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.

Though observers at the time noted that a well-coordinated lobbying campaign contributed to enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, subsequent popular and scholarly accounts have largely ignored the role of institutional advocacy, focusing instead on either the inspirational effects of direct-action protest outside of Washington or unhindered institutional activity by policymakers themselves to explain the achievement of this legislation. In contrast, this article investigates civil rights movement organizations’ engagement in federal legislative lobbying and the broader network of labor, religious, and other public interest lobbyists within which their Washington representatives collaborated. Using archived sign-in sheets from meetings hosted by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, I identify 138 individuals who participated in the Civil Rights Act’s lobbying campaign as Washington representatives of various organizations. Drawing on their memoirs, obituaries, and other records of their professional careers, I trace these Washington representatives’ paths to the Civil Rights Act lobby. This descriptive analysis reveals a critical mass of Washington representatives with ample Beltway experience, findings that challenge conventional periodization of the civil rights movement’s institutionalization and suggest new interconnections in the development of the administrative and civil rights states.

This manuscript revisits the history of American highway policy from the perspective of the powerful institution at its core: a confederation of state highway departments able to cut through partisan and sectional divides in Congress with two powerful claims: they represent both the advice of experts and the will of the states. After documenting their role in the development of the American highway system, the manuscript applies this perspective to current policy developments with an emphasis on the potential reauthorization of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021, scheduled to expire at the end of fiscal year 2026. The manuscript concludes that the intersection of a looming fiscal crisis with the climate crisis creates the opportunity for this still powerful institution to launch a sustained transition away from fossil fuels, with impacts significantly beyond this policy realm.

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.

When and why did House parties identify exclusive committees? The nexus of parties and standing committees defines the distribution of power in the U.S. House of Representatives, shapes legislators’ careers, and affects Congress's ability to address the nation's problems. Yet, political science provides inadequate and often misleading characterizations of the parties and the most important standing committees. We provide missing detail and offer a historical perspective on party efforts to arrange standing committees in the period since the revolt against Speaker Joseph Cannon in 1909–1910. Our narrative offers a foundation for explaining party efforts to regulate committee membership and meet legislators’ demands. For the first time, we define three periods in committee assignment limitations. In doing so, we place key events in historical context: We report that the modern exclusive committees (Appropriations, Rules, and Ways and Means) did not become defined until the 1950s; the identification by the two parties of a larger set of exclusive committees for which a one-assignment limitation applied began decades earlier; the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 placed a one-assignment limitation in House rules that had been party practice for three decades by then. In recent decades, deep partisanship has been accompanied by a loosening, not tightening, of restrictions. In fact, there are no fully exclusive committees remaining in practice.

The expansion of schooling in the early 20th Century required the modernization of state governments at the subnational level and related fiscal policy reform. Organized educators in California and Washington promoted legislation in 1920 that would increase each state’s support for schooling. In spite of similar fiscal policy goals and a shared commitment to the support of public schooling in both states, the legislation passed in California and failed in Washington. This comparative analysis of fiscal policy reform in the two states demonstrates the relationship between education fiscal policy and state formation, between tax policy and social change, the role of states as subnational sites for fiscal policy experimentation in the early twentieth century, and the role of policy feedback in fiscal policy reform. A close study of factors contributing to the divergent legislative outcomes illuminates underlying relationships between fiscal policy and associative action at state levels over the 70-year-period preceding the 1920 reform campaigns and demonstrates the centrality of education to research in fiscal sociology and political development.

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.

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.

In British North America, imperial sovereignty required peripheral cooperation in public finance. However, because of limited coercive British state capacity, local colonial assemblies and town governments operated with substantial autonomy. The interests of colonial subjects did not align exactly with those of politicians and military officers in the center of British imperial authority in London. Short term success in colonial war between 1754 and 1763 required policies that incentivized colonists to buy into the imperial project. After 1758, Parliament and royal departments managed to incentivize greater provincial participation and resource allocation to the military by co-opting existing colonial merchant networks using lucrative public contracts. The contracts requested a small number of merchant firms in colonial cities take on large debts to circulate notes of credit in exchange for commissions. Merchant financiers could use these notes to pay for military expenses. The contracts promised bullion remittances from England to cover the debts, but these funds ultimately proved insufficient to cover outstanding obligations. Failures to remit led to a colonial credit crisis between 1762 and 1768 which shook colonists’ faith in the credibility of the British fiscal state in the decade leading up to the American Revolution.

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.

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.

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 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.