The shifting salience of political parties is a central issue in American political development. From the debates over colonial “parties” to debates over the relevance of realignment theory in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars have attempted to assess the impact of political parties on political development. One topic that has provoked particularly extensive debate is the status of parties since World War II. Scholars point to confidence gaps, realignment, and institutional displacement, among other factors, to explain the postwar decline of political parties. But there are problems: Analytical frameworks explaining decline cannot account for recent signs of party resurgence; frameworks explaining resurgence typically account for little of the decline. Those focused on one aspect of the party system (e.g., parties in Congress) rarely offer insights on other aspects (e.g., parties in the electorate). What is needed is an approach that places parties within their structural settings. If these settings change, parties may change.

Beginning in the late 1840s advocates of municipal reform in the United States campaigned to throw rascals out of public office, reconstruct the legal foundations of municipal government, and install regimes of at least modest virtue in place of local government's shameless vice. More profoundly, reformers hoped to replace municipal political cultures of partisanship and patronage with different values and expectations. In these efforts reformers met with the militant opposition of party leaders and their constituents; party leaders too had a vision of what local political life ought to be, and of their own central role in making it so.

The election of 1912 retains its hold on the imagination of students of American political development. Long interpreted as a conflict between tradition and modernity, Martin Sklar has recently argued that the old order had passed by 1912. In law and economy, competitive-proprietary capitalism had been eclipsed by administration. The political conflict was now over who would administer prices and investment, the corporation of the state?

In one of his last published works, Vernon Louis Parrington authored the introduction to a book entitled The Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government. In it he endorsed the book's claim that ratification of the U.S. Constitution had been accompanied by “bitter class divisions.” In Parrington's view, the struggle for ratification was accurately described as both a political “clash between aristocracy and democracy” and an economic class struggle “between the greater landed and financial interests and the agrarian interests” of the new republic. He concurred with the author that “the two [struggles] in reality were one.” Hence, he suggested, relative to this historical context, the Constitution should be regarded as “a deliberate and well considered protective measure designed by able men who represented the aristocracy and wealth of America; a class instrument directed against the democracy.”

The following essay elaborates the proposition that changing work relations has been a major problematic of American constitutional development. By work relations I refer to the hiring and firing, compensation, and discipline, of persons assigned to perform designated tasks in public and private settings. By “problematic” I have in mind cause and project, dynamic and rationale, of constitutional duration and change. By “constitutional development” I mean the authoritative reordering of government institutions or of the transactions between government and society.

During the 1992 presidential contest, the press and pundits alike characterized the challenge posed by H. Ross Perot and the political organization he created, United We Stand America, as the most significant assault on the two-party system since Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Campaign. In one sense, this comparison is more penetrating than these observers imagined, for the impressive showing of Perot was emblematic of the candidate-centered, plebiscitary electoral politics that Roosevelt and the Progressive party championed in 1912. Given that Perot ran without partisan attachments and refused to cede authority to the rank and file of a new reform movement, however, the allusion has proven to be as ephemeral as the public opinion polls it relies on. The Progressive party was born during the 1912 election as more than an aegis for Roosevelt's ample desire for power; it embodied the aspirations of reformers whose quest for a vehicle of political, social, and industrial transformation was at least a dozen years old.

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.

Recently, Victoria Hattam and William Forbath have separately defended new explanations of the development of the distinctive, relatively apolitical labor movement in the United States. Their explanations differ from earlier accounts that saw the failure of socialism in the United States as the result of either the distinctive liberal tradition in the United States or of ethnic and other divisions within the working class. Their alternative view is that distinctive structural features of the U.S. state – in particular, the independent judiciary – played a decisive role in shaping the development of the labor movement. This paper questions some of the shared assumptions of these new accounts, focusing on Victoria Hattam's recent book, Labor Visions and State Power. Without denying that the judiciary played an important role in the development of the U.S. labor movement, I want to suggest a different account of the relationship between the judiciary and the legislative and executive branches.

From today's vantage point, the radical potential originally envisioned for parcel post is hard to imagine. One historian facilely characterized postal savings banks (1910) and parcel post (1912) as small incremental advances in the evolution of state action: “From legislation designed to restrain harmful practices in big business, it was but a step for the government to embark in business on its own accord.” Yet parcel post marked a dramatic departure in public-sector initiatives: it put the federal government in the transportation business to compete with well-established private firms. That the United States started parcel post so late – it was the last major industrialized nation to do so – suggests the extent to which the service raised fundamental questions about the proper sphere of state action.

The period roughly encompassing the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century has been described as one in which America embarked on a “search for order.” It has also been characterized as a period that witnessed the genesis of the modern American administrative state. The time was one of profound change, marking the transition from a principally agrarian to an industrial society and economy. Positions on the most contentious issues of the era tended to fall along sectional lines that reflected regional disagreement on the scope, as well as the propriety, of that transition. Even after appeals to the “bloody shirt” had waned, the fundamentally sectional nature of the national debate over these issues, and the state's capacity to deal with them, remained.