Federalism in the Progressive Era: A Structural Interpretation of Reform

Negative and Positive Integration in the Political Economy of European Welfare States

“…Under the "negative commerce clause" decisions of the Supreme Court, they were not allowed to prohibit or tax the import of goods produced by child labor in neigboring states. Hence locational competition in the integrated American market prevented all states from enacting regulations that would affect only enterprises within their own state (Graebner 1977). In the same way, the increasing transnational integration of capital and product markets, and especially the completion of the European internal market, re duces the freedom of national governments and unions to raise the regulatory and wage costs of national firms above the level prevailing in competing loca tions.…”

Is Constitutional Symmetry Enough? Social Models and Market Integration in the US and Europe

“…Throughout the 19th century the US experimented with a number of state‐based approaches for securing US‐style social models, but each of these attempts succumbed to market pressures. To economic historians of the era, it appeared that ‘Federalism, in conjunction with national markets, meant that the states were part of the economies of competition’ (Graebner, 1977, p. 332). To overcome these economies of competition, US citizens found it necessary to focus their most ambitious redistributive and regulatory measures at the federal level.…”

“…The next US response was to co‐ordinate state regulatory reforms in a way that would protect states from the threat of what we today would call social dumping. Actually, an emphasis on uniform state reform legislation is one of the defining characteristics of the US' Progressive Era (Graebner, 1977, pp. 332f.).…”

“…20 20 This quote is by Elihu Root in 1906, as referenced in Graebner (1977, p. 347). Root was then New York's Secretary of State. …”

Decentralized Regulation and the “Race to the Top”: The Case of Municipal Saloon Licensing in Turn-of-the-Century Massachusetts∗

“…In what has been termed a "race to the bottom" (Cary 1974), units in a decentralized system are thought to lower their standards of control in the hope of attracting or retaining business. At the turn of the century, the claim was raised in the United States around such issues as workplace safety regulation, child labor laws, and corporate chartering (Graebner 1977;Zillmer 1914). It remains "the ubiquitous argument against local environmental control .…”