The American Cancer Society puts it bluntly: “We're fat and it's killing us.” Obesity is rising at epidemic rates and, according to a first-ever Surgeon General's report on obesity (issued in 2001), it may soon surpass tobacco as the chief cause of preventable death in the United States. Obesity has been directly linked to heart disease, diabetes, stroke, infertility, and cancer. Each year, obesity costs the nation an estimated $120 billion in medical care and takes some 280,000 lives. Body weight is rising fastest among young Americans—the most dramatic stories feature heart attacks among obese six year-olds.David Satcher, “Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity” (Rockville, MD: Department of Health and Human Services, 2001), xiii, 8; Kelly Brownell, “Public Policy and the Prevention of Obesity,” in Eating Disorders and Obesity: A Comprehensive Handbook, ed. Christopher G. Fairburn and Kelly D. Brownell (New York: Guilford, 2002); Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 241–43.

The legal-political status and power of associations in American society is an age-old historical question. As early as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed,

Between 1971 and 1975, congressional leaders quietly transformed the character and politics of public assistance in the United States. Three legislative initiatives were passed in quick succession and with little debate—the Talmadge Work Incentive amendments (WIN II), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Although they drew little attention at the time, their combined impact was significant in two respects. First, by redefining the terms and target populations of income assistance, they established the elements of a workfarist approach to federal antipoverty policy, one that turned the ends and means of federal assistance away from traditional needs-based New Deal welfarism and toward the principle of rewarding, encouraging, and enforcing work. In addition, the initiatives helped to create the political capacity for subsequent retrenchment of traditional welfare programs, notably Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).

It is now a commonplace assertion among scholars of regulation to say that new regulatory statutes follow “crises,” “tragedies,” or “scandals.” The content and form of these critical events varies considerably. They include acts of journalism or research such as the publication of the Nader Report (which purportedly led to new federal automobile safety regulations) or Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (which eased the path for the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906). They include instantaneous disasters such as the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India, as well as slowly materializing epidemics like the thousands of horrific birth defects that resulted from widespread use of the sedative thalidomide in Europe and Australia in the late 1950s. As Lawrence Rothenberg describes this argument, it amounts to a meta-narrative of the origins of regulation, an alternative to capture theory. In the tragedy narrative of regulation, “public opinion becomes energized by some dramatic event or condition illustrating the pitfalls of a market's unobstructed operation; the outcry spurs elected officials to promulgate governmental regulation.” This story, as he notes, is at least as old as the work of Marver Bernstein and Anthony Downs.

The seemingly wide opening for liberal domestic policy innovation by the U.S. federal government in the early-to-mid-1930s gave way to a much more limited agenda in the late 1930s and 1940s. The latter years saw the consolidation and gradual extension of several key programs (e.g., Social Security and Keynesian macroeconomic management), but also the frustration of liberal hopes for an expansive “cradle-to-grave” welfare state marked by strong national unions, national health insurance, and full employment policies. Drawing upon rarely used early public opinion polls, we explore the dynamics of public opinion regarding New Deal liberalism during this pivotal era. We argue that a broadly based reaction against labor unions created a difficult backdrop for liberal programmatic advances. We find that this anti-labor reaction was especially virulent in the South but divided even Northern Democrats, thus creating an effective wedge issue for Republicans and their Southern conservative allies. More generally, we find that the mass public favored most of the specific programs created by the New Deal, but was hardly clamoring for major expansions of the national government's role in the late 1930s and 1940s. These findings illuminate the role played by the South in constraining New Deal liberalism while also highlighting the tenuousness of the liberal majority in the North.

Fifty years ago Louis Hartz set out to tell the “storybook truth” about America. Despite being almost risibly dense, The Liberal Tradition in America neatly captures the popular folklore – this is what you might hear at the Chamber of Commerce. Meanwhile, academics are often flatly contemptuous: Hartz mangled history, muffed quotations, and did not bother with rules of evidence. Even so, for better and for worse, his version of an all-American fable lives on as an enigmatic, controversial, and enduring political science classic.

There are few scholars who would disagree with the proposition that individual economic position and economic risk play a critical role in shaping preferences for income redistribution and social insurance. There is less consensus, however, about the extent to which non-economic factors also influence individual preferences regarding social insurance provision. A number of scholars have examined how issues of race and identity have influenced the development of social insurance programs in the United States, as well as individual attitudes with respect to these programs. In a theoretical context, other authors have considered how attitudes toward income redistribution might also depend upon psychological dispositions such as the “belief in a just world.” In this article, we focus on religiosity as an important factor that can shape both individual preferences and policy outcomes regarding social insurance in the United States. To do so, we develop an argument about religion and social insurance as substitutes that draws both on existing work on the political economy of social insurance and on findings in social psychology regarding what we call the “coping effect” of religion. We test our hypothesis using historical evidence from two early social insurance policies: workers’ compensation legislation enacted by state governments between 1910 and 1930 and New Deal unemployment relief.

Why did public sector unionization rise so dramatically and then plateau at the same time as private sector unionization underwent a precipitous decline? The exclusion of public sector employees from the centerpiece of private sector labor law—the 1935 Wagner Act—divided U.S. labor law and relegated public sector demand-making to the states. Consequently, public sector employees' collective bargaining rights were slow to develop and remain geographically concentrated, unequal and vulnerable. Further, divided labor law put the two movements out of alignment; private sector union density peaked nearly a decade before the first major statutes granting public sector collective bargaining rights passed. As a result of this incongruent timing and sequencing, the United States has never had a strong union movement comprised of both sectors at the height of their membership and influence.

At a Democratic Leadership Council meeting in the summer of 2002, centrist leaders of the Democratic Party took Al Gore to task for his use of populist rhetoric during the 2000 presidential campaign. Ed Rendell, the current governor of Pennsylvania and the former Democratic National Committee Chairman, bemoaned: “We wish Al had refined the message and not used the ‘poor people versus the rich’.” Striking a similar note, Joseph Lieberman charged that Gore's populist language made it difficult for the Democratic ticket to gain the support of middle-class, independent voters who did not see America as “us versus them,” and that these verbal attacks were to blame for Gore's failure to win the popular vote by a more convincing margin. The apparent backlash against Gore's use of populism is the latest manifestation of a transformation that has characterized presidential rhetoric over the past several decades. Put simply, the language of populism, which in the nineteenth century constituted one of the most formidable rhetorical weapons in the arsenal of Democratic presidents, has faded and been displaced by a more consensual language. This trend contrasts with the striking, though limited, embrace of populism by such Republicans as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Over the past several decades, a new kind of labor politics has emerged in new venues (state and local levels), focusing on new governing institutions (employment laws), involving new strategies by labor unions, and featuring new organizational forms (“alt-labor”). The timing, form, and content of these developments have been powerfully shaped by the persistence of the increasingly outmoded but still authoritative national labor law, which has constrained and channeled the efforts of workers and their advocates to respond to growing problems. While the new institutions and organizations provide new substantive rights for workers and alternative vehicles for voice and collective action, the layering of these new forms alongside the old—without displacing the latter—has generated new problems without solving the problems produced by the ossification of labor law in the first place. Using novel empirical data and analysis, this article documents these changes, explores their causes, and considers their consequences for the changing politics of workers’ rights.

This article offers a first-ever comprehensive empirical assessment of a key Progressive reform, the direct primary, and its impact on competition in American elections. We begin with a review of the problems Progressives diagnosed in the American electoral system and reasons to expect the direct primary to be a pro-competitive, democratizing reform. We then consider prior research into the direct primary and electoral contestation and describe the database of primary and general election outcomes that we have constructed to trace competition in primaries for federal and statewide offices. Finally, we examine the historical trajectory of competition in primary elections, starting with the first decades after the introduction of the reform and then the succeeding decades.

Consistent with the hopes of reformers, we find primary elections indeed provided a forum for contestation for federal and statewide elections. Although primaries were never broadly competitive, even at the outset, they accounted for about a third of the serious electoral tests faced by statewide officeholders and about a fifth faced by U.S. representatives. The role of primaries as a venue for robust contestation, however, was short-lived, as the competitiveness of federal and statewide primaries decreased sharply starting in the 1940s. The last section of this article explores whether two recent developments in American elections—the extension of two-party competition and the rise in the value of incumbency—conspired to temper the contribution of direct primaries to electoral competition.

From Aristotle and Hobbes through Bentley, Truman, and Riker, many writers have claimed, more or less directly, that they are founding or helping to found a true political science for the first time. Modern scholars have usually expressed this aspiration via criticism of earlier “unscientific” approaches. Thus William Riker in 1962, advocating rational choice theory as the basis of political analysis, dismissed “traditional methods—i. e., his-tory writing, the description of institutions, and legal analysis” as able to produce “only wisdom and neither science nor knowledge. And while wisdom is certainly useful in the affairs ofmen, such a result is a failure to live up to the promise in the name political science ”. l Subsequently, rational choice has indeed become the most prominent pretender to the throne of scientific theory within the discipline.

On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA), which unilaterally made United States citizens of all indigenous people living in the United States. This new law made citizens of approximately 125,000 of the 300,000 indigenous people in the country (the remainder were already U.S. citizens). Usually, people who have been excluded from American political life see the codi- fication of their citizenship status as an unambiguously positive political development. In the case of indigenous people and U.S. citizenship, however, one cannot find such clear and certain statements. All indigenous people certainly did not look at U.S. citizenship in the same light; in fact, very few saw it as unambiguously positive. This study demonstrates that the indigenous people who engaged the debate over U.S. citizenship came to define themselves, in various ways, as “ambivalent Americans,” neither fully inside nor fully outside the political, legal, and cultural boundaries of the United States. This effort to define a form of ambivalent American-ness reflects a significant tradition in indigenous politics, which involves indigenous political actors working back and forth across the boundaries of American political life to secure rights, resources, and/or sovereignty for the indigenous people they represent.

In recent years, scholars have made major progress in understanding the dynamics of “policy drift”—the transformation of a policy's outcomes due to the failure to update its rules or structures to reflect changing circumstances. Drift is a ubiquitous mode of policy change in America's gridlock-prone polity, and its causes are now well understood. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the political consequences of drift—to the ways in which drift, like the adoption of new policies, may generate its own feedback effects. In this article, we seek to fill this gap. We first outline a set of theoretical expectations about how drift should affect downstream politics. We then examine these dynamics in the context of four policy domains: labor law, health care, welfare, and disability insurance. In each, drift is revealed to be both mobilizing and constraining: While it increases demands for policy innovation, group adaptation, and new group formation, it also delimits the range of possible paths forward. These reactions to drift, in turn, generate new problems, cleavages, and interest alignments that alter subsequent political trajectories. Whether formal policy revision or further stalemate results, these processes reveal key mechanisms through which American politics and policy develop.

Several of the articles in this volume criticize the use of DW-NOMINATE in historical work in American politics and suggest alternative approaches to the use of roll call voting data. While many of criticisms are certainly valid, their practical implications are often overstated. Moreover, the suggested alternatives are either impractical for most historically oriented scholars and or do not adequately address the underlying problems. Almost all of the criticisms can be addressed by correct application of DW-NOMINATE results or those of other closely related measures.

Previous work in law and political development has emphasized the role that a “support structure” in civil society plays in translating electoral success into legal outcomes. In this paper, I claim that legal change can also work in the other direction—political appointees in government can use their power to assist their allies in civil society. Drawing on in-depth interviews and archival materials, I show how—especially under Attorney General Meese—the Reagan Department of Justice invested in the ideas (through its support of originalism), organizations (especially the Federalist Society), and personnel of the conservative legal movement and reorganized itself to give these longer-term objectives more importance in the department. These investments add up to a case of “transformative bureaucracy”: the use of bureaucratic power to transform the conditions of future political conflict.

The connections between ideas of political culture and political development are intrinsically problematic. The term development typically refers to change, contingency, and the impact of causal forces in reshaping a social or political order. The concept draws on the powerful intuition that no feature of human experience, including language itself, is exempt from change and transformation. By contrast, culture typically refers to the framework of symbols, norms, assumptions, and expectations with which a people make sense of their experiences and formulate appropriate courses of action. At least for long periods, this interpretive framework molds the process of social change and limits the extent to which it occurs. Here, the controlling intuition is that without some stable set of meanings no complex human discourse can be really coherent—for there is no stable marker against which change itself can be measured. It is easy enough, of course, to assert that a particular political regime exhibits both a distinctive culture and a particular pattern of development. But it is another matter to indicate the precise relationship between the two.

The education and training benefits of the G.I. Bill of Rights are renowned for their redistributive effects among nonblack veterans, but their consequences for black veterans remain in question. Among non-blacks, the provisions are known to have expanded access to education across class lines, and to have generated positive socioeconomic consequences. They also fostered greater postwar involvement in civic associations and political activities, particularly among less advantaged beneficiaries. Given the widely perceived view that the G.I. Bill represents a landmark social program, it is imperative to investigate whether access to its social and economic benefits transcended the rigid color line of the postwar era. As well, consideration of how the education and training benefits affected African-American veterans' political participation may deepen our understanding of the relationship between governance and civic engagement.

In November of 1968, Richard Nixon became only the second Republican in four decades to win control of the Executive Office. For helpful comments, we would like to thank Shana Bass, Michael Brown, Scott James, David Mayhew, Corey Robin, Joel Silbey, Pam Singh, Stephen Skowronek, Tom Sugrue, Rick Valelly, and the anonymous reviewers for Studies in American Political Development. Unlike the administration of his party's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon's presidency would ultimately display a willingness to aggressively confront the then-dominant New Deal order of the Democratic party and, in the process, attempt to forge a new electoral majority. In many ways, Nixon's efforts were shaped by historical and institutional circumstances. The civil rights movement of the early 1960s had successfully pushed Democratic party leaders to take legislative action against racial discrimination in the southern United States, effectively shattering their party's century- old alliance with white segregationists in the region. Meanwhile, efforts by the Supreme Court and Democratic legislators to provide substantive civil rights in areas of the country outside of the South strained their party's relationship with urban and blue-collar white-ethnic voters.See Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 8; and Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). Nixon courted these disaffected Democrats in the 1968 campaign through both the “Southern Strategy” and appeals to the so-called “Silent Majority,” a symbolic reference meant to contrast his supporters from the civil rights activists “blamed” for disrupting more traditional ways of life.

From the vantage point of a critical moment in the history of statebuilding in the United States, we wish to take a fresh look at questions about the resources and wherewithal of the national state. Within modern American political science, a focus on state capacity is at least as old as the landmark essay by Woodrow Wilson on “The Study of Administration” and as current as the important scholarly impulse that has revived interest in the state at a time of struggle about the size and span of the federal government. The dominant motif of these various accounts of American statebuilding has been a concern with organizational assets, which usually are assayed by their placement on a linear scale of strength and weakness.