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.

This article examines the historical significance of Barack Obama's creation of “OFA,” a presidential grassroots organization. It attempts, as Theda Skocpol has put it, to analyze American political development “as it happens.” Born as “Obama for America” during the 2008 campaign, OFA was renamed “Organizing for America” and ensconced in the Democratic National Committee during Obama's first term, where it served as the “grassroots arm” of the party. After 2012, it was spun off as a nonprofit social-welfare entity called “Organizing for Action” dedicated to advocating for Obama's second-term objectives: immigration reform, efforts to fight climate change, gun safety legislation, LGBT rights, and the implementation of health reform in the face of continuing intense opposition. That OFA was kept intact after Obama's successful election and reelection efforts marks it as an especially pioneering effort. Making use of several personal interviews, a wealth of primary documents, and data on spending and mobilization tactics, we explain how Obama's paradigm-shifting organization marked an effort to meet the challenges of forging a new progressive coalition in a fractious polity. More broadly, the article considers how this digital age grassroots effort has been influenced by, and in turn has contributed to the advance of an executive-centered partisanship characterized by high expectations for presidential leadership in a context of widespread dissatisfaction with government, strong and intensifying political polarization, and high-stakes battles over the basic direction of domestic and foreign policy programs.

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.

Scholars of judicial behavior have persuasively demonstrated that parties profoundly influence the elaboration of judicial doctrine, but have paid more limited attention to understanding how courts can transform the content of party agendas. In this article, I argue that judges can work to deliberately define the issue positions adopted by the political parties with which they are affiliated. I contend that judges can, like other political actors, use the tools of their office to further explicitly partisan goals. Although they may employ traditional modes of legal reasoning, judges may nevertheless craft their decisions in ways that prioritize certain party principles over others, interpret the law in ways that knit together the beliefs of divergent factions within their party coalition, articulate principles to guide the party's incorporation of new issues, and, in some instances, begin to outline a coherent ideological vision for the party. I develop this theory through a close examination of the Slaughterhouse Cases, regularly cited as a core building block of the American constitutional canon.

Politicians and program administrators played a central role in early studies of policy feedback but have largely been superseded by a focus on mass publics. This article attempts to revive and reorient the study of elite feedback effects by investigating, in the context of American federalism, whether and how national programs can influence the incentives and resources of state government officials. It examines four case studies in which national officials adopted a new program and subsequently tried to alter it by diminishing the states’ administrative role, reducing the financial resources available, or terminating the program. State-level actors emerged as critical stakeholders and strongly resisted national efforts to reform unemployment insurance and Medicaid, but neither the Sheppard-Towner Act nor general revenue sharing generated strong elite-level feedback effects. This variation suggests that timing (i.e., the political, economic, and administrative context), policy design (financial generosity, administrative discretion, duration of authorization, and coalition potential), and their interaction can prompt or discourage government elites to mobilize.

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.

Why do legislative parties emerge in democracies where elections are contested by individual candidates, rather than national party organizations? And can parties survive in the absence electoral pressure for their members to work on shared political goals? In this article, we examine the emergence and maintenance of party discipline in an atypical legislative context: California's 1878–79 constitutional convention. The unusual partisan alignments among the delegates at the California convention provide us with a unique empirical opportunity to test election- and policy-based explanations for legislative discipline. Our study combines a careful reading of the historical record with a statistical analysis of roll call votes cast at the convention to show how leaders of the “Nonpartisan” majority held together their disparate coalition of Democratic and Republican members in the face of conflicting preferences, ideological divisions, and well-organized political opponents. Our findings provide evidence that cohesive parties can exist even in the absence of broadly shared electoral pressures or policy goals.

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.

After a protracted national discussion about racial mixture in the early 1990s, the Office of Management and Budget made the unprecedented decision in 1997 to allow Americans to “mark one or more” racial categories on the 2000 census. A small “multiracial movement” provoked this fundamental change in the way the government collects racial data. This case study shows that even very small and modest social movements can have profound effects on public policy through their unintended consequences. In winning a redefinition of how the U.S. government defines and counts by race, the multiracial movement of the 1990s set in motion a process that has both amplified and been amplified by broader structural and cultural changes in how Americans perceive race. The modest impact of a small social movement can ultimately produce very big consequences.

Comparative studies of capitalist political economies have settled on a new understanding of how historical choices about electoral rules were constitutive of the current varieties of capitalism that are distinguished by their strategies of growth and adjustment to competitive conditions. The countries that have “coordinated market economies” typically have well-organized unions and employers with distinct partisan representation under multiparty electoral rules, and they have more egalitarian outcomes. The countries that have “liberal market economies” have arms-length market-based relationships under the plurality rule that are more conflictual, and they have inegalitarian outcomes. This article develops the analysis of electoral rules and industrial order by taking another look at the United States, which has always been taken as a case of plurality and liberal market economy. In contrast, New York had multiparty politics for most of the twentieth century, in part because of its cross-endorsement fusion rule of nominations. This article argues that fusion operated in a similar way to proportional representation to enable labor–management collaboration and social regulation. Collaboration in New York City was a constitutive element of the New Deal's laboristic politics. The later disruption of this American version of coordination transformed the U.S. political economy into a liberal market economy.

The U.S. military was the principal agent of American state development in the seven decades between 1791 and 1861. It fought wars, removed Native Americans, built internal improvements, expedited frontier settlement, deterred slave revolts, returned fugitive slaves, and protected existing property relations. These activities promoted state development along multiple axes, increasing the administrative capacities, institutional autonomy, political legitimacy, governing authority, and coercive powers of the American state. Unfortunately, the American political development literature has largely ignored the varied ways in which the presence of slavery influenced military deployments and, in turn, state development during the pre–Civil War period.