In 1968, the Republican Party began an impressive run of success that would lead to victory in five of the next six presidential elections. A critical aspect of the GOP's winning electoral formula was the attack on an elitist social liberalism characterized as soft on crime, overly tolerant, and excessively responsive to minorities. A prime target was the Supreme Court–a remote and aloof body that could only be brought to heel through a string of new appointments. In American politics it is hard to dislodge the status quo, but with virtually uninterrupted GOP control of the White House, the Court seemed one place where electoral dominance could translate rapidly into broad judicial change.

In practice, as Steven Teles argues in his remarkable book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, the conservative journey was much more arduous. Twenty-four years later, when Bill Clinton put an end to the long stretch of Republican victories in presidential elections, Republicans had succeeded in making the previous nine Supreme Court appointments (the snake-bit Jimmy Carter having been the only twentieth-century president to fail to make a single addition to the Court). And yet, GOP success in remaking the law was far more limited. To some extent, this reflected the weight of precedent in muting legal change, along with Democrats' success in blocking some GOP nominees. But it also reflected a string of appointments that had partially (Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor) or more completely (David Souter, John Paul Stevens) misfired. The distance between partisan control over Court appointments and partisan control over how the law was interpreted remained wide. For political scientists, that surprisingly durable distance presents a major puzzle.

To solve the puzzle, Teles adopts an approach that is both highly effective and radically divergent from the typical foci and methods of contemporary scholarship on American politics. Utilizing extensive interviews and hard-won access to private archives, he tracks the activities of a diffuse set of skilled professionals operating over decades. These elite actors strove to penetrate a densely institutionalized environment—what sociologists would call an organized field—that provided a surprisingly resilient support structure for legal liberalism. Teles rejects what he calls (p. 276) “the ‘myth of diabolical competence.’” Conservatives made many mistakes, and many of their organizations' initiatives failed. They learned from failures, however, and many entrepreneurs took the long view. Over the course of several decades, they built a legal movement that could effectively counter the liberal legal establishment.

This focus on slow and indirect efforts to outflank or undermine an entrenched regime reflects Teles's distinctive take on contemporary policymaking. He insists (p. 3) that elections are just one aspect of modern politics, and not always the decisive one: “[C]hanges in the form of political competition over the past half-century, especially the increasing importance of ideas and professional power, have led to a decline in the power of elections to cause comprehensive change, especially in highly entrenched political domains.” Battles must be waged through complex, densely institutionalized policy environments. In these battles, organizational capacity plays a substantial role in dictating outcomes. Perhaps even more important are the complex social structures that determine what (and whose) arguments have credibility in policy disputes.

Teles insists that these characteristics of modern policymaking have huge consequences for politics. Particular actors may succeed in institutionalizing policy regimes that favor their preferred policy outcomes, and that are relatively resilient even in the face of repeated electoral defeats. Drawing an analogy to economic processes, he suggests that modern contestation over policy looks less like idealized market competition, where equilibria are constantly subject to challenge and economic rents are short-lived, than it does like industries tending to oligopolistic outcomes, where first-mover advantages may be critical: “The complexity of political competition means that actors do not limit themselves to the marginal advantages of median voter models, but seek to construct a ‘regime’ that will generate supernormal profits over a span of decades. In that sense, politics is more like markets for technology than markets for potatoes” (p. 266).

These arguments about nonelectoral politics, the author adds, apply with particular force in the field of law. Courts cannot fully shape their own agenda, which means that the existence of a network of organizations strategically feeding cases into the system is a substantial political advantage. More fundamentally, legal ideas operate in a social field with elaborate professional norms governing credibility and legitimacy. Judges emerge from, and seek cues from, a network of legal elites shaped at leading law schools. By the 1970s, Teles explains, liberal legal networks were wel-institutionalized and (especially through the critical institutions of leading law schools) able to reproduce themselves. They shaped both the pool of viable candidates for judicial appointment and the lines of legitimate argument in legal contestation. In Teles's account, the strength of this organizational field largely explains the long delay between Republican electoral success and legal transformation and the repeated disappointments with GOP appointees.

The core of this book is an exploration of conservative efforts to confront this entrenched regime. It is an account that emphasizes diverse sites of loosely connected activity, playing out over an extended period of time. Through trial and error, political actors gradually improved their capacity to develop a credible network of conservative legal elites, equipped with credible arguments and sufficient status to merit a hearing. Only after the painstaking development of these networks, Teles argues, were effective challenges to the entrenched policy regime possible: “Transforming what judges considered reasonable and appropriate,” he writes (p. 89), “was as important as the design of specific cases. Conservatives would have to change the ideas of legal elites before they could effectively change the behavior of courts.” This development required skilled social action in a variety of critical roles: intellectual entrepreneurs to develop and broadcast conservative legal ideas; network entrepreneurs to develop a conservative legal community that could nurture these ideas and recruit and train candidates for court appointments; political entrepreneurs to help feed these ideas and candidates into policymaking circles; and patrons to provide the financing needed to facilitate all this social action.

Teles explores the activities of this diverse set of social actors—and how they fit together to produce a conservative legal movement—in a series of compelling studies of distinct organizational sites: two generations of conservative public interest law organizations, the development of the law and economics movement, and the emergence of the Federalist Society as a kind of conservative parallel to the American Bar Association. It is impossible to do justice to these marvelous organizational studies in this brief review. Each is elegantly crafted and full of insights, combining interview and archival evidence to explore how particular organizations developed. The narratives are carefully structured to identify the reasons behind both successes and failures—often grounded in strategic choices and their fit (or lack of fit) with the broader environment of legal organizations.

The fascinating chapter on the Federalist Society can illustrate the broader argument. Teles shows how the society gradually developed from very humble beginnings as the brainchild of a few law professors and some energetic conservative law students to become a transformative force in the law. It became the principal conduit for developing a cadre of law students and young lawyers who sought to develop more conservative visions of the law. As it grew, the Federalist Society invested in the human capital of members, developed cultural capital in the form of better, more developed ideas, and produced social capital “in the form of networks that develop as by-products of Society activities” (p. 136). Over time, the Federalist Society facilitated not only the development of conservative legal ideas but also their transmission into elite circles of law through the production of social networks and the cultivation of a reliable and deep bench of conservative legal talent.

Revealingly, Teles argues, the Federalist Society achieved these impressive political results through a studied commitment to indirect activity. Despite opportunities to move into litigation and pressure from supporters to take public stances on political matters as it became more prominent, the Federalist Society held back. Instead, it focused on a carefully delimited task: creating a parallel institutional setting for conservative legal discourse—a kind of shadow university. As Teles writes (p. 136), “the key decision this entrepreneurial cadre made was to narrow its mission of facilitating the activism of its members and influencing the character of intellectual debate rather than directly influencing the actions of government itself.” Only after a long period of development, marked by setbacks as well as successes, has the Federalist Society (and other components of a maturing conservative legal movement) provided the basis—personnel, argumentation, professional status—for a more effective confrontation with the regime of legal liberalism.

Political scientists well beyond the field of public law can learn a lot not only from Teles's argument but also from his intellectual approach. “Americanists” today focus overwhelmingly on immediate and direct causal effects that are a good fit for their preferred methods and dominant theoretical imagery (which focuses on voters and legislatures). The emphasis that Teles places on long-term, indirect action to build an alternative legal establishment and shift the distribution of status and credible legal argumentation points to quite different sources of political outcomes. Critics could reasonably question whether some of Teles's claims are sufficiently supported—although he is admirably systematic about indicating the evidence that leads him to make particular inferences. Reliance on interviews has its risks as well (although he uses archival sources as an effective supplement and occasional corrective). There are places where Teles, who puts great weight on the role of ideas and the philosophical commitments of his subjects, is perhaps too willing to take their self-characterizations at face value. For instance, he uncritically accepts the justifications put forward by the Institute for Justice, a conservative public interest law firm whose assaults on government regulation were regularly orchestrated around downtrodden minorities, even as their success in litigation would have more generally liberated private property from government interference. He briefly notes that critical and extensive early funding for the Institute for Justice came from a single patron, billionaire Charles Koch, without acknowledging that the Koch family has parlayed vast energy industry wealth into extensive support of lobbying and grassroots mobilization targeting taxes and economic regulation.

Indeed, Teles's downplaying of the role of business in the emergence of a successful conservative legal movement (including the absence of any discussion of the Chamber of Commerce's extensive efforts in this domain) leads to a lopsided treatment of modern conservatism—one in which savvy political entrepreneurs and compelling and deeply held ideals loom large, and raw organized power and material interest stays in the background. This tilt might have some justification in an analysis of the peculiar organized field of law. Indeed, one of the many strengths of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement is its sophisticated appreciation for the distinctive structural features of this particular domain of social activity. Yet Teles stumbles slightly in trying to move beyond the law to draw general lessons about change in policy regimes. Conservative challenges to, say, financial regulation are likely to look very different—involving different political resources, different kinds of actors, and different strategies.

To his credit, Teles and his coeditor Brian Glenn have broadened the canvas in their Conservatism and American Political Development. Assembling a strong team of scholars, they examine how conservatism has shaped, and been shaped by, the development of three distinct policy regimes: Social Security, environmental regulation, and education. In an admirable attempt to generate greater coherence from an edited volume, Glenn and Teles match their three policy areas with three distinct periods: the New Deal to the late 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s, and post-1980. This gives them nine separate units of analysis to work with, and a group of scholars who were given “the exact same set of questions regarding the relevant political actors, their goals and the ideational and institutional constraints and support they encountered in pursuing their goals” (p. 5).

The volume makes a genuine contribution, both in the quality of its individual chapters and through a design that allows one to track the evolution of important issues over time and make comparisons across different venues. Yet this project, too, is weakest when it tries to make general claims about the nature of American conservatism and its role in shaping public policy. One problem lies in the selection of policy cases—three areas where the editors acknowledge that liberal initiatives had achieved “quasi-constitutional” status. The editors' conclusions about conservatives' limited policy gains might have looked quite different if, say, their cases had been taxation, industrial relations, and gun control.

A deeper problem is an overly strong emphasis on the role of ideas, which the editors describe (p. 9) as “the complimentary analytical focus for our authors.” Again, there is a tendency to downplay the role of power and interests (business, for instance, playing a very low-profile role in the volume) while playing up the intellectual aspects of conservatism. The edited volume reprises Teles's claim in The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (p. 274) that traditional GOP fixtures like business elites “have been increasingly joined by, and in some cases rendered subordinate to, a network of conservative organizations whose members are primarily motivated by ideological principle rather than coalitional affiliations.” Perhaps. Too often, the editors accept actors' offered rationales at face value. This shows up most critically in the emphasis placed on the development of a conservative form of government activism that promised to seriously address problems like environmental degradation or economic insecurity, but using conservative tools.

Without question, there were actors who genuinely embraced these ideas. How central they are or were to the political actions of modern conservatism is another question altogether. Unsurprisingly, neither of the books under review provides a final answer to that question. They approach the matter in such stimulating ways, however, that each adds considerably to our understanding of politics.