States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism

Abstract

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.

How people experience and change institutions: a field guide to creative syncretism

“…When there is displacement, the mechanism of change is defection from old to new rule systems, 1 For many working in the field, the absence of a theory of change meant new and creative explanations of institutional disorder, incremental change, and indeterminacy. Such scholarship has yielded many powerful insights with regard to: rule ambiguity and political entrepreneurship (Hall and Taylor 1996;Sikkink 1991;Blyth 2002;Parsons 2003;Scheingate 2003;Lieberman 2002); the ongoing expression of grievances by losers (Weir 2005); lost alternatives (Schneiberg 2007;Sabel and Zeitlin 1997); redundant features (Crouch and Farrell 2004;Crouch and Keune 2005); layering of old and new institutions (Thelen 2004;Orren and Skowronek 1994Shickler 2001;Sil 2002); the coexistence of "traditional" and "modern" institutions (Dunning and Pop-Eleches 2004); change driven by "quasi-parameters" (Greif and Laitin 2004). from Keynesianism to vestigial liberalism in 1970s Britain, for example. If institutions are layered, people invest in differential growth that advances, say, private welfare systems over publicly funded safety nets.…”

America’s Two Worlds of Welfare: Subnational Institutions and Social Assistance in Metropolitan America

“…Although the idea that civil-society organizations will flourish once freed from government remains a staple of conservative rhetoric, the regional disparities that have crystallized over the last century demonstrate exactly the opposite. Mettler 1998;Weir 2005. 10 Howard 2007, 178-191.…”

Why Some Cities Provide More Public Goods than Others: A Subnational Comparison of the Provision of Public Goods in German Cities in 1912

“…Evidence from the German case suggests that infrastructural power can develop from the "bottom up" in the presence of two necessary conditions: cooperative central-local relations and close ties between local political power and the scientific expertise required to respond to perceived threats. It is true that in certain federal contexts, the underdevelopment of local and state governments capacity have been conservative barriers to broader national progressive projects (Weir 2005), posing the broader puzzle: When does local government serve as a barrier to decentralized paths to infrastructural power and when does it serve as a key player facilitating this process? Though admittedly tentative, this article's framework suggests the outline of a first-cut answer to this question and areas for future research.…”