Between 2021 and 2025, national media gave attention to federal court cases and legislation that established new policies for increasing the compensation of college athletes. Foremost was "NIL," acronym for the "Name-Image-Likeness" payment guidelines. Although NIL was hailed as a "whole new ball game" for students as paid athletes, our research tempers news coverage by drawing from historical findings about trends and traditions in college sports practices and policies. Compensation and commercialization in American intercollegiate athletics-and issues of the rights of college students and the governance of college sports-have been central to intercollegiate athletics from their founding to the present. An enduring legacy is an "American Dilemma" in the balancing of academic and business principles in the education of collegiate student athletes and conduct of varsity sports programs.
This article uses youth soccer in Georgia, a state traditionally dominated by American football, as a case study of the challenges of the American youth sports system as a mechanism for talent development. We trace the historical divergence of US youth sports from global models, emphasizing the inefficiencies of school-based athletics and the rise of privatized club systems. Through historical analysis and interviews, the study reveals how socioeconomic barriers, geographic disparities, and competing league structures hinder equitable access and talent development. The pay-to-play model exacerbates exclusion, particularly for minority and low-income families. Georgia's case reflects broader national trends, where market-driven youth sports systems prioritize elite experiences over inclusive development.
In 1977, British Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan joined Commonwealth leaders by committing to the Gleneagles Agreement and thereby pledged to "combat the evil of apartheid" by "taking every practical step" to prevent sporting contacts between Britain and South Africa. Within two years of the agreement being struck, the Tories came to power under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Until the end of Thatcher's time in office (1990), Britain's application of the agreement became more controversial and divisive than it ever had during Callaghan's administration, as critics zeroed in on the new Prime Minister's interpretation of what "every practical step" represented or required. Although there are several studies that explore how and why Thatcher's government chose to apply Gleneagles, none consider how the agreement was interpreted, debated, and contested from multiple perspectives. In this article, we examine what motivated such different reactions to Gleneagles in Britain and the Commonwealth and why ultimately Thatcher could not seem to please anyone.
Jack Kemp's ascent from cast-off professional football player to conservative national figure requires understanding how the phases of his athletic career, which he filtered through his on-field experiences, shaped his unorthodox hybridity. He was in many ways a standard small-government conservative advocating the tenets of the technocratic Sunbelt New Right, but one who took surprisingly progressive stands on issues of labor and race very much at odds with developing Republican orthodoxy.
Six weeks after the United States entered World War II, Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking if he thought Organized Baseball should continue during the war. FDR responded the next day with his famous Green Light Letter, basically saying yes. Although this simple decision has been amply covered by scholars, its complex consequences have not. During the course of the war, more than a dozen executive agencies were called on to deal with practical aspects of the Green Light letter decision including the Selective Service; the Office of Defense Transportation; the War Mobilization Commission; the Office of War Mobilization; and the departments of war, treasury, and agriculture.
The Supreme Court is less constrained than political science has recognized. Motivated justices can dramatically alter politics without deferring to actors in the other branches. Subverting constraints, justices can aggrandize power and impose their irreducible preferences. Using Reconstruction as an example, this article brings new evidence to support the claim that an autonomous Court precipitated the end of Reconstruction. I make three essential arguments: First, the Republican commitment to federal civil rights protection extended longer than is traditionally supposed. Second, the architect of postbellum constitutionalism, Justice Bradley, harbored long-standing fear of Black equality and enfeebled the Reconstruction amendments when neither legal nor political imperatives compelled him to do so. Last, Bradley's interventions substantially hindered Reconstruction by facilitating the "redemption" of southern state governments. This article employs mixed-methodology, using a difference-in-differences analysis and novel archival data. Contrary to scholarship arguing that the Court simply followed a Republican retreat, the Court dramatically reshaped the political-social development of Reconstruction.
This essay examines the Army's efforts to cultivate and gain congressional support for the GI Bill in the 1980s. Focusing on the relationship between Representative Sonny Montgomery, senior Army leaders like Maxwell R. Thurman and Robert Elton, and the staffers who worked for each of them, it illustrates the intentionality with which Army leaders worked to cultivate congressional support for and to head off congressional and presidential opposition to a bill that they saw as essential. Analyzing their public and private efforts at critical moments when the legislation was imperiled reveals that relations between the Army and Congress are more intricate than testimony at hearings and budget requests might reveal, that throughout the 1980s, Army leaders remained deeply concerned about sustaining the All-Volunteer Force, and that the ultimate success of that force and the legislation that helped ensure it rested with individuals who built and then leveraged personal relationships.
Our thesis is that the degree of permissible interaction between government and religion and its policy implications is most strikingly documented in the educational arena. To support our claim, we make three arguments: (1) by the early 1970s, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and other states were experimenting with accommodationist policies in education that neither increased religious divisiveness nor denied religious freedom. These policy experiments contributed to the Supreme Court's new understanding of religious accommodation under the First Amendment; (2) beginning in the late 1970s, a scholarly reappraisal of the establishment clause-based on a close reading of the debates over the First Amendment in Congress and the states-was demonstrating that reasonable governmental accommodations, particularly in education, would not violate the establishment clause; and (3) that periodizing the establishment clause's history, by focusing on state-level innovations and scholarly reinterpretations, enhances the understanding of the policy developments of the First Amendment, particularly in the educational field.
In the years since the 2016 presidential election, questions of partisan identity and partisan polarization have burst into broader public discourse, and they have invariably been intertwined with curiosity about gender and gendered behavior, especially as it relates to partisanship and voting. What is women’s role in creating and sustaining the current political moment, or is politics as we experience it today shaped entirely by and for men? Political science as a discipline has of course tackled these questions for a much longer time, even though for some scholars, the current political moment has bestowed greater urgency on these long-running discussions and puzzles. However, even within political science, these two phenomena and their related questions have not always been examined in tandem.
This article investigates female voting behavior in the 2016 US presidential election through the lens of tall poppy syndrome, a theory suggesting that those in less prominent or celebrated roles sometimes seek to undermine individuals who pursue or attain extraordinary public success. Using data from the ANES, VOTER, and CCES surveys and controlling for alternative explanations, I find that women outside the workforce were more likely to vote against Hillary Clinton, indicating that their voting behavior may have been driven by tall poppy syndrome rather than solely by social conservatism. These findings highlight an underexplored factor in voting behavior, suggest widening avenues of partisan polarization, and point to the unique challenges that are faced by women who seek elected office.
The overturning of the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade (1973) in the United States during the summer of 2022 with Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization eliminated the nearly 50-year constitutional right to abortion, leading to the introduction of numerous new restrictions. This article examines how the language used in federally proposed anti-abortion legislation has evolved in the aftermath of the Roe decision. By exploring the gender and power dynamics that shape the contemporary abortion debate, alongside feminist legal theory, this study analyzes the language and effects of five bills that have been introduced since the ruling. After analyzing the proposed bills, there was a noticeable shift in anti-abortion strategies by Republican elected officials. Rather than directly criminalizing pregnant individuals, these bills target abortion providers, state funding, and the dissemination of information. This indirect approach sets to restrict abortion access by making it practically unattainable for many regardless of its legality.
The history and practice of party polarization in Congress is a gendered concept. Men have comprised the overwhelming majority of legislators from both parties, served as their party's leaders, and dominated the party caucuses. As women and women of color have increased their presence in the institution, particularly among Democrats, gender and race have emerged as important themes in understanding party polarization in contemporary congresses. In an analysis of legislative activity of members in the 104th to the 117th Congresses, I find the two most distinct groups of partisans, Democratic women and Republican men, are prominently featured in the opposing party's negative messaging to constituents and voters. The prominence of Democratic women as the focal point of negative messaging from the opposition has significant consequences for this group of officeholders. This study enhances our understanding of how gender dynamics inform party polarization in legislatures.
This article considers the link between industrialization and social movement strategy. In the late nineteenth century, temperance organizations, rebuffed by Congress, won prohibition at the state level, especially in the American South and West. Simultaneously, lawmakers in the Reconstruction South and West built railroads to Midwestern rail hubs, which housed breweries and distilleries that shipped liquor by rail back into dry states. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and Anti-Saloon League lobbied dry state congressmen to ban this interstate liquor traffic through the 1890 Wilson Act and 1913 Webb-Kenyon Act and eventually sought a complementary national amendment prohibiting liquor manufacturing, sale, and transportation. As railroad expansion and advances in liquor manufacturing undermined the state-level dry regime, prohibitionists pushed for a nationwide ban, contrary to voters’ preferences. This case shows how interest groups adapted a new legislative strategy, partly in response to industrialization and interstate rail development at the turn of the twentieth century.
The early 1970s was a tumultuous time for abortion law and policy in North Dakota where the defeat of an abortion liberalization initiative in 1972 was quickly followed by Roe v. Wade in 1973. The resulting political and cultural circumstances strongly favored the North Dakota Right to Life Association, which saw much of its agenda passed by the legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support. This study uses a political culture perspective to examine the development of North Dakota abortion law and policy in the years after Roe. It illustrates how the state legislature, interest groups, the bureaucracy, and the courts reacted to a series of disruptions in abortion policy. The resulting policies made abortion a continuing source of tension within North Dakota politics.
Despite nearly two centuries of actively stylizing itself as above the partisan fray of banal politics, the US Supreme Court faces increasing scrutiny over its ideological nature, ethical lapses, and perceived disconnection from democratic accountability. This article explores potential reforms including ethics guidelines, public affairs offices, and term limits to enhance the Court’s legitimacy. It also examines trends in judicial decision making, the Court’s relationship with public opinion, and the influence of identity politics on judicial perceptions through an examination of the scholarship on the Court. The article concludes by emphasizing the need for ongoing research and methodological innovation to address these challenges and ensure the Court’s role in American democracy.
This article examines the influence of the American Medical Association’s (AMA) campaign against national health insurance between 1945 and 1950. Although previous research has focused on the AMA’s professional influence and its opposition to national health care proposals, I argue that the AMA’s efforts played an essential role in the widespread adoption of private health insurance in the postwar era. Managed by the political consulting firm Whitaker and Baxter, the campaign actively promoted so-called “voluntary” health insurance and mobilized its member physicians and medical societies to support this alternative. Drawing on new archival research, I also highlight the significance of state-level innovations and medical society insurance plans, particularly in California. Ultimately, the article shows how the AMA’s campaign not only prevented the adoption of national health care but also entrenched private health insurance as a cornerstone of the American welfare state.
Prior to the Civil War, the US and state governments required the modern licensing of only three occupations, doctors, lawyers, and ship pilots. Most other references to licensing in the 15,000 surveyed antebellum statutes referred to licensing in general terms. Those that referred to the “licensing” of occupations clearly referenced a type of tax or regulation of occupations thought sinful or diplomatically sensitive, like Indian trading and privateering. In other words, the presumption of occupational freedom that developed in medieval and early modern Britain transferred to the colonies and the United States. Only with the rise of Progressivism did modern occupational licensing become common, thus adding weight to economic critiques of the current system.
There has been limited research on African policy instruments’ historical and institutional nature in health policy literature. However, in the field of health systems research, there are many examples that show the permanent use of financing instruments inspired by liberal (pro-market) ideas such as user fees, performance bonuses, or private practice of medicine in Africa. Through an analysis of archives (1840–1960), this article shows the presence of these instruments in the health system during the French colonial period in Senegal. Thus, this study shows that these financing policy instruments’ institutional presence and longevity are part of a liberal approach that predates international organizations’ contemporary (and liberal) promotion. This study uses a historical and institutionalist approach to understand the context, actors, and underlying factors that allowed for this historical continuity, resulting in the permanence of these instruments.
This article examines a 40-year policy history of efforts to redress survivors of egregious violations, such as torture, massacres, and genocides. Using oral history interviews and document analysis, it first focused on the ideas and creative advocacy that undergirded a burgeoning redress movement. By juxtaposing classic ideas with a relatively obscure statute (the Alien Tort Statute or ATS) and modern strategies, advocates won an improbable court case. Their case inspired Congress to introduce, debate, and pass the Torture Victim Protection Act, explicitly to support, affirm, and expand the ATS and the idea of universal jurisdiction, locally and globally. After advocates further developed these ideas with new court cases and NGOs, the Supreme Court began whittling the policies away, despite congressional intent, prioritizing the ideas that Congress had rejected, until the Court stripped the ATS of its universal jurisdiction power. This human rights retrenchment in the United States drove the advocates to seek new bases for human rights justice and to develop their ideas abroad where legal actions have succeeded in advancing some redress. In expounding this history, the article sheds light on four phenomena: the power and limitations of aspirational and practical ideas in constructing new pathways to justice; the role of creative advocacy to frame and amalgamate ideas toward developing paradigm-shifting policy and law; the flow and interactions between government branches and civil society with the ideas and policies, including how the courts initially led in advancing human rights redress then later reversed and truncated the pathway counter to Congressional intent.
This article uses the case of the economist John Malcolm Blair as a vehicle for examining the durability of the institutional tradition in US economic policy making. Over a multidecade federal government career, Blair played an important role in focusing policy debate on institutionalist concerns like economic structure and corporate power even through the heyday of the Keynesian Revolution. Indeed, Blair stood as representative of an overlooked postwar policy-intellectual current that strove to anchor the study of macroeconomic issues like inflation and unemployment upon solid microfoundations: what I call Institutional Keynesianism. A primary influence behind such policy developments as the Celler-Kefauver Anti-Merger Act of 1950 and the wage–price guideposts implemented by the Kennedy administration, Blair’s work sheds light on the meaningful yet often neglected links between different schools of economic thought and policy domains.
