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.

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.

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.

How do dominant political actors suppress minority votes amid institutional constraints? I argue that “repertoires of vote repression”—the set of repressive tactics that political actors can choose from—expand or contract over time amid institutional and structural constraints, and that political actors who seek to repress votes prefer the most efficient tactic available to them amid these constraints. Examining historical case studies of vote repression in the American South following Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era, I show how subnational political actors reconfigured suppression strategies in response to changing institutional constraints. During Reconstruction, federal oversight of local politics and reliance on agrarian labor limited institutional repression, leading to widespread violence. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal constraints on legal vote restrictions led to the rise of administrative and carceral workarounds. My findings suggest that a historically grounded examination of institutional constraints is essential for understanding both past and present struggles over voting rights in America.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

In Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice Roberts tied the notion of equal state sovereignty to the constitutional order. Yet, asymmetric federalism has long existed in the Constitution and in practice. Asymmetry has long been theorized in comparative politics literature but is missing in American politics’ conceptualizations of federalism and democratization. By attending to multidimensional federalism, this paper moves the debate over federalism’s positive or negative consequences on democracy toward a more precise understanding of how different dimensions of federalism might strengthen democracy under historically contingent conditions. Analyzing multidimensional federalism, whereby federalism is characterized by the relationship between the federal government’s power over state governments (i.e., centralization), as well as how state governments experience federal authority relative to one another (i.e., symmetry), this paper examines how the federal government’s selective, concentrated oversight over Southern states shaped democratization efforts in the United States during the post-Civil War era. This study finds democratization occurred in the South during Reconstruction, in part, due to the presence of asymmetric federalism. In the face of democratic backsliding, asymmetric federalism may be used as a toolkit of democratization, especially when a democratically committed government lacks the state capacity and political feasibility to institute expansive reforms.

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 presidents, and how their actions will likely continue to undermine norms and make clemency even more of a political tool in the future.

Why did the states of the Jim Crow South vary in both their overall level and geographic distribution of public goods? Given these states’ similar political economies, racialized barriers to political participation, and repressive single-party politics, it is surprising they varied as much as they did. I argue that an underappreciated legacy of the 1880s and 1890s helps explain this variation. During this period, southern states experienced over two decades of multiparty competition and agrarian mobilization, with the most intensive episode channeled by the People’s Party. Seeking to end threats to their rule, conservative Democrats convened state constitutional conventions throughout the 1890s to disenfranchise their opponents and entrench single-party rule. I argue for increased attention to, and the heightened importance of, authoritarian foundings in setting the terms of political conflict and resource allocation within authoritarian states. I show that a strong Populist challenge to the Democratic Party in Louisiana forced the state’s authoritarian founders to compromise on the design of the state’s newly constitutionally entrenched institutions, whereas conservative elites in South Carolina coopted agrarian discontent and avoided concessions. These contrasting foundings contributed to divergent policy legacies. By the 1920s and 1930s, Louisiana provided a greater amount of two key public goods: public highways and funding for white public schools. Louisiana also distributed a larger share of these goods to poorer whites in rural areas.