Institutional approaches to explaining political phenomena suffer from three common limitations: reductionism, reliance on exogenous factors, and excessive emphasis on order and structure. Ideational approaches to political explanation, while often more sensitive to change and agency, largely exhibit the same shortcomings. In particular, both perspectives share an emphasis on discerning and explaining patterns of ordered regularity in politics, making it hard to explain important episodes of political change. Relaxing this emphasis on order and viewing politics as situated in multiple and not necessarily equilibrated order suggests a way of synthesizing institutional and ideational approaches and developing more convincing accounts of political change. In this view, change arises out of “friction” among mismatched institutional and ideational patterns. An account of American civil rights policy in the 1960s and 1970s, which is not amenable to either straightforward institutional or ideational explanation, demonstrates the advantages of the approach.

To many observers across the political spectrum, American democracy appears under threat. What does the Trump presidency portend for American politics? How much confidence should we have in the capacity of American institutions to withstand this threat? We argue that understanding what is uniquely threatening to democracy requires looking beyond the particulars of Trump and his presidency. Instead, it demands a historical and comparative perspective on American politics. Drawing on insights from the fields of comparative politics and American political development, we argue that Trump’s election represents the intersection of three streams in American politics: polarized two-party presidentialism; a polity fundamentally divided over membership and status in the political community, in ways structured by race and economic inequality; and the erosion of democratic norms. The current political circumstance threatens the American democratic order because of the interactive effects of institutions, identity, and norm-breaking.

Theories of federalism supporting the devolution of welfare policy to the states suggest that the removal of national policy controls will allow states to tailor-make welfare policy to fit local needs and preferences. These theories predict that state policymaking under devolution will respond mostly to state-specific factors. Alternative theories of federalism suggest that devolution will increasingly expose states to national and interstate pressure, and that state policymaking will follow primarily national factors. We use data on AFDC waivers granted to states from 1977 through the end of the program in 1996 to test these competing approaches. National factors tend to be more important than state-spcific factors in shaping state welfare innovation, supporting competitive theories of federalism, although welfare innovation, unlike benefit levels, does not seem to be susceptible to the “welfare magnet” phenomenon.

Early postoperative feeding is safe and is tolerated by the majority of patients. Early feeding, if tolerated, decreases length of hospital stay and may decrease health care costs. Longer operative time and increased blood loss intraoperatively may indicate a more difficult procedure and identify those patients who will not tolerate early feeding.

Diese Arbeit wurde auf Veranlassung des Bremer Sonderforschungsbereiches 597 "Staatlichkeit im Wandel" unter Verwendung der ihm von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft zur Verfügung gestellten Mittel veröffentlicht. With this premise, the paper undertakes three tasks. First, it examines the reasons for the scholarly neglect of the State amongst students of American government and politics, concluding that the level of federal activism (including taxing, spending, regulating and war making) observable in respect to both Democrat and Republican administrations renders this oversight unsustainable intellectually and analytically. Second, the paper develops a typology of ways in which the American State has been an effective presence in the US political system including its role in sustaining and then ending segregation, in standardizing national rights of citizenship, and in militarizing society. Last, the paper shows how recent advances in comparative studies of the state, notably with respect to federalism and state-society relations, offer lessons for developing scholarly knowledge of the American State. Sfb 597 "Staatlichkeit im Wandel" -"Transformations of the State" (WP 73) CONTENTS