Abstract Why did the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan and interwar fascism share such profound similarities? My basic argument is that the Klan prefigured interwar fascist movements that sought political revolution after military defeat. Modern warfare, mass demobilization, and labor revolt converged with American settler institutions during Reconstruction to yield what I call early fascism. The importance of my argument is that it highlights how the Klan was a break from previous traditions of American racist violence and represented a more modern movement than many accounts recognize. Moreover, this article highlights a more transnational perspective on fascist politics and situates the Klan and interwar fascism within the broader arc of colonial racism. I conclude by discussing the implications for discussions about home-grown varieties of American racism, especially what observers called the “fascism debate.” Certain contemporary American social movements—such as the Paleoconservatives—have attempted to adapt fascist politics to a post-civil-rights, post-colonial context and represent counterparts to European post-fascism.
For most of American history, the American state has been an active agent of racial oppression. As the country democratized, it retained structures and practices of racial authoritarianism and coercion. But in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the United States underwent waves of racial democratization. For a brief while during those periods, the American state transformed itself, on balance, into an agent of racial equality. We explain the reasons for this turn and present a theoretical scheme to explain the transformation of the state's role in American democratization. We show that the construction of a "civil rights state," a distinctive historical alignment combining national standard-setting and varieties of coercive enforcement, best accounts for these democratizing surges. We further demonstrate that both standard-setting and coercion are essential components of the civil rights state. When they converge, racial democratization is possible; when they do not, racial democratization is less likely.
Abstract This article examines how Afro-Caribbean immigrants navigated, challenged, and ultimately reshaped the racial and political terrain of early twentieth-century Harlem. Drawing on the framework of racial capitalism and the concept of political Blackness, the paper traces the interplay of labor market stratification, ethnic civic life, and party realignment in the making of a new Black political order. It excavates how Afro-Caribbean migrants, initially maligned as “foreign,” were positioned as both labor competitors and cultural interlopers—and how they responded by building transnational institutions, cultivating parallel civic worlds, and, eventually, forging coalitions that redrew the boundaries of racial belonging. This study shows how party politics—not cultural affinity or the racial order—created space for Afro-Caribbean incorporation, culminating in their ascent as key power brokers in Harlem's Democratic machine. Through archival records, press coverage, labor surveys, and organizational correspondence, this study reveals that political Blackness was not inherited or inevitable—it was constructed through contestation, coalition, and the strategic reimagining of race in the crucible of urban politics.
The National Labor Relations Act no longer protects the right to unionize because business organizations and their allies have succeeded in redirecting the statute to protect their interests over workers' right to collective action. This paper examines how processes of conversion have reshaped the agency charged with enforcement-the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). I argue that conversion does not produce institutional collapse but rather internal fragmentation, creating space for normative subcultures of enforcement. Drawing on interviews with NLRB officials and publicly available agency documents, I find that mission-committed officials sustained the agency's original pro-worker mission through two strategies: mining latent legal resources within the statute and building external partnerships for proactive enforcement. These enforcement subcultures differ from the "pockets of effectiveness" identified in developing countries-they operate within fragmented institutions rather than controlling whole agencies, requiring strategic adaptation to shifting political conditions.The findings bridge historical institutionalism and public administration scholarship, showing how bureaucratic legacies enable resistance to institutional change. They also illuminate urgent questions about whether such resistance can survive systematic civil service dismantling, with implications beyond labor law for understanding mission-driven governance under authoritarian pressure.
The main goal of this article is to examine how vanishing norms have freed presidents of both major political parties to abuse their clemency power to pursue their own personal interests rather than the traditional purposes of mercy or serving the public interest. In the piece, I look more closely at the pardon power in practice, considering vanishing norms related to both mass pardons and individual pardons over the last half century. I explain how certain clemency decisions helped clear room for controversial clemency decisions by our most recent three presidents, and how their actions will likely continue to undermine norms and make clemency even more of a political tool in the future.
Americans have never had any direct say over the way their federal courts are structured or operate. As a result, we know little about their preferences on such matters. In contrast, through ballot measures, they have had many opportunities to weigh in on the way state courts function. I analyze 364 measures targeting state courts of last resort that appeared on ballots between 1792 and 2024. These propositions asked voters to make concrete choices about court structures and operations. By examining the debates that preceded votes on these measures, election results reveal the public's preferences by showing which arguments voters found persuasive, which they rejected, and how their views evolved over time. I find that until the mid-twentieth century, voters grappled with questions about how many justices should sit on their courts of last resort and how much those justices should be paid. Voters slowly and grudgingly agreed to increase court sizes and to raise judicial pay. From the mid-twentieth century on, voter attention was redirected primarily toward judicial ethics rules and regulations and the methods used to put people on the bench. Ethics measures proved popular, but no consensus emerged on selection schemes.
We draw on a dataset of 1,044 state and national party platforms from 1980 to 2025 to track the evolution of Democratic and Republican positions with respect to higher education. The sector enjoyed considerable bipartisan support in the 1980s and early 1990s, with both parties generally expressing the view that 4-year colleges and universities contribute to economic vitality and student advancement. Starting in the mid-1990s, Republicans' position gradually became more critical-even so, there is considerable diversity in views across states as late as 2010. In recent years, the party's platforms have become almost uniformly negative toward higher education. The first line of GOP criticism focused on concerns about speech and alleged liberal bias. In the past decade, the party increasingly focused its criticism on higher education's approach to racial and gender/sexuality issues-just as the intensity of opposition ramped up. Democratic platforms show much more stability but have expressed increased concern about college costs since the 2010s. Democrats also became more likely to express a liberal position on race and gender/sexuality policies just as the GOP became more vocal in criticizing these policies from the right. Our evidence suggests that the shift in the GOP's positioning began at the national level and was instigated by nationally oriented ideological activists rather than mass-level demands. In a highly polarized and nationalized two-party system, the case of higher education illuminates the dangers that exist for any civil society institution when one party becomes hostile to its purposes and orientation.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve restored its historic financial stability mandate with new monetary tools to help mitigate the credit crunch and stimulate the economy. This article develops a new theory about how political constraints facing monetary institutions limit the effectiveness of these tools. It develops the concept of the Fed's financial stability paradox, suggesting that the central bank's implicit financial stability goals can complicate its ability to meet its dual mandate of full employment and price stability. In a highly financialized world, the Fed often provides easy credit with exceptional monetary instruments, such as quantitative easing, to contain financial instability. Without sufficient regulatory tools, however, these monetary actions risk stoking moral hazard and fueling financial fragility. To test these theoretical priors, this article conducts a plausibility probe of the 2023 regional banking crises, finding that political constraints reduced the feasibility of more traditional banking supervisory powers, placing the financial stability onus disproportionately on the Fed's quantitative easing.
Why did the United States return to the gold standard in 1879, and why did the ensuing Gilded Age feature a high level of financial instability? While existing scholarship adopts an economic development model of monetary policy that emphasizes material interests in explaining government retrenchment during Reconstruction, this paper argues that the confluence of state interests in cheap borrowing and financial elites' interest in debt monetization led to the outsourcing of monetary policy and the financial instability of the Gilded Age.
Private funding of U.S. federal elections is at record levels, with most money contributed by a few very wealthy individuals and organizations. Cross-partisan majorities of the American public consistently express concern, and proposed campaign finance reforms are introduced as frequently in Congress recently as earlier in time. Despite these facts, and that successful twentieth century reforms often were preceded by corruption scandal, that these continue today, that there remain political entrepreneurs for reform, that reformers continue to use corruption framing, and that the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision left some reform strategies open, no proposed campaign finance reforms to curb moneyed interests' influence have been enacted since the 2002 BCRA. We address this puzzle through comparative process tracing of forty reform efforts receiving consideration in a congressional committee from 1907 to 2024. We identify three ideal-type reform trajectories-scandal as agenda-setter, the Supreme Court as agenda-setter, and a multiple legislative trajectories type-through which campaign finance reforms through 2002 sometimes were successful. We then show how and why a combination of changes in the political, media, and legal environments doomed reform efforts post-2002 and especially post-2010 to almost certain failure. We draw implications for federal political discourse and policy-making more generally.
Elites in the antebellum U.S. South faced persistent protest by enslaved Americans. Elites sought to quell that threat through policing, but success relied on the participation of non-slaveholding Whites. I hypothesize that elites encouraged non-slaveholders' compliance by offering policy concessions, specifically, school funding. Novel data from North Carolina show that the state distributed more school funds to counties where more enslaved people lived, and that elites in those counties raised more school taxes. I then proxy for slave escape with the location of escape routes and find that elites also raised more taxes in densely enslaved counties containing escape routes. Alternative explanations rooted in electoral incentives or education preferences cannot account for the funding patterns, and data from the 1850 U.S. census suggest that the theory may extend to the rest of the South. The paper illustrates how elites can leverage public funds to preserve power in ethnically diverse settings.
Why was New Jersey able to construct a more robust air pollution control regime after World War II while Ohio lagged far behind? Moreover, why did Ohio - a pioneer in early air pollution control efforts - fall behind New Jersey during this period? Both of these states were heavily-industrialized, densely populated, and concerned about maintaining a competitive economy. This paper explores the role played by institutional legacies in shaping bureaucratic politics as well as the development of effective government agencies. It demonstrates that statewide action on air pollution was primarily shaped by the states' institutional legacies (or lack thereof) from the Progressive Era. In Ohio, extant urban pollution agencies remained the center of pollution control during the 1960s even as policymakers recognized their limited capacity to address air pollution. In contrast, policymakers in New Jersey could design a statewide agency virtually from scratch without disrupting existing institutions and their relationships with affected industries. While it took some time for New Jersey to develop an effective state agency, policymakers and pollution control advocates could focus on improving one statewide agency rather than several urban agencies, thus easing their path to developing an agency capable of regulating corporate activity.
This article tells the story of how high-ranking officials in New York State, during the early nineteenth century, designed and revised an institutional structure for a statewide public school system that offered, even demanded, a significant role for local residents in governing and operating their schools. This statebuilding initiative was pursued with equal vigor by members of the various political factions of the time. The educational system it produced was built by government action, rather than primarily growing out of civil-societal forces and voluntary/spontaneous efforts. Politicians in charge of the system consistently tried to encourage citizen engagement. Their goal was not just to improve the schools, but also to enhance self-government in American life more generally. The story anticipates debates in the contemporary field of theory and practice known as participatory governance, contributing to discussions about the possibilities for meaningful citizen control within large bureaucratic structures. Since participatory democracy presupposes and relies upon policy feedbacks, the article discusses feedbacks that emerged-or were hoped for but did not-and how they facilitated or obstructed participatory goals. It also contributes to scholarship on the activism of nineteenth-century government and speaks to conversations in the history of American education.
The appointment of federal examiners under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a novel administrative authority that Congress granted to the Justice Department to enforce voter registration of black southerners, was largely limited to jurisdictions in which the department had already pursued federal litigation under the previous Civil Rights Acts. Out of procedural concerns, the attorneys of the Department's Civil Rights Division became increasingly path-dependent in their enforcement activities as they concentrated bureaucratic resources in three of the volatile southern states. They left the remainder of the south that experienced comparable incidents of authoritarian repression and violence with little to no federal intervention. These findings are presented with geospatial illustrations to reveal the limitations in the territorial reach of federal law enforcement. I argue that the circumspection was caused by the department's continued reliance on litigation as a benchmark for establishing the existence of racial discrimination. Both the signed complaints from the local black citizens and the President's political deference to the southern Democrats in Congress had little influence on the department's decisions for appointing examiners.
This paper documents how administrative geography functioned as a strategic political instrument during post–Civil War Reconstruction. I document sixty-seven counties established by Republican-controlled state legislatures across the South that concentrated Republican and African American voters. Historical boundary data and election returns show that Republicans created new counties in areas where they held strong support, added legislative seats that strengthened their majorities, and expanded opportunities for African American political representation at the state and local level. This partisan model of administrative unit proliferation advances our understanding of institutional design during contested democratization. The findings contribute to research on American political development, democratization, redistricting, and administrative design politics—showing that county creation functioned not merely as administrative policy but as a tool in partisan competition with lasting consequences for American political geography.
We consider three American policy controversies that have entailed memorable drives to repeal congressional measures. Those drives have targeted the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition), Section 14b of the Taft–Hartley Act, and the Affordable Care Act. We do not consider the actual conduct of these repeal drives. We consider the overall policy controversies in which the drives have figured. Components of this focus include factors related to political geography, Congress’s deliberative content and style, the U.S. system of vertical federalism, the U.S. system of elections, the role of crises, and the consequences of conflict. One line of takeaway is the following. In each of these three policy enterprises, we see a kind of controversy in which extreme intensity has joined with striking geographic differentiation in views. As a practical matter, the policymaking process in these cases has enrolled a multiplicity of actors, including the states as well as the public, and it has extended across time. All this activity has arguably constituted the policymaking process. In these instances, this is how the country has been making certain of its major decisions—jaggedly and extendedly. A congressional enactment can be just a first draft.
With the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the American labor movement cemented the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. However, the NLRA explicitly excluded the public sector. Government employees did not achieve similar legal protections until decades later, and even then, the laws varied considerably by state. Because of this, scholarly accounts of the development of public-sector unions usually start in the 1960s and emphasize how public- and private-sector unions developed along separate paths. In this article, we analyze a new dataset and show that hundreds of cities had organized workers during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, including firefighters, police, and other public-sector workers (like those in the sanitation and roads departments). By the 1950s, numerous employee unions had engaged in strikes and had achieved written agreements with their city employers. We also present evidence that public- and private-sector employee organization were correlated during this period. Thus, despite very different legal contexts before 1960, our evidence suggests that the timing and location of early public-sector organization may have had more in common with private-sector organization than is often recognized.
How have U.S. House districts changed since the Founding? When do mapmakers reshape districts—and when do they choose to preserve them? This article introduces the concept of “spatial protectionism”—the strategic minimization of district change—and develops four original measures to analyze redistricting changes from 1789 onward. I demonstrate how the strategic imperatives, racial context, and technical capabilities of mapmakers shape the magnitude and form of district change across five redistricting eras: Spatial Representation, Shifting Apportionment, Relative Stasis, Racial Redistricting, and Precision Engineering. My analysis reveals persistent low change disrupted by shifts to at-large districts; unprecedented boundary changes in the last decade; and clear associations between racial demographics, party control, and patterns of continuity and change. These findings establish the first empirical standard for judging the magnitude of district change and underscore the dual significance of stasis and dynamism in the politics of redistricting.
The United States and Canadian Conferences of Catholic Bishops chose opposite strategies of either confrontation or cooperation when their respective countries expanded abortion rights, despite their identical institutional philosophies. This paper theorizes the Conferences’ strategic divergence as a response to partisan cues during debates over contraception and abortion access in the 1960s and 1970s. In the United States, abortion rights debates coincided with the collapse of the New Deal Coalition. The Republican Party responded to increased electoral competition by adopting an antiabortion position to court Catholic voters. This strategy invited bishops to take an uncompromising stance against expanded abortion access. In contrast, Canada debated decriminalizing abortion when the Liberal Party dominated electoral politics and supported increased access. The Liberals were thus unwilling to adjust their position, so the bishops had no incentive to be confrontational. The effect of these differences lingers to the present and complicates efforts to expand public health insurance due to its link to contraceptive and abortion access. Further, the analysis demonstrates that party cues are an under-explored variable in developmental stories of religious institutions’ political positions and reveals a tendency for health expansions to revolve around the availability of reproductive care.
Today, two touchstones of the conservative legal movement are support for the unitary executive theory and skepticism of affirmative action policies. This article reveals a connection between these two positions, demonstrating how policy disputes over civil rights contributed to conservative efforts to increase and legitimize presidential control over the bureaucracy through the controversial claim that the president possesses the whole executive power under Article II. Specifically, I examine two intertwined controversies from 1983, which pit the Reagan White House and Department of Justice (DOJ) against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), two agencies that Reagan officials viewed as obstacles to pursuing its preferred civil rights agenda. Conflicts between the DOJ and EEOC led the administration to deploy the unitary executive theory to help centralize control over its civil rights litigation strategy, while clashes with the USCCR spurred the administration to assert the theory's tenets amid battles over that agency's reauthorization. While these episodes yielded mixed political and legal outcomes, the early articulations of the unitary executive theory that emerged helped to elaborate and advance a controversial constitutional doctrine about presidential power that has become increasingly consequential over time.
