Repurposing the Administrative State

Callen, Zachary

doi:10.1515/for-2017-0023

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

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“…2.Some scholars have begun to take notice of this development (for example, see Callen 2017), but it has yet to be centered in a broad historical and institutional context.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building a Conservative State: Partisan Polarization and the Redeployment of Administrative Power

Jacobs¹,

King²,

Milkis³

2019

Perspect. polit.

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It is commonplace to equate the arrival of a new conservative administration in Washington, DC, with the “rolling back” of the federal activities. We disagree with this conventional perspective, and seek to demonstrate that the equation of conservative Republicanism and retrenchment elides a critical change in the relationship between party politics and State power—a relationship that Donald Trump seems determined to nurture. Drawing on primary research, we argue that partisanship in the United States is no longer a struggle over the size of the State; rather it is a contest to control national administrative power. Since the late 1960s, conservative administrations have sought to redeploy rather than dismantle or roll back state power. Through “redeployment,” conservative presidents have sustained previous levels of State spending or State activity, but in a way reflecting a new administration’s ideology.

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“…2.Some scholars have begun to take notice of this development (for example, see Callen 2017), but it has yet to be centered in a broad historical and institutional context.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building a Conservative State: Partisan Polarization and the Redeployment of Administrative Power

Jacobs¹,

King²,

Milkis³

2019

Perspect. polit.

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‘I Alone Can Fix It’ Donald Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Hazards of Executive-Centered Partisanship

Milkis

Jacobs

2017

The Forum

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Eight months into his presidency, most depict the Trump administration as being mired in chaos and frenzy. Such a perspective, however, overlooks the aggressive pursuit of Trump’s campaign agenda through unilateral administrative action. Far from “deconstructing the administrative state” as promised, Trump has embraced the levers of presidential discretion and power inherent within the modern executive office. Although Trump cannot lay claim to any major legislative achievement early in his presidency, we argue that there is plenty he can take credit – or blame – for in fulfilling his campaign promises. Moreover, far from using administrative power to simply roll back his predecessor’s programmatic goals, the new president has sought to redeploy state resources in ways that will further entrench traditional commitments of the Republican Party, while simultaneously redefining them to mirror the president’s personal policy objectives. This is not a new development. Rather it is the culmination of a decades-long reorientation within both major parties: the rise of an executive centered party-system. As such, Trump – despite his seeming idiosyncrasies – might further reinforce the centrality of executive actions as a way to overcome both parties’ institutional weakness and ideological polarization.

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The Rise of Block-Granting as a Tool of Conservative Statecraft

LaRochelle

2020

The Forum

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This article sheds new light on how conservatism has affected American state development by tracing the history of how block-granting transformed from a bipartisan tool to solve problems of public administration in the 1940s into a mechanism to roll back and decentralize the welfare state that had reached its zenith in the 1960s. By the early 1980s, conservative policymakers had coopted the previously bipartisan tool in their efforts to chip away at the increasingly centralized social welfare system that emerged out of the Great Society. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan successfully converted numerous categorical grants into a series of block grants, slashing funding for several social safety net programs. Block-granting allows conservative opponents of the postwar welfare state to gradually erode funding and grant more authority to state governments, thus using federalism as a more palatable political weapon to reduce social welfare spending than the full dismantlement of social programs. However, despite a flurry of successes in the early 1980s, block-granting has not proven as successful as conservatives might have hoped, and recent efforts to convert programs such as Medicaid and parts of the Affordable Care Act into block grants have failed. The failure of recent failed block grant efforts highlights the resilience of liberal reforms, even in the face of sustained conservative opposition. However, conservatives still draw upon the tool today in their efforts to erode and retrench social welfare programs. Block-granting has thus transformed from a bipartisan tool to improve bureaucratic effectiveness into a perennial weapon in conservatives’ war on the welfare state.

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Repurposing the Administrative State

Cited by 4 publications

References 15 publications

Building a Conservative State: Partisan Polarization and the Redeployment of Administrative Power

Building a Conservative State: Partisan Polarization and the Redeployment of Administrative Power

‘I Alone Can Fix It’ Donald Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Hazards of Executive-Centered Partisanship

The Rise of Block-Granting as a Tool of Conservative Statecraft

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