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Over the past two decades, a burgeoning literature has touted the promise of regional collaboration to address a wide range of issues. This article challenges the premise that horizontal collaboration alone can empower regional decision-making venues. By analyzing efforts to create regional venues for transportation policy making in Chicago and Los Angeles, the authors show that vertical power is essential to building regional capacities. Only by exercising power at multiple levels of the political system can local reformers launch a virtuous cycle of reform that begins to build enduring regional capacities.

The article argues that big cities in the United States have lost power in State politics. This development is partly due to declining city populations, but it is also a product of changes in the organization of State politics. Foremost among these changes are the decline of political parties, the rise of interest-based politics in State legislatures, and the growing power of legislatures over Governors. These changes in State politics have made it harder to build policy coalitions that address urban problems, and they have limited the scope of the State's metropolitan agenda at a time when the Federal Government has sharply reduced assistance to big cities. * The metro area was defined using the 1990 census definition of the Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA), excluding out-of-State counties.

There is no escaping the New Deal's pivotal place in studies of twentieth-century American politics. Social scientists have vigorously debated the causes of the New Deal's distinctive features and continue to argue about its consequences for subsequent American political development. The predominant perspective advances a coherent linear history in which the central features of New Deal reform shape the understanding of political developments both before and after the 1930s. The era of Progressive reform is viewed as a precursor to the expanded public power and the practice of activist government that was consolidated in the 1930s. The Great Society is the effort to extend the benefits of liberal reform to African Americans, who had reaped only scant benefits from the central achievements of New Deal reform. When this effort went “too far,” it resulted in a far-reaching backlash against activist government. The “rise and fall” of a New Deal order that had the creation of active government at its core has thus provided a central narrative for the study of twentieth-century politics.