Why have group-party alliances become more common since the mid-twentieth century? To address this question, I develop a continuum of group-party relationships, running from fluid, unstructured interactions, akin to political pluralism, to highly institutionalized alliances, as we might see in a firm. Drawing on pluralist scholarship and theories of firm formation and evolution, I explore the costs and benefits of different arrangements and explain why we might expect to see movement along the continuum over time. On the one hand, pluralism offers flexibility to parties and groups, and alliances have little value when parties are too weak to discipline their members in Congress. On the other, institutionalized alliances offer significant efficiency and security gains, which are especially valuable during periods of growth. I demonstrate the plausibility of this organizational theory by examining the evolution of group-party relations in the executive branch from the Nixon through Reagan administrations using archival documents collected at four presidential libraries.

Between 1890 and 1914, the United States acquired overseas colonies, built a battleship fleet, and intervened increasingly often in Latin America and East Asia. This activism is often seen as the precursor to the country's role as a superpower after 1945 but actually served very different goals. In contrast to its pursuit of a relatively liberal international economic order after 1945, the United States remained committed to trade protection before 1914. Protectionism had several important consequences for American foreign policy on both economic and security issues. It led to a focus on less developed areas of the world that would not export manufactured goods to the United States instead of on wealthier European markets. It limited the tactics available for promoting American exports, forcing policymakers to seek exclusive bilateral agreements or unilateral concessions from trading partners instead of multilateral arrangements. It inhibited political cooperation with other major powers and implied an aggressive posture toward these states. The differences between this foreign policy and the one the United States adopted after 1945 underscore the critical importance not just of the search for overseas markets but also of efforts to protect the domestic market.

This article explores the contentious and dynamic relationship between Woodrow Wilson and a nascent, diverse civil rights movement from 1912 to 1919. The pivotal relationship between Wilson and the early civil rights movement emerged out of two concurrent and related political developments: the increasing centrality of presidential administration in the constitutional order and the growing national aspirations of political strategies and goals among reform activists. Not only do we illustrate an early form of social movement politics that was largely antithetical to the administration's objectives, but we also trace how the strategies adopted by civil rights leaders were contingent on an early, still-to-be institutionalized administrative presidency. We highlight Wilson's involvement in the racial unrest that emerged from the debut of the film The Birth of a Nation and in the race riots that accompanied the Great Migration and World War I in his second term. These early twentieth-century episodes legitimized a form of collective action and helped to recast the modern presidency as an institution that both collaborated and competed with social movement organizations to control the timing and conditions of change.

This article uses a political developmental approach to examine African American poll-tax registration and voting in Virginia from 1940 to 1954. Using the concept of multiple orders, the article traces how changes in the state's political system of managed race relations created an opening for African American political mobilization. The Virginia Voters League (VVL), in alliance with other African American political, civic, and social organizations, conducted voter education and poll-tax payment campaigns in order foster political efficacy among the state's disenfranchised black voters. The VVL met with mixed success, affected by past political mobilizations, the impact of NAACP mobilization, and local and statewide political competition between the state's main political machine and insurgents. The VVL campaign was successful in achieving short-term victories, including the election of a few African Americans to local office. By 1954, the VVL's internal weakness coupled with the emergence of “massive resistance” stymied further black electoral mobilization through politics and made protest a more viable option for achieving political and civil rights for black Virginians. By tracing the path from politics to protest, this article shows how a political developmental approach can be successfully used to develop a nuanced understanding of the emergence of the civil rights movement and Southern politics in the pre–Brown v. Board of Education era.

The Board of Trustees of the Negro Rural School Fund convened in the office of the president of the United States on December 14, 1911. The mission of the fund was to assist Southern black schools, supplying black supervising teachers to rural areas.1 President William Howard Taft presided over the meeting, which included members from banking, industry, philanthropy, higher education, and the clergy, demonstrating the importance of associated action in policy and political development in the early twentieth century.2 These elite reformers hoped to guide policymaking in education reform, and their work was just one part of a far-reaching agenda for education in the Jim Crow South, based on the premise that public schooling was important to a strong national state.3 Yet, it was difficult for elite actors to implement national policy goals in state and local areas, particularly for education. Local control was an important characteristic of American schooling, and Southern education reform was a particularly complicated terrain, dominated by rural areas committed to states’ rights, local control, and the racial state.4 While the fund's trustees hoped to direct efforts from their lofty White House venue, foundation efficacy required extensive collaboration with organizations and actors across the South. This work, referred to here as interstitial collaboration, included a set of initiatives tailored to state and local regions, supported by cooperative relationships between governmental and nongovernmental organizational entities and with citizens across the political spectrum.