Desmond King

The Politics of Path Dependency: Political Conflict in Historical Institutionalism

The conventional critique of institutional theory, and especially historical institutionalism, is that it is incapable of coping with change. We argue for the importance of political conflict as a means of initiating change in an institutionalist framework. In particular, conflict over ideas and the underlying assumptions of policy is important for motivating change. We demonstrate the viability of this argument with examples of institutional change.

Racial Orders in American Political Development

American political science has long struggled to deal adequately with issues of race. Many studies inaccurately treat their topics as unrelated to race. Many studies of racial issues lack clear theoretical accounts of the relationships of race and politics. Drawing on arguments in the American political development literature, this essay argues for analyzing race, and American politics more broadly, in terms of two evolving, competing “racial institutional orders”: a “white supremacist” order and an “egalitarian transformative” order. This conceptual framework can synthesize and unify many arguments about race and politics that political scientists have advanced, and it can also serve to highlight the role of race in political developments that leading scholars have analyzed without attention to race. The argument here suggests that no analysis of American politics is likely to be adequate unless the impact of these racial orders is explicitly considered or their disregard explained.

Rethinking local democracy

The transformation of British local government into a new and complex system of local governance raises fundamental theoretical questions as well as empirical ones. Rethinking Local Democracy argues that traditional defences of local government are no longer adequate and that the case for local autonomy and local democracy needs to be radically rethought. It brings together a set of specially-commissioned chapters by leading academics designed to stimulate and contribute to debate on these issues

Citizenship, Social Citizenship and the Defence of Welfare Provision

This article analyses the normative status of claims to the social rights of citizenship in the light of New Right criticisms of the welfare state. The article assesses whether there is any normative justification for treating welfare provision and citizenship as intrinsically linked. After outlining T. H. Marshalls conception of citizenship the article reviews its status in relation to: traditional arguments about citizenship of the polity; relativist arguments about the embedded place of citizenship within current societies; and, drawing upon Rawlsian analysis, absolutist arguments about what being a member of a modern society implies. Each argument has some strengths and together they indicate the importance of retaining the idea of citizenship at the centre of modern political debates about social and economic arrangements.

Eugenic Ideas, Political Interests, and Policy Variance: Immigration and Sterilization Policy in Britain and the U.S.

A burgeoning literature in comparative politics has sought to incorporate ideas into political analysis. In this article the authors categorize the main ways in which this incorporation has occurred--ideas as culture, ideas as expert knowledge, ideas as solutions to collective action problems, and ideas as programmatic beliefs--and explicate the different assumptions about causality and the permanence of ideas implied by these different frameworks. This theoretical exercise is then applied to an empirical examination of eugenic ideas about sterilization and immigration and their influence on public policy in Britain and the United States between the world wars. Given that ideational ideas were (broadly) equally powerful in both countries, the cases provide a basis for shedding light on when and how extant ideational frameworks influence public policy. Employing primary sources the authors conclude that ideas remain powerful expressions of societal interests but depend upon key carriers to realize such expressions.

Cheap Labor: The New Politics of “Bread and Roses” in Industrial Democracies

In this article we aim to return labor (particularly the most vulnerable members of the labor market) to the core of the comparative political economy of advanced democracies. We formulate a framework with which to conceptualize cheap labor in advanced democracies. We propose that to understand the politics of cheap labor, the weakest members of the labor market need to be divided into two structural groups: those in standard and those in nonstandard employment. Standard cheap labor includes “regular jobs” while nonstandard cheap labor includes low-cost, flexible, and temporary jobs. We show that the use of cheap labor is significant in all industrialized democracies but that there are important contrasts in how different economies use cheap labor. We argue that there is a trade-off between standard and nonstandard cheap labor. Countries that satisfy their need for cheap labor through standard employment do not develop large nonstandard sectors of their economies. Countries that do not promote cheap labor in the standard sector, on the other hand, end up relying on an army of nonstandard workers to meet their cheap labor needs.

Regime Politics in London Local Government

The authors provide an encompassing eight-point characterization of regimes designed to cover all cases of this complex multicriteria concept, arguing that not all eight characteristics need be present for a regime to exist but that the larger the subset, the more a governing coalition constitutes a regime. The regime concept is then applied to six London boroughs during the early to mid-1990s. They demonstrate the utility and limits of the regime concept in identifying and explaining the politics of these boroughs at this time, suggesting that three of the cases constitute different types of regimes, and the other three constitute failed regimes.

Ironies of state building: a comparative perspective on the American state

This review of new directions in the American and comparative literatures on the state reveals important intellectual trends that parallel each other quite closely. Both comparativists and Americanists address similar questions about the sources of state authority, and both propose similar answers. Collectively, these scholars and others are retheorizing the state-developing a suppler, multidimensional picture of the states origins, structure, and consequences-to shed light on the reasons for the states stubborn refusal to cede the stage. The emerging understanding of the state that the authors describe provides a framework not only for revisiting the state in the international realm but also, in dialogue with recent Americanist studies, for revising and deepening the understanding of the states paradoxical role in American political development and finally setting aside the assumption of the United States as stateless. In this emerging view, American state building, strength, and institutional capacity form through links with society, not necessarily through autonomy from society. But such distinctive patterns provide insights for comparative studies, too, for instance, in respect to the relationship between the state and welfare policy across nations.

BARACK OBAMA AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN RACIAL POLITICS

In 2008, following a campaign in which racial issues were largely absent, Americans elected their first Black president. This article argues that Obamas election does not signal the dawn of a postracial era in U.S. politics. Rather, it reflects the current structure of racial politics in the United States—a division between those who favor color-blind policies and seek to keep racial discussions out of politics, and those who favor race-conscious measures and whose policies are often political liabilities. The Obama campaign sought to win support from both camps. Only if pervasive material racial inequalities are reduced can such a strategy succeed in the long run.

Varieties of Obamaism: Structure, Agency, and the Obama Presidency

President Obama’s record stands out among modern presidents because of the wide range between his accomplishments and the boldness of his as-yet unfulfilled promises. Obamaism is a complex phenomenon, with multiple themes and policy ends. In this paper we examine the administration’s initiatives drawing upon recent scholarship in political science to consider the political, economic and institutional constraints that Obama has faced and to assess how he has faced them. Our key theme is the importance of integrating the study of presidency and public leadership with the study of the political economy of the state. The paper argues against personalistic accounts of the Obama presidency in favor of a structured agency approach. he first eighteen months of Barack Obama’s presidency have been marked by startling contrasts that both define his administration and underscore the need for a more integrated approach to analyzing presidential leadership. With the largest popular vote in two decades and the largest Democratic victory margin since Lyndon Johnson, Obama smashed the race barrier and inspired majorities of voters to believe in the possibility of change that would remedy the country’s economic problems while soothing the long-standing and bitter partisan divide. The high hopes surrounding Obama’s election boosted his approval to stratospheric levels of 60 percent or higher during his first months in office and were—after a tortuous year—realized in the passage of historic reforms of health care and higher education. These reforms will reshape policy and politics in these areas for decades. But these accomplishments coincided with his failure (to date) to deliver on a new, post-partisan politics; to enact far-reaching legislation on labor, immigration, and energy; and to recast foreign policy toward the Middle East and global climate change. The striking contrasts between historic accomplishment and abject failure are also accompanied by more ambiguous cases. None stands out more than the strained effort to enact reform of America’s financial system to prevent a repeat of Wall Street’s crisis and its disastrous consequences for the economy. Reform has been substantially watered down and falls far short of the restructuring that the administration proposed and that many experts recommend to prevent future system breakdowns. 1