In his book, Samuel DeCanio provides a novel, and important, understanding of American statebuilding. He challenges the idea that statebuilding is a mechanistic institutional response to economic or social complexity. Instead, he argues that statebuilding is very much a political phenomenon, shaped by the interaction of mass opinion, elite preferences, and the (at times unforeseen) consequences of elections. But, most importantly, he argues that the development of the administrative state, which relies on bureaucratic strength housed in the executive, is an undemocratic response used by elites to protect their interests from the public.
DeCanio relies on extensive archival research to detail the origins of a number of critical federal policies, notably monetary policy and railroad regulation. Through careful historical research, he is able to establish how political elites intentionally misled the public and manipulated popular opinion in order to achieve policy goals that suited their ends, rather than the public’s preferences. In this analysis, he brings together institutional theory with voter behavior, stressing that voter ignorance often results in the public being easily turned from its own preferences. This understanding of how individuals understand political information, and its impact on policymaking, has been missing from the statebuilding literature. By carefully selecting cases, notably the 1875 Ohio gubernatorial election, DeCanio is able to tell a persuasive story about how voter behavior shapes institutional development (pp. 132–48). In particular, he highlights how the impact of elite discourse and media frames are not a modern phenomenon. Instead, American democracy has struggled with the tension between elite narratives and public attitudes for a very long time.
DeCanio argues that elite framing and voter ignorance have had a very specific impact on American statebuilding (pp. 50–52, 67). He suggests that in the mid-nineteenth century there was a public interest in greater economic regulation. The initial preference among voters was to use the legislative branch to constrain and guide the emerging American industrial economy. However, elites were wary of allowing voters to have this much power over the economy, and preferred to entrench their interests in regulatory agencies that were less susceptible to outside influence (pp. 129–30). Ironically, the author posits that the state’s developing regulatory agencies were a conservative response to anxieties over how the public might otherwise shape economic policy.
In pointing out that statebuilding can be a deeply undemocratic process, DeCanio fits into a long tradition of American political development scholarship. American political development scholars have long been aware of how ideas about race, religion, or even feudal understandings of economic relationships have shaped our institutions. More recently, work on the submerged state, the invisible state, and subaltern politics also underscores the ways in which policy is developed and deployed, frequently without the public at large being aware of what is happening. However, while American political development scholars have long concurred that these cultural values and biases exist in the background, there has still been a sense that motivated citizens can (and do) shape the form of the state. Obviously, American political development does not assume a simple relationship between voters’ preferences and later state policies: Scholars of American history understand that institutional structures and political compromise will alter policies as they move from voter demand into actual implemented program. But DeCanio’s claim is more serious: He argues that there is a profound separation between the public and the state, and that the state may in fact not be responsive at all to the public’s demands (pp. 19–20, 180, 196–97).
In making these arguments, DeCanio recalls the work of James Scott. Like Scott, DeCanio is positing a democratic state that is potentially more predatory and much less under democratic control than we normally assume. In doing so, he importantly helps us to better understand the actual nature of the American state. Definitions of the state, particularly those that accurately describe who it involves and how it functions, are notoriously slippery. However, DeCanio is able to point both to specific political actors engaging in bribery, policy making, and intentional miscommunication and to particular government agencies (and the policies that created them) (pp. 90–120). Once he has identified these actors, he allows us to say: There is the actual state as it functions in reality, in a much more unambiguous way than we have in the past.
Democracy and the Origins of the American Regulatory State is ambitious and well researched, and DeCanio does an exceptional job of detailing how complex policy histories played out. However, the book raises a number of important questions that deserve more attention. First, in the opening pages, the author explains that he chose to examine one particular era, just after the Civil War, because it was a critical moment when key regulatory agencies were developed. He argues that this moment highlights the undemocratic nature of how regulatory agencies were created and also how they set the trend for the ways in which future regulation would unfold (pp. 2–6). This is a completely defensible choice to explain a critical moment in American state-building. Nonetheless, I still find myself wondering: How does this political process travel to other contexts, including both other time periods and other policy areas? This question is not meant to discredit DeCanio’s decision to focus on monetary policy and railroad regulation. He is right that these are critical issues, with long-standing influence on American state formation and economic development. However, the model of voter ignorance and elite control over discourse seems ripe for application to other time periods and other issues. In particular, it would be interesting to bring this model to a more contemporary setting, where it could be paired with better measures of public opinion as a means to better track elite manipulations and the eventual gap that those manipulations produce between public opinion and how policies are ultimately implemented. In other words, does DeCanio’s analysis travel well to other eras in American history, or is it specific to the particular case he selects?
The second question raised by the book, and one that feels underdeveloped in the text, is the role of other institutions in the process whereby elites took advantage of voter ignorance (pp. 32–33). It is clear that newspapers were important for disseminating misinformation developed by various political elites. But why were other political parties, or media outlets sympathetic to those rival parties, unable to challenge these claims? Civil society is an important, if at times undertheorized, concept for explaining American political outcomes. In the cases explored by DeCanio, there seems to be a breakdown of these other institutions that are meant to challenge a single elite narrative from dominating political life. How, then, do we explain this failure? Or, to turn this question another way, how do we explain why some pieces of false information are so attractive to voters that competing explanations are unable to dislodge them? Thus, the book implicitly raises, but is unable to answer, why it is that these political fictions came to have so much power despite various checks to their dominance.
The third question that the book raises, perhaps without intending to, is where state building theory turns in light of this work. DeCanio’s argument, bringing in voters and their shortcomings, recasts much of how we think about American statebuilding. The author focuses on explaining how one particular event happened, rather than necessarily predicting how future events will unfold. This is a reasonable approach to social science. But thinking about how to theorize statebuilding in the wake of DeCanio’s text becomes difficult. He focuses on the ways that seemingly unconnected events, such as a race for governor and future federal policies, can have large national consequences down the road (pp. 143–46). This awareness of the complexity of political life, combined with a focus on how narrative shapes political outcomes, means that many of the standard variables that scholars of American political development focus on (crisis, economic indicators, partisan conflict, etc.) may be less relevant than we have historically believed. DeCanio challenges us to think harder, and more carefully, about how and why political events unfold in the manner that they do.
Finally, Democracy and the Origins of the American Regulatory State raises important normative questions. Obviously, in the wake of recent political events in the United States, there is a growing interest in the ways in which misinformation and poorly informed voters shape political life. DeCanio argues that voters are ill-prepared to deal with complex issues, leading them to be easily led astray (pp. 119; 244). What he really seems to be saying is that there is a mismatch between a complex society and our current democratic political institutions. This forces us to ask, then, what the next steps are. Do we somehow produce smarter citizens? Do we need new democratic institutions that can better collect voter preferences while at the same time insulating the public from undue elite interference? It is perhaps unfair to encumber DeCanio with solving such a wicked problem, but this excellent book very much leads us to this critical question. He has written a thoughtful, well-researched book that raises critical questions about the statebuilding process, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
