Kimberly Johnson's Governing the American State is an impressive achievement. It calls for reassessment and revision of the standard account of the transition from “dual” federalism to “new” or “cooperative” federalism in the development of the American state. On the conventional account, a framework of dual federalism reigned in the United States up to the New Deal. Under it, the state and the federal governments each operated in their separate and independent spheres, and the growth of a powerful central state was structurally contained. The years between the end of Reconstruction (1877) and the onset of the Great Depression (1929)—the time frame examined by Johnson—are mainly regarded as a period of relative stasis for the development of the American state, a period which ended dramatically when the central state experienced a “big bang” of growth under the firm executive leadership of FDR in response to the crisis of the Great Depression. An important way that New Dealers increased the central state's power was through a cooperative approach in which the federal government entered policy domains historically reserved to the states and undertook interventionist polices in collaboration with them.

While this perspective is characterized by a trope of radical disjuncture, Johnson sees important elements of continuity between the growth of the New Deal state and prior state building innovations that had been developing for over a half-century. She also stresses that the state building innovations of Gilded Age and Progressive Era reformers, taken up and carried forward by New Dealers, largely emanated from the choices of members of Congress responding to local constituencies, not from the executive branch. This latter point is important because Johnson's argument is not only a departure from dominant modes of periodizing the development of the modern American state, but it is also a departure from conventional accounts of the institutional locus of its genesis, shifting the focus from the presidency to Congress. Johnson's book thereby contributes to recent trends away from an overly narrow focus on the executive branch in the literature on American political development.

Gilded Age and Progressive Era reformers sought to expand the role of the central state into new policy areas, and, according to Johnson's account, they found their state building ambitions limited by a number of constraints, importantly including the deeply fragmented character of the American state, particularly its federated structure, weak legislative institutions, limited administrative capacity, and a judicial veto—characteristics that have led many to denominate it as “weak state.” However, Johnson shows that those reformers did not abandon the state building project, but rather devised a distinctive form of state building that accommodated the constraints they faced. Congress grew the capacity of the central state through “intergovernmental policy instruments” (IPIs), such as the federal articulation of polices to be implemented largely by states, and grants-in-aid that gave federal authorities leverage over state policymaking, and such policies led to the emergence of interlocking federal and state bureaucracies. The New Deal state, leading to our contemporary forms of governance, was built upon this longstanding and already entrenched legacy of cooperative federalism. In relation to the story of America's “weak state,” it is significant, too, that Johnson's account highlights how American institutional fragmentation can lead to distinctive (non-Weberian) forms of intervention, rather than the non-intervention that is often supposed, as Desmond King and Robert Lieberman have recently pointed out (“Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State,” World Politics [2008], forthcoming).

To explain the development of IPIs, Johnson relies upon a combination of statistical analyses of data and qualitative historical case studies. She compiled an original dataset of 131 federal statutes passed between 1877 and 1929, which included IPIs, and tested a variety of partisan, electoral, and institutional hypotheses about what drove the enactment of these laws as well as the details of who they empowered. While her findings vary in important and subtle ways across policy areas, she broadly finds that partisan control of Congress, party cohesiveness, unified versus divided government, professionalization of legislative careers, growth of legislative staff, and sectionalism were significant explanatory variables. The key point is that Gilded Age and Progressive Era Congresses, acting strategically and self-consciously in the course of party and electoral competition, within the framework of American political institutions, laid the foundation for the modern cooperative federalist policymaking regime.

Turning to the case studies, Johnson examines legislation to regulate food and drug safety, facilitate highway construction, and reduce maternal and infant mortality rates. The evidence from the cases, broadly, is mutually reinforcing with the findings on the partisan, electoral, and institutional variables in her empirical model, and it conveys the growing importance of IPI's during the period leading up to the New Deal. The cases also highlight other causal forces apparently encouraging enactment of IPIs, including public skepticism toward an interventionist central state, the growth of interest groups, and the emergence of a professional bureaucracy. Given the significance of these factors in Johnson's argument and case study evidence, the reader is left to wonder why they were not incorporated as explanatory variables in the empirical model. In a project as ambitious as Johnson's, of course, readers will often be able to raise such questions. The evidence she does present is powerful, and scholars working on the political development of American federalism will have to reckon with her book.