In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court in Smith v. Allwright shocked the southern body politic by invalidating the white-only Democratic primary. Interpreting the eleven states of the old Confederacy as enclaves of authoritarian rule, this article views Smith as beginning a long process that culminated in the early 1970s with the consolidation of democratic rule in America. Smith v. Allwright transformed the politics of all eleven enclaves, challenging rulers in their roles both as party officials and as lawmakers. Filtered through various configurations of intraparty conflict, political institutions, and black insurgency, however, the ruling shaped the politics of each enclave differently. This article compares the ruling's effects on three similarly-situated enclaves—Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina. It suggests how Smith v. Allwright positioned these enclaves differently as they faced several other democratization challenges over the next three decades. The article closes with a discussion of how southern enclaves ultimately took divergent paths out of Dixie, why these different modes of democratization matter today, and how the reframing of southern political history developed here engages with recent research on America's distinctive democratic development.

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.

In the 1950s, the Sierra Club emerged as a leader of the nascent environmental movement. In challenging a proposal to build two dams within the boundaries of Dinosaur National Monument, the Club found its voice as a public advocate for the preservation of wilderness and in the process introduced a new type of politics to old conflicts over conservation. Born out of the Dinosaur dam conflict was a new environmentalism characterized by confrontation with state authorities and emotion-laden appeals to the public for political support. The Sierra Club's success in pioneering these strategies launched it to the forefront of the new movement, elevated its executive director David Brower to icon status among environmentalists, and affirmed the philosophy of Aldo Leopold as the moral compass of the movement. In this essay, I argue that interest group entrepreneurs ought to be considered alongside institutional actors as agents of change within processes of political development. As the case of the Sierra Club demonstrates, the internal organizational politics of a group can be just as important in establishing a trajectory of political development as are processes of policy feedback.

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.

Why do most African Americans and other racial liberals vote Democratic, whereas most racial conservatives—largely whites—vote Republican? To what extent is this alignment of race and party attributable to the strategic choice of GOP elites to take the party in a racially conservative direction during the mid-1960s? This paper exploits a little-known ballot initiative in postwar California to shed light on the question. Proposition 11, as it was known, would have outlawed discrimination in employment if it had passed. Instead, it failed by more than a two-to-one margin. Drawing on archival and statistical evidence, including the ecological analysis of precinct-level election returns, we find that Republican voters were much more likely than Democratic voters to oppose Proposition 11, despite Republican Governor Earl Warren's well-known support for fair employment practices (FEP) legislation. We conclude that many Republican voters tended strongly toward racial conservatism well before Republican elites decided to pursue racially conservative policies in the mid-1960s. We suggest that the emergence of the contemporary alignment of race and party may have been less contingent on elite strategy and more structurally determined than the conventional wisdom allows.

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.

We examine the development of legislative capacity in U.S. state legislatures in the twentieth century. This capacity can be derived from the legislators themselves, or from institutions and practices. We consider both sources as we provide an account of the ragged and piecemeal development of legislative capacity in the states. We argue that most state legislatures have been neither entirely professional nor amateur, but rather have existed somewhere in between, in a place where pockets of expertise fill in for professional capacity.

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.