Explore the vast range of titles available.

Reacting against early accounts of the American state as a peculiarity in comparative terms--an underdeveloped \"Tudor state\" with faint coercive capacity, according to Samuel Huntington--the foundational work of Stephen Skowronek showed that the United States was not as \"stateless\" as Huntington feared.6 Instead, Skowronek contended, American national administrative capacities developed out of America's distinctive political patterns rather than the European model of the progressive democratization of absolutism.7 Following Skowronek's lead, numerous scholars have examined the development, peculiarities, and capacities of the American state, placing it at the center of the subfield of American political development.8 But for Skowronek, as for those who have followed, the American state was defined by the existence of formal, coercive administrative power lodged with public bureaucracies, and its dimensions--presence, size, strength, autonomy, and the like--measured against the European-derived Weberian model. Both because many central initiatives have been resisted and because the center's institutional capacity is comparatively weak, it is often maintained that the American state's capacity to establish and enforce uniform national standards for policy and governance is limited.12 For example, Margaret Weir has documented just how durable pre-progressive patterns of state-level governments were until long after the Second World War despite the dramatic central interventions of the New Deal.13 Resistance to national standards and entrenched localism in policymaking represent the national state's limits in commanding uniformity in the design and application of policy, often resulting in uneven enforcement of rights across the population.\\n Underlining such expansionist expressions of national state power are the articulation and maintenance of common standards, be these in social policy such as education, civil rights such as voting rights, administrative devices for industrial organization, or compensatory measures for historical injustices such as affirmative action.

In recent years, \"governance\" has become a term of art used by scholars in all subfields of political science ranging from international relations to public policy, and from comparative politics to American politics, political theory, and public administration (whether the latter is considered a subfield of political science or a field or discipline in its own right). Citizens offered their representatives in Congress guidance not from party platforms or the ballot box, but instead in individual and group petitions that Congress was expected to respond to (and did).\\n Still other scholars, often theorists and/or affiliates of the fields of comparative and world politics pondering globalization, use the term \"governance\" in an effort to make sense of the ordering, controlling, or \"steering\" activities and capacities of transnational inter-relationships, alliances, networks, and other entities and organizations above the level of the sovereign state and its monopoly on imposing binding decisions on citizens.18 Although many examples of hybrid, public-private governance could be assayed here, the governance scheme undergirding the current U.S. engagement in Iraq seems particularly apt because it raises so many provocative questions about government, state, and stateness.

2 The American State of the 2000s There has been relatively little recent scholarship on the American state either in journals associated with research in American Political Development or in general political science journals.3 This seems odd, in view of the rich tradition of scholarship on the American welfare state, and how it evolved and obtained its distinct features.4 Too, there are rich veins of scholarship on the relationship between the U.S. party system and the state,5 on the distinctive role that race plays in the policies and administration of the American state,6 and on the dynamics of federal policy and the state.7 For all these reasons, research on state-building would appear to be a central component of APD scholarship.8 There are, I think, several reasons for the scarce recent scholarship on the American state. It may be that Orren and Skowronek's choice reflects the U.S. politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s--a political climate in which \"development\" (in the strict sense of the word) has not been visible in the form of enhanced federal government autonomy from dominant industries, stronger fiscal health for the national state, more inclusive and comprehensive social provision, achievement of greater political, social, or economic equality, modernized transportation infrastructure, or promulgation of policies to improve the long-term health of American society, such as mitigating climate change.

Washington's first four Councils (1803-1806) immediately enacted a host of ordinances regulating markets; the size of bricks; the weighing of hay, straw, and fodder; hackney carriages, theatrical and other public amusements; poor, infirm, and diseased persons; the cording of fire-wood; the repairing of pumps; weights and measures; fire buckets; peddlers and ordinary keepers; the keeping of carriages and billiard tables; the measuring of coal; nuisances; the inspection and measurement of lumber; fairs; the inspection of flour; auctions; the weight and quality of bread; and ferries.18 The sweeping compass and careful detail of these regulations were duplicated a thousand-fold across the many jurisdictions of early nineteenth-century America, legal testament to the extensive power of legislative action in the early American state.

The idea of an eternal reward for valor was so deeply embedded in Viking culture that warriors even asked the dead to show them the way to the great hall in the sky.1 On the northern fringes of Europe in the eleventh century, a battle was an opportunity for men to join Odin and his Valkyries and that prospect made a war much more than the continuation of politics by other means. Walt Rostow offered a more contemporary conception of sovereignty when he said: National sovereignty means that nations retain the ultimate right--a right sanctioned by law, custom, and what decent men judge to be legitimacy--the right to kill people of other nations in defense or pursuit of what they judge to be their national interest.

To illustrate this claim, Farr traced a discourse of the state that had been embraced by political theorists from Francis Lieber to Woodrow Wilson, and that would play a vital role in the early history of the discipline of political science as it emerged in the 1880s.2 Farr's conclusion, which is echoed in a recent book by another non-APD political scientist, John G. Gunnell, is broadly congruent with recent historical writing on nineteenth-century political culture.3 Yet while both Farr and Gunnell are well regarded by political scientists who specialize in political theory, they are for some reason rarely cited by political scientists who specialize in APD. [...] it would seem incontrovertible that the documents flesh-and-blood nineteenth-century Americans left behind are a better guide to nineteenth-century conceptions of stateness than the often cryptic ruminations of idiosyncratic and often ill-informed observers, however exalted their reputations.4 Why APD specialists persist in perpetuating old cliches is particularly puzzling since, for historians as otherwise diverse as James L. Huston, Don E. Fehrenbacher, and Rebecca Edwards, it is taken for granted that--even, or perhaps especially, in the nineteenth century--the state loomed large in the popular imagination.5 In this period, as Philip J. Ethington has observed, Americans had a political conception of society in which the state figured prominently, while twentieth-century Americans had a social conception of politics in which society loomed large.6 Even so, one of the only essays to make this point in the flagship APD journal, Studies in American Political Development , is Thomas Goebel's The Political Economy of American Populism from Jackson to the New Deal.

Despite a widespread fear of standing armies, the military became the largest part of the new state organized under the Constitution; in more than half of the years between 1800 and 1860, military expenditures exceeded half the federal budget.1 The Army used its resources to become the largest public institution in antebellum America promoting economic development.2 Soldiers were at the forefront of efforts to acquire new territory or consolidate control to permit settlement and resource exploitation. Beyond the use of coercive force, the Army engaged in a wide range of non-coercive socioeconomic activities with far-reaching economic consequences: mapping and surveying newly acquired territory so that it could be divided and sold; training soldier-engineers for a society lacking skilled personnel; assigning engineers to help build roads, canals, and railroads; requiring arms makers to adopt new manufacturing technologies; and more.

Within this discourse, a focus on the state may be the means of pulling the conversation back to matters of power, or it may be just another \"conceptual variable,\" no different in weight from religion or ethnicity, and thus more fodder for the mill of cultural analysts.2 A third argument pits those who study electoral politics--voter behavior, party formation, correlations between legislative outcomes--against those who stress the importance of administration. At its extreme, such an approach could lead to absurd claims as Herbert Baxter Adams's theory that American democracy originated in the sixth-century institutions of the Teutonic forest.5 What has intervened since that first wave of institutionalism is almost a century of intellectual and cultural history, during which historians have increasingly regarded the state as an implementer of cultural or political programs, not as an autonomous Creature From the Black Lagoon.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), labor organizations top its so-called \"heavy hitter\" list of political action committees (PACs) that contributed and spent the most money in federal elections over the past twenty years. From 1989 to 2009, CRP's analysis shows that twelve of the top twenty groups on its list are labor PACs (see Table 1 (See PDF) ), and six made the top ten: the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (second on the list at $41.7 million); the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (fifth at $31.3 million); the National Education Association (seventh at $30 million); the Laborers Union (eighth at $28.7 million); the Service Employees International Union (ninth at $27.8 million); and the Carpenters and Joiners Union (tenth at $27.7 million). [...] unlike many of the corporate and business groups that spread their donations to candidates of both political parties, labor PACs overwhelmingly gave their money to Democrats.