The 1980s revival of HI among political scientists in the United States was strongly centered on actors in the national state, and its explanation for the birth and development of a modern centralized state tended to start at the top. Social scientists rediscovering history (and the state in history) were inXuenced by the work of the neo-Marxist and other elite focused historians with similar foci. Such was the case with Theda Skocpol’s pioneering States and Social Revolutions (1979) and the seminal article on the diVerential success of innovative agricultural and industrial policies in the New Deal by Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold (1990), as well as Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State: The Expansion of National
Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (1982). These scholars were pioneers in the
budding 1980s sub-Weld of American political development, and in the creation of a new section on politics and history in the American Political Science Association (APSA). It might be noted that HI’s respectability, in a discipline dominated for the previous half century by RC and ahistorical quantitative work, is evidenced by the size of the politics and history section in its parent professional organization. It ranks in the top quintile of APSA’s thirty-four sections, and has been joined by a new political history section with an exclusively international focus.
As Skowronek and his co-author Karen Orren write in The Search for American Political Development, the historical analysis of politics assumes that political institutional development unfolds on sites that are deWned by rule structures
and their enforcers, holders of ‘‘plenary authority.’’ It is not surprising, then, that the Wrst wave of HI in the United States has done its process tracing with a focus on those plenary authorities in national government, the rules they promulgate and uphold, and the ideas that motivate their actions. That is in itself a tall order, and in practice leaves little space for attention to ‘‘ordinary people.’’ The latter are seen as the objects of governance, not as subjects whose ideas and demands might shape institutional development and provoke institutional change.
Ironically, then, as historians were abandoning the study of powerful white men for the lives of ordinary people, political scientists of an historical/institutional bent were rediscovering the momentous agency of ‘‘state managers.’’ Social move- ments of the poor and middling orders of society, if they were noticed at all, tended to be viewed as inconvenient obstacles to the modernizing projects of political elites, or as clients of reformist state actors. For Stephen Skowronek (1982), farmers and their representatives in the progressive era Congress, along with judges jealous of the power of the new regulatory agencies, were the main obstacles to the holistic modernization schemes of a few visionaries in the Interstate Commerce Commis- sion (ICC) and Senate. For Skocpol and Feingold (1990), workers were important
New Deal clients, but not themselves agents of labor policy change in the New Deal. (For an opposing view that stresses labor agency, see GoldWeld 1989.)
Skowronek’s Building A New American State (1982), one of the founding works in the 1980s revival of historical institutionalism in the United States, focused on three cases in the modernization of the American national state: the beginning of national railroad regulation, the Wght for a meritocratic civil service, and the struggle for a permanent professional army. Though each case of necessity touched on Congress, the states, and parties, the prime movers in these accounts were distinctively elite. In the case of civil service reform, Mugwump intellectual reformers, with the support of important businessmen who hoped for a more eYcient bureaucracy, were the activists who championed a meritocratic bureau- cracy against party ‘‘spoilsmen.’’ Of course, it was acknowledged that elites had to settle for partial loaves and halting progress, in view of the centrality of patronage resources for American parties. Skowronek’s central argument is that a disjointed state ‘‘of courts and parties’’ could succeed only in erecting a ‘‘patchwork’’ rather than a fully rationalized administrative state.
In the Wght for railroad legislation, according to Skowronek, well-educated intellectual reformers worked through a savvy Midwestern senator to restrain (while moderately responding to) agrarian forces in Congress. In 1887, they created the nation’s Wrst independent regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Com- mission. From the time of its founding, commissioners, judges, and ultimately presidents were the principle actors, in Skowronek’s narrative.
Presidents, intellectuals, and generals were the prime movers in the struggle to create a professional army (the ‘‘continental army’’ of progressive era policy debate). Elite business actors were strongly supportive, since a permanent, profes- sional military promised better protection for investment, at home and abroad, than the traditionally decentralized and part-time militia. ReXecting the power of path dependence unfolding from initial policy decisions, echoes of this debate still reverberate in the speeches of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who would clearly prefer a larger professional military (and private national contractor corps) to what he sees as the reluctant amateurs in the national guard contingents raised by the states.
To a large extent, the elite-centered account of APD in Skowronek’s early work was shaped by the chosen cases: the campaigns for military and civil service professionalism were not popular causes in the United States (far from it). Likewise, Daniel Carpenter (2001) has recently challenged claims of social move- ment responsibility for reforms in the early twentieth-century United States. His careful archival and statistical work has demonstrated that entrepreneurs in the country’s early bureaucracies came up with ideas for expanded bureaucratic authority and then engineered social movements to support new postal services and food and drug regulation. However, the elite leadership in these two arenas cannot be generalized to other policy domains (Sanders 1999), and the
phenomenon of bureaucratic entrepreneurship of the order reported by Carpenter may itself be time-bound, particularly marking the struggles for legitimacy of Xedgling agencies.
But there are, surely, resounding cases of institution building and expansion in which elite leadership is to be expected. One is monetary policy, in which Wnancial elites and their governmental allies pioneered the creation of central banks and stable national currencies (although the structure and powers of the resulting agencies did not follow elite designs in critical areas: Livingston 1986; Broz 1997; Sanders 1999). Another is military policy, where (as Skowronek’s case study of the campaign for a national, professionalized army underlines) expansion of bureau- cratic resources has been, in the United States, almost entirely under presidential leadership; on the other hand, major attempts at rationalization of military and intelligence bureaucracies (through reorganization and new mandates) has come from Congress. As the 9/11 episode revealed, presidents have been more interested in assuring that the defense and intelligence agencies support their policy preferences than in assuring that these agencies eVectively serve the national security interest (Zegart 2000, 2005).
Skowronek’s early HI work centered on the critical policies that initiated the rise of a modern administrative state. John Gerring, also a pioneer of HI, and of the establishment of a distinct Weld of qualitative methods that gained popularity in the wake of HI’s emergence, shifted the focus to political party ideologies and their development over two centuries (Gerring 2001). As critical intermediary institu- tions linking leaders and their societal constituent groups, parties have been ambiguous institutions in HI. The early work of Skocpol and Finegold (1990, 1995) treated them as extensions of political elites—recalling Maurice Duverger’s (1954) labeling of major US parties as ‘‘cadre’’ organizations, founded by and elaborated around competing national political Wgures.
Gerring follows this perspective, too, centering his narrative (and impressively rigorous counting of patterns of discourse in party platforms and oYcial pronouncements) on the expressed ideas of party elites (mainly nominees for, and holders of, the presidency). The ideas that constitute the public philosophies, and guide the policy foci of diVerent party regimes—in two distinct periods for the Whig/Republicans and three for the JeVersonian/Democrats—are assumed to arise with elites, and then Wnd favor with the masses. This is the usual assumption of scholarship focused on elites and ideas, though constructivists would argue for a broader and more socially interactive ideational provenance.
An alternative, but still elite-centered way to look at party institutions in APD is found in Richard Bensel’s thick and empirically buttressed account of the rise and maintenance of the post-Civil War ‘‘party-state’’ constructed by leaders of the victorious Republican Party. The identifying contours of that party ideological superstructure (Bensel would say ‘‘facade’’) do not diVer signiWcantly from Gerring’s account, but where Gerring sees a coherent national party ideology
organized in the minds of national political leaders and then articulated to the masses, Bensel sees party leaders instrumentally brokering bargains among coalition factions who have very diVerent policy interests, and then herding them into a corral that Xies an ideological banner (Bensel 1991, 2000, 2004).
Bensel parses out the institutional complexity that buttressed Republican ideational and policy dominance for half a century by allowing diVerent coalitional interests to hold sway in diVerent institutions. He shows that diVerent aspects of the GOP postwar program (policies concerned with the tariV, gold standard, and creation of an unfettered national market) were parceled out to Congress, the White House, and the federal courts—and that institutional diVerentiation, rather than a national consensus on ideas, held the GOP together, in his account (Bensel 2000).
