The Two Schools of American Political Development

Historical Institutionalism

Historical institutionalists have been extremely influential in forwarding inquiry in three areas. First, they have developed a fairly coherent approach to the study of American public policy, examining how actors make their way through institutional settings. Second, they have revealed much about how institutions themselves change over time, either through endogenous changes brought about by the actors working within them, or exogenously, through their interactions with other institutions. ¹ Finally, and most recently, they have dedicated themselves to the study of the mechanisms of path dependency and positive (or negative) feedback loops.

The analytical approach of historical institutionalism has been dramatically influenced by Theda Skocpol of Harvard University, whose prolific writing and equally prolific production of graduate students has shaped a generation of scholarship on many elements of American political development (APD). She sketched out the historical-institutionalist approach to the study of public policy in her 1992 book, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers:

In sum, the goals that actors choose to pursue, and those that they are able to pursue effectively, are shaped by the institutional arrangements through which they and other political actors must operate. This perspective places great demands on the researcher not only to understand the place of each interest group in the larger institutional setting, but also to do so over time, since, as Skocpol argued, the outcomes of an earlier era will influence the strategies and assessments of later groups operating within the same policy spectrum.

Just as group goals may change over time as a result of policy outcomes, so may the institutional arrangements that surround them. Although this idea is certainly not new, a spate of recent scholarship has generated a series of coherent models seeking to map out the processes that inform policy development. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek offered what is perhaps the best articulation of a historical-institutionalist perspective on institutional change. Noting that institutions ‘solve problems of collective action by altering the strategic context in which individuals calculate their self-interest’ (1994, p. 315), they explained that a system is not informed by one single logic. Instead, each element is driven by its own set of incentives and is at a different stage of development than others may be. The Federalist (#51) argued that the internal pressures from each of the branches would keep their relationship to one another stable (Hamilton et al., 1961 [1788]). This claim was far too simple, but even if it were true, we would still witness change as the various branches developed over time, following their own logics, explaining, for example, why the relationship between the president and Congress is constantly changing (Skowronek, 1993).

The insights of Orren and Skowronek have also been applied to change within institutions. Eric Schickler's Disjointed Pluralism: Institutional Innovation and the Development of the U.S. Congress (2001) is among the best examples of this. Why do the respective chambers of Congress have the peculiar collection of rules and practices that they do? Explanations vary, from supporting the reelection chances of their incumbents (Mayhew, 1974), to facilitating logrolling in order to ensure policy stability (Shepsle and Weingast, 1984), to supporting majority party reputation and effectiveness (Cox and McCubbins, 1993). Although each theory, along with many other possibilities, sometimes seems to explain certain particular arrangements, none do a particularly good job at explaining the entire system. Schickler took the lessons of Orren and Skowronek regarding the idea that different institutions can abrade against one another and suggested that something similar happens within Congress.

Members of Congress have multiple needs and, at times, will seek to change the rules in order to meet one particular need or another. But old practices die hard, largely because they meet other needs that will be seen as important by other members. So instead of replacing old practices, new practices are often built on top of them, resulting in a layering of rules and procedures in an often competing and contradictory manner. Such analysis reveals that the institutional structure of Congress does indeed appear to be informed by members pursuing needs, constructing new procedures to meet them, while finding it difficult to displace completely the old ones.

Although political historians are at times interested in explaining policy change, they are at others focused on regime stability – or even growth – and a powerful contribution has been made in the area of path dependency. Under certain circumstances, policy innovations can generate positive feedback mechanisms that become self-reinforcing. The actors involved find it more rewarding to support the policy than to promote alternatives, and the result is a path-dependent policy regime where adopting alternatives becomes more and more costly as time goes on. The study of path dependency is the third major contribution of historical institutionalism and is most closely associated with the work of Paul Pierson (1993, 2000a, b).

Analyses employing path-dependent arguments therefore focus quite heavily on the timing of events relative to one another. As Kathleen Thelen noted, arguments about self-reinforcing event sequences make three claims: (i) the order in which things happen matters to outcomes; (ii) being first on the scene can confer important and enduring advantages; and (iii) ‘movement along a trajectory, however initiated, frequently moves forward according to the logic of positive feedback or increasing returns’ (2000, p. 102). Thus, analyses of this nature require a focus not just on what happens, but also on when.

It is important to distinguish between positive feedback and sequencing, as the two are related but distinct. Being first mover can confer advantages, for example, but it need not if the initial experiences of the various actors involved are negative ones. Feedback loops may influence policy in one of three ways. First, there are self-reinforcing feedback loops, in which initial movement down a particular path encourages further movement down the path (Hacker, 2002). This may be because the initial costs involved in setting up a program make movement to a different policy prohibitively expensive. Alternatively, once in place, the policy may create interest groups that have a strong vested interest in protecting the policy from change (Milkis, 1993) or cause groups to alter their strategies towards incremental change of existing programs, rather than wholesale creation of new ones, which seems to have been the case with many issues surrounding the US Social Security system (Derthick, 1979). Second, initial events can backfire, generating strong displeasure with a policy that creates countermovements (Skocpol, 1992). Finally, feedback can be created by‘historical conjunctures’, in which, again working from Orren and Skowronek, interaction effects between various institutions produce positive or negative support for a policy (Lieberman, 1998).

Historical-institutionalist research has provided important contributions to the study of political development in its focus on timing and sequence, feedback and interaction mechanisms; in its careful mapping of how actors are situated in institutional settings; and in its focus on what happens when one element changes over time. What is noticeably absent in most of the literature from this school is attention to norms, narratives, or ideology. Issues of identity are largely ignored or even denigrated in historical-institutionalist analysis, left to members of the ideational approach, who in turn bring them to center stage.

Ideational Approaches to APD

Ideas matter for members of the cultural school, especially ideas about the nature of American identity, about ‘us’ and ‘them’ and about what ‘we’ the people owe each other versus what we owe outsiders. This had led to deeper understanding of the nature of liberalism in the US and to explanations of why a country that seemingly hates government has so much of it, how ideas move from proposals into public policies, and why so many policies are cyclical.

The meaning of liberalism in America has been an important focus of a great deal of inquiry among cultural scholars, largely due to Louis Hartz's influential work The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). Hartz compared the early experience of America's citizens with that of Europe's, and he argued that the absence of feudalism and the almost universal white manhood suffrage provided Americans with a unique interpretation of the relationship between citizens and government. Without having to topple a permanent political elite, America's citizens came to understand themselves as sharing a common interest. Class conflict did not exist at the start, was not embedded into the nation's social or political institutions, and never made its way into the collective consciousness. As a result, Hartz argued, Americans adopted a form of liberalism best embodied in the work of John Locke (as evidenced by the wording of the Declaration of Independence), and this has limited the nature of political development for the nation ever since, especially in terms of welfare programs.

Culturalists have not taken Hartz as being the last word, but rather the first. J. David Greenstone (1986), for example, noted that America's version of liberalism has more than one face. The Lockean version certainly does have strong underpinnings. After all, one of the best selling works in nineteenth-century America was William Graham Sumner's What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1995). ³ In the account provided by Hartz, American politics begins with Locke and ‘stays with [him] … by virtue of an absolute and irrational attachment’ (Greenstone, 1986, p. 3), but this can only be the case if there is consensus about the meaning of liberalism, and Greenstone argued that in practice this is anything but the case. Liberal values in the abstract do not always lead to obvious conclusions when issues of policy development and implementation are involved. Instead, they merely define a loose set of boundaries (see Landis, 1999, for how this plays out in practice).

Other culturalists have taken the question of liberalism in a different direction, arguing that liberalism itself is but one tradition in America. Rogers M. Smith (1993, 1997), for example, has focused on the unsteady march of minority rights in America. He began with a basic question: if America's political system is founded on a concept of liberalism, how can it be the case that illiberal policies have characterized so much of the nation's history? In the 1830s, two-thirds of the population was legally ineligible to vote, despite Alexis de Tocqueville's (1969 [1835–40]) celebration of democracy. How could slavery exist in a nation informed by liberalism? One answer, forwarded by Gunnar Myrdal (1962 [1944]), is that blacks simply were not considered humans. Yet a generation after slavery ended, when that argument could no longer credibly be made, illiberal policies towards black Americans still existed. Smith thus argued that

The reason that many Americans can hold competing and inconsistent opinions (such as the desire for equal opportunity between the races but opposition to policies that would make this happen) is because, Smith argued, individuals internalize the idea that they have an inherent superiority over groups of others, at the same time that they hold generalized beliefs about the equality of all human beings. ⁴ The result is the peculiar phenomenon of rights being gained and then lost, of civil rights laws being passed then restricted, of a race being freed then constrained. America has been propelled by ideas about liberalism, but by other ideas as well.

The idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’ found in Smith's work has recently been employed in Hellfire Nation by James A. Morone (2003) to explain why America, a country that seems to hate government, has so much of it, especially in the form of regulatory penetration into seemingly private spheres of personal life. From the beginning, he argued, Americans have routinely seen themselves as‘a godly people, a model for the world, a city on a hill’, and these ideals inspire moral crusades both at home and abroad (2003, p. 3). A great deal of APD, according to Morone, is the result of a moral tale. It begins with a change in the status quo that threatens a political elite or influential portion of the mass population – the socioeconomic balance in colonial Salem starts to shift; Chinese workers begin arriving to work on the railroads; former slaves try to take their place in society; the position of women in society changes, and family relations do as well – and the result is a moral uprising. As he explained:

At least part of the reason America is so tough on smoking, gives such extremely harsh prison sentences, and involves itself so much in the personal lives of its citizens can be explained by the fear not just of the threat posed by the other to the lifestyles of the powerful, but also to the godly mission of the nation itself. When liberal tenets are violated in America, it is often because the very soul of the nation is understood to be at stake.

What we see in the work of ideational APD scholars like Morone and Smith is the belief that ideas underpin broad swaths of significant policies in American politics. But rather than being deterministic, ideas clash against one another. This is perhaps best articulated in Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making by Deborah Stone (1997). She explained that for every value, there is a counter value, and policy proposals have an easier time garnering acceptance when their proponents appeal to one or the other. Appeals to efficiency, for example, can be countered with claims about fairness. Policies predicated on ideas of security can be contested on the grounds of individual liberty.

Stone helped to clarify the dynamics of why many policies seem so cyclical, as their support is often contingent upon the story told about it. At first, consuming alcohol was not a problem (in fact, the Puritans drank quite a bit of it, especially when water sources weren't safe), later it was constitutionally banned, only to be legalized once again to be assaulted once more by campaigns to reduce consumption. Gambling was once considered a huge public problem, but state lotto tickets are now sold in virtually every convenience store across the country. At one point, mothers' pensions were enacted to keep women out of the working world, yet welfare programs now have time limits to force them back in. The civil rights of minority groups fluctuate incessantly. As Morone noted: ‘American political development offers no clear historical trajectory, no inevitable march of rights, no irresistible triumphs of rights and freedom’ (2003, p. 8; see also Klinker with Smith, 1999), and the reason is that for every policy, there is a strong theoretical underpinning that can be called upon both to support and to argue against the policy. It is not that ideas are inconsistent or unimportant; rather, it is that they are very important, only contradictory to one another.

Typically, cultural scholars are quite attuned to the sources of the ideas that inform American policies. Their research demands attention to the mechanisms that carry ideas across time, either replicating them for the next generation, or adapting them to comport with new experiences. The most impressive work of recent times in this vein is Daniel T. Rodgers' Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998). Rodgers traced the flow of progressive ideas between both sides of the Atlantic through the study of key figures, where they went, whom they met, and, importantly, how they transmitted what they learned to others through writings and lectures:

Rodgers was very careful to explain the role of ideas in influencing outcomes. Building on the work of John Kingdon (1995), he understood ideas as critical elements informing the reception that various policy proposals will receive. When proposals fit comfortably with dominant narratives, they are more likely to be welcomed. Ideas compete with each other for policy space, and as time progresses, certain ideas become more entrenched, making the policies informed by them more likely to be warmly welcomed, if not codified into law (see Huntington, 1969). Exogenous events can open space quickly, however, as Rodgers noted in his study of how progressive policies in Germany were first carefully studied, and then rapidly abandoned after the start of each of the two world wars.

Fundamental Differences

Although both schools readily acknowledge the importance of the study of politics over time, they separate over the role of cultural variables as causes of development, and also over the study of policy change in the form of path dependence versus circularity. Putting these two admittedly important differences aside, I am going to argue that the truly important separation between the two schools is their respective assumptions over the meaning of political development. The model one employs will inform the inquiry one conducts, and although neither perspective often articulates an understanding of precisely what development is, both sides clearly have a distinct vision of it.

Although it is rarely articulated, most cultural approaches to APD see development as occurring at the time a new idea springs forth that eventually shapes the final outcome. Thus, we often see works that carefully trace an idea from its genesis across time and space as it makes its way through popular culture and elite discourse. This can take the form of following just one idea or issue area (Garland, 2001; Katz, 1996 [1986]), or it can be comparative, tracing across a range of issues (Kersh and Morone, 2002) or across time to reveal the mechanism in comparative perspective. Returning to Morone's Hellfire Nation (2003), we see moral panics driving development across America's history in roughly the same pattern. What begins with a panic over a change in the status quo grows into a jeremiad over lost virtue. Once those being blamed for the change reveal themselves unwilling (or unable) to conform, calls for self-help change to calls for reform through regulation. What is noteworthy about Morone's work is that the actual outcomes of many of these moral crises are themselves downplayed, sometimes being discussed only as an afterthought. He presented detailed discussions of early American social conflict over the authoritative allocation of values for society, ⁵ and, importantly, who should be allowed to allocate them. He carefully retraced the debates, studying how they were propagated in the public arena. Salem's witch trials, for example, brought the private into the public in a remarkable fashion. There were open hearings about the sex lives of area residents, going so far as to subject certain women to luridly intimate searches (by male ministers, of course") in order to find their hidden ‘witches tits’ used to suckle demons. He placed this event into a much larger context – one in which witches can be taken seriously, as can ministers conducting trials – and traced the diffusion of ideas informing it through sermons, pamphlets, trials, and public punishments. The entire witch trial was anything but predestined, and to make sense of it requires a deep understanding not just of seventeenth-century socioeconomic relations, but more specifically of the norms that underpinned them. The result of the trials was a precedent of state involvement in the private sex lives of Americans. As with much of Monrone's study, however, this aspect is left almost for the reader to infer, almost as though the outcome itself is not worthy of much attention. What we see is an author focused on the genesis of the change, and the process by which this translates into political development, rather than on the results themselves. For ideational scholars, development begins with a shift in ideas, and this is what concerns them.

On the historical-institutionalist side, Orren and Skowronek have presented an almost completely opposite vision of political development, defining it as ‘a durable shift in authority relations among political institutions’ (2001). Whereas for culturalists the stress is on origins, for many historical institutionalists the stress is on outcomes – and it is noteworthy that their focus is squarely on institutions. Since historical-institutionalist analysis is so concerned with how institutions limit the aims of actors and the methods by which they can achieve them (see Steinmo and Watts, 1995), a focus on shifts in institutions is not surprising but, rather, virtually mandatory. What is so interesting about this is that it directs attention to an event that is itself the result of prior politics. From a culturalist perspective, a durable shift can be understood as the dependent variable, not the independent one. The historical-institutionalist response to this might be that cultural shifts happen all the time, and what really matters at the end of the day is whether this results in a change in institutional practices.

Returning to Schickler's Disjointed Pluralism (2001), we see an approach to the question of development very different from that of Morone. Schickler was concerned with testing theories of congressional rule change, and his focus was on that very subject-rules. In chronological chapters, he started by noting each of the internal changes to Congress in the given time period and used this list of outcomes to structure his inquiry. The causes of the changes themselves are given just a few pages each (as compared to a single change in the rules, which can be given virtually hundreds of pages in other accounts; see Caro, 2002). His focus was almost the mirror opposite of Morone's. Where the latter focused on the (intellectual) origins of changes and put little emphasis on the changes themselves, the former structured his entire inquiry around the outcomes, devoting in many cases just a few pages to explain how they came about. Although I suspect neither author has given much thought to it, the difference between these pure-type works is explained by the fact that, for them, political development takes place at different stages in the process. The methods of inquiry flow naturally out of this assumption.

Lessons

As distinct schools of thought, both cultural inquiry and historical institutionalism have generated remarkably powerful methodological tools for studying particular questions of interest. These tools can be of great utility to scholars outside the APD subfield, as they focus heavily on mechanisms that translate independent variables into outcomes. Sadly, members of the two schools have learned little from one another. Yet, when studies do draw from the relevant tools of both schools in a substantive way, the results can be extremely impressive. Marie Gottschalk, for example, in her study of American labor unions (2000), employed both historical-institutionalist and cultural approaches to produce a highly convincing explanation for why labor remained committed to the idea of health insurance via an employer mandate, even when faced with the opportunity to support the Clinton administration's proposal for universal health insurance. This is an important question, given that employers even then were cutting back on health benefits – a process that has since continued. She started with what she calls the ‘backstory’ of labor's decision to pursue universal health care through an employer mandate. She traced the development of this idea, which, she explained, took on a life of its own, as it was able to ‘fit’ perceptions of a problem in the eyes of key policy-makers in the unions.

She explained why it was a logical move for labor to pursue employer-mandated health care rather than a national health insurance system back in the late 1970s, and then she painstakingly traced why this idea was so hard to displace for the Clinton administration, in seeking union support. Rather than relying on simplicities, she was forced to walk through a detailed and quite complicated (yet entirely convincing) explanation – one that could only be arrived at by someone who took both the institutional context and the power of ideas seriously.

The reason Gottschalk's analysis is so powerful is that it captures the key independent variables involved in a highly effective manner. Ideas at times really are important, as are institutional settings. When an analysis is able to capture both in a holistic manner, it should come as no surprise that the results seem more convincing. Another very good but quite different example of this is found in Robert C. Lieberman's (2002) application of Orren and Skowronek's work on multiple orders. Also building on the work of David Plotke (1996), Lieberman identified ‘orders’ as ‘regular, predictable, and interconnected pattern[s] of institutional and ideological arrangements that structure political life in a given place at a given time’ (2002, p. 702). Much like the idea of ‘fit’ that Gottschalk employed, ‘orders’ are collections of ideas and institutions that are distinct but mutually reinforcing. They operate via their own individual logics, allowing room for them to grate upon one another at times, and be mutually supporting at other times. When they begin to grate, there is opportunity for change and development (Huntington, 1981). Lieberman applied this approach to an explanation of the surprising adoption of affirmative action despite the color-blind language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As he explained: ‘the puzzle is that neither ideas (the apparent triumph of color-blindness in 1964) nor institutions (the apparent weakness of the civil rights enforcement apparatus) predict the emergence of affirmative action’ (2002, p. 705). Instead, the federal government adopted affirmative action as a solution to the race problem only after ‘disjunction, friction, and overlap among ideational and institutional’ elements created an incentive structure allowing the new policy to take root (p. 709). Thus, by studying the relationship between ideas and institutions over time, Lieberman was able to explain policy change in a time and direction one might not otherwise expect.

Work such as Gottschalk's and Lieberman's is extremely demanding, because the researcher must not only effectively capture all of the institutional and ideational variables involved, but also provide a convincing explanation of how they interact with one another. This requires drawing upon the analytical tools of both APD schools where appropriate, without becoming locked into one or the other. Scholarship that succeeds at this, to name only a few recent works, include studies of how the origins and transformation of the right to petition in colonial and early America affected the political participation of otherwise disenfranchised groups (Mark, 1998); how and why selective entitlements were adopted by the new American federal government, and the impact this had on later social policy (Jensen, 2003); the manner in which cultures of manhood in combination with voting systems shaped the nature of political participation in the mid-nineteenth century (Bensel, 2003); and how the advancement of mass communication technologies and evolving interpretations of identity made it possible for industrial workers to become effective political participants in the mid-1930s (Cohen, 1990).

Works of a pure type are extremely useful for the analytical insights they develop, allowing the authors and others later to pull from the toolkit as needed. Whether purists will ever come to take perspectives from the other school seriously – and, to some extent, whether they should – is a question that remains open.