on the theme of “American Politics in Historical Perspective.” Panels were organized on political institutions and social history, on periodization, and on political identity. The panel presentations on political identity are printed below, along with some of the exchanges among the conference group. Slightly edited for clarity, they are offered to readers in the interest of conveying some of the intellectual ferment currently surrounding the focus on political identity and its use as an approach in historical study. The editors of Studies in American Political Development do not endorse any of the views or interpretations expressed.

For the first time since 1860, our collective future as an ideologically coherent and nominally democratic nation is at risk. In the short, medium, and long term, our nation faces several systemic and intertwined threats. Because these cascading crises threaten our fundamental political ideals and our lives, we recommend here a rapid and careful reorientation of at least some part of American political development (APD) toward a scholarship of foresight—that is, one based on the premise that anticipating and shaping the future is now as important as or more important than understanding the past. The article first considers some of the ways in which APD is tethered to the past and then discusses how several of the subfield's analytical approaches are compatible with a scholarship of foresight. Prognosis, prediction, and projection, we argue, are analytical tools that can inform prescription. We conclude with five sets of recommendations that can help APD scholars consider turning their attention toward the future.

Although the political presence of business in the economic development of American cities has been richly documented, there has been much less attention to how and why urban business politics has changed in the course of our history. Indeed, the political circumstances and problems of the early Republic's merchant entrepreneurs in the towns seem remote from those of urban business leaders of postindustrial America, with its giant cities and megacorporations. The challenge remains of identifying forces of continuity and change that have shaped relations between business and city governments in urban economic development.

From the mid–1800s through the mid–1980s, the federal government initiated programs to manage three types of resources on the lands that it controlled. The discovery of gold in California and elsewhere in the West prompted the first government policy in the 1860s. Debate over the nation's forests began in the 1870s, and a system of national forests to be managed by a federal Forest Service was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And in the 1930s, the government finally began to manage the lands no one wanted, its grazing lands. The federal government continues to be an active manager of national resources. Indeed, with control of nearly 30 percent of the nation's land, it is the largest land manager in the country.

Proceeding inductively, starting with three standard examples of major constitutional change, this short essay offers a theory of the Constitution, derived from its historical imposition on the criminal law. The theory proposes to unite constitutional provision, structure, and operations within a single framework over time.

In 1916, Charles A. Beard was denouncing Germany as “a danger to civilization” and calling for American participation in World War I on the side of the Entente Allies. Like John Dewey and other social-democrats, Beard saw the Great War as an opportunity to advance the interests of the European working class by breaking “the union of the Hohenzollern military caste and the German masses whose radical leaders are Social Democrats”. Even after the Versailles Treaty, Beard continued to embrace the Wilsonian theme that the Great War had been fought to make the world safe for democracy. However, by the mid–1980s, he was staunchly opposed to war with Germany and Japan, had come to embrace the revisionist history of World War I, and even testified before Congress against the Lend-Lease Act. Thus, intellectual historians agree that somewhere between the end of World War I and the 1930s, Beard shifted from internationalism to isolationism and, indeed, a few critics have referred to him as a pacifist in his later years. Within the umbrella of this consensus, debates among biographers, intellectual and diplomatic historians, have come to center largely on identifying the timing and the reasons for Beard's “conversion” to isolationism. Not coincidentally, during the 1960s and 1970s, Beard's writings on foreign policy and diplomatic history enjoyed a resurgence among many on the New Left who were constructing their own revisionist history critical of America's political and military involvement in various Third World countries. Today, Beard's views are still cited in international relations and history textbooks as an example of isolationist theory in American foreign policy.

Broad developments in the political economy, coupled with the effects of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA) and its amendments, have weakened organized labor's position in campaign politics. The number of business-related political action committees (PACs) exploded at the end of 1975, and quickly dwarfed the number of labor PACs. More significant are trends in spending. In 1977–1978 business-related PACs outcontributed labor committees by approximately $5.6 million, and in 1979–1980 the gap grew to $17 million. In 1993–1994 business PACs outcontributed unions by $60 million, and in 1995–1996 the figure was around $68 million.The FEC's scheme for classifying PACs makes it difficult to account for all business spending. The figures presented here are based on the conservative approach taken by Edwin Epstein, who counted all corporate spending and half of the spending by PACs classified by the FEC as Trade/Membership/Health and Cooperatives as business-related. Edwin M. Epstein, “Labor's Eroding Position in American Electoral Politics,” in Charles Bulmer and John L. Carmichael, eds., Employment and Labor Relations Policy (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1980), 151–78; Epstein, “Business and Labor Under the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971,” in Michael Malbin, ed., Parties, Interest Groups, and Campaign Finance Laws (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1980), 107–51. This approach is superior to the FEC's classification, but almost certainly understates business-related PAC spending. Makinson and Goldstein's method probably exaggerates business spending, but they found over $40 million more in business PAC contributions to candidates in 1991–1992 than I found using the Epstein approach. Larry Makinson and Joshua Goldstein, Open Secrets: The Encyclopedia of Congressional Money and Politics, 3d ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1994), 22. These figures are impressive, but they probably underestimate the full dimensions of the gap between business and labor PAC spending. The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) uses a more inclusive definition of “business PACs” than the Federal Election Commission (FEC), and found that business committees outspent union PACs by $36 million in 1987–88, and nearly $100 million in 1995–1996.Larry Makinson, Open Secrets: The Dollar Power of PACs in Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1990), 19; Larry Makinson, Open Secrets: The Encyclopedia of Congressional Money and Politics, 2d ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1992), 21; Makinson and Goldstein, Open Secrets, 3d ed., 21; Center for Responsive Politics, “Business-Labor-Ideology Split in Donations from PACs,” http://www.crp.org/pubs/bigpicture/blio/bpbliopac.html. There is some dispute about the full magnitude of the differences between business and labor PAC contributions, but it is clear that there is a large and growing gap between direct contributions to candidates from business and from labor.