Rebuilding the American State: Evidence from the 1940s

Abstract

From the vantage point of a critical moment in the history of statebuilding in the United States, we wish to take a fresh look at questions about the resources and wherewithal of the national state. Within modern American political science, a focus on state capacity is at least as old as the landmark essay by Woodrow Wilson on “The Study of Administration” and as current as the important scholarly impulse that has revived interest in the state at a time of struggle about the size and span of the federal government. The dominant motif of these various accounts of American statebuilding has been a concern with organizational assets, which usually are assayed by their placement on a linear scale of strength and weakness.

Rediscovering reasonable rationality in institutional analysis

“…But it might also lead to path-dependence and exploitation of existing institutional capacities (Weir & Skocpol 1985;North 1990). Institutions, once coexisting in harmony, might become conflictual because new wants, new ideas, or new political interests produce instability (Moe 1987;Hall 1989;Katznelson & Pietrykowski 1991;Baumgartner & Jones 1993). Or, institutions failing to deliver what they promise may lose their legitimacy and hence provoke experimentation and reform (Olsen 1992; Hall 1993).…”

“…In comparative and international political economy scholars have stressed how changing conditions in the international realm have prompted dramatic policy reforms and even institutional innovation on a supranational level (Gourevitch 1986;Keohane & Hoffmann 1991;Hall 1993;Norgaard 1994). Scholars have emphasized in state-centric studies how international events, social mobilization and socio-economic changes have a decisive impact on institution-building and policy change at critical moments in history (Skowronek 1982;Krasner 1984;Katznelson & Pietrykowski 1991;Rothstein 1992;Baumgartner & Jones 1993).…”

States and their territorializations: Class, local dependence, and how geohistory matters

“…These are found at both state and federal levels. In metropolitan areas, they targeted the monopolies of the urban machines, facilitating the formation of new, competing municipalities in a way that would stymie any central planning for metropolitan areas (Hays, 1964;Teaford, 1979); much as a federal planning power was itself contested and dismantled in the reaction to the New Deal (Katznelson and Pietrykowski, 1991). The states then lent their own impetus to this decentralized form through delegating powers and responsibilities to local governments: power over primary and secondary education, land use regulation, provision of water and sewerage, and so giving the fragmentation of local government serious material weight.…”

Measuring Liberalism, Confronting Evil: A Retrospective

“…Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949) at a New School graduate seminar, I began to write with two members of the class, Kim Geiger and Dan Kryder, what I thought would be a one-off article about Congress and the role of the Jim Crow South (Katznelson et al 1993). I also wrote a second article with a graduate student in economics, Bruce Pietrykowski, to track the policy implications of southern congressional power on the character of national state formation during the 1930s and 1940s (Katznelson & Pietrykowski 1991). Little did I know that some 10 years after moving to Columbia in 1994, I would devote most of my empirical attention to congressional studies and to the effects on domestic and international policy of the power possessed by representatives from the country's segregated states, almost all Democrats.…”