Eileen McDonagh

Political Citizenship and Democratization: The Gender Paradox

This research challenges models of democratization that claim liberal principles affirming the equality of rights-bearing individuals equably enhance the political inclusion of groups marginalized by race, class, or gender. While such explanations may suffice for race and class, this studys quantitative cross-national analysis of womens contemporary officeholding patterns establishes that gender presents a counter case whereby womens political citizenship is enhanced, first, by government institutions that paradoxically affirm both individual equality and kinship group difference and, second, by state policies that paradoxically affirm both individual equality and womens group difference. These findings challenge assumptions about the relationship between political citizenship and democratization, demonstrate how womens political inclusion as voters and officeholders is strengthened not by either a “sameness” principle (asserting womens equality to men as individuals) or a “difference” principle (asserting womens group difference from men) but rather by the paradoxical combination of both, and provide new views for assessing multiculturalism prospects within democratic states.

Woman Suffrage in the Progressive Era: Patterns of Opposition and Support in Referenda Voting, 1910-1918

Sources of opposition and support for woman suffrage are analyzed with the use of the responses of male voters to constitutional referenda held in six key states during the Progressive era. Traditional axes of opposition and support for suffrage are examined, establishing that stable sources of suffrage support originate most often from Protestant and northern European constituencies (with the exception of Germans), whereas southern Europeans and Catholics (except for Germans) generally show no consistent patterns. Opposition to suffrage is most constant from Germans—both Catholic and Protestant—and from urban constituencies. A structural model indicating the greater importance of prohibition as an intervening variable compared to partisanship or turnout at the grass-roots level of voting behavior explicates the sources of direct and indirect support for suffrage while it also demonstrates the influence of educational commitment in determining suffrage voting patterns. Except in the West, opposition to suffrage was intense and greater at the grass-roots level than among legislative elites. The ultimate success of the federal amendment is discussed in the context of state referenda, the changed political climate after American entry into World War I, and the innovative efforts of state legislatures to grant “presidential” suffrage, thereby circumventing what proved to be the difficult referenda route.

Representative Democracy and State Building in the Progressive Era

I draw upon state-building and legislative literatures to investigate how constituency-based representative institutions in the Progressive Era nationalized innovative public policies, thereby expanding the authority of the federal government as a component of the modern American state developing at that time. Using state-level referenda votes as measures of grassroots views, multivariate analysis discloses the impact of district opinion, as well as party and district economy, as major determinants of House roll call voting on landmark regulatory legislation authorizing federal intervention in market relationships, state suffrage qualifications, and life-style behaviors involving intoxicating beverages.

It Takes a State: A Policy Feedback Model of Women's Political Representation

American women attain more professional success in medicine, business, and higher education than do most of their counterparts around the world. An enduring puzzle is, therefore, why the US lags so far behind other countries when it comes to womens political representation. In 2008, women held only 16.8 percent of seats in the House of Representatives, a proportion that ranks America lower than 83 other countries. This article addresses this conundrum. It establishes that equal rights alone are insufficient to ensure equal access to political office. Also necessary are public policies representing maternal traits that voters associate with women. Such policies have feedback effects that teach voters that the maternal traits attributed to women represent strengths not only in the private sphere of the home but also in the public sphere of the state. Most other democracies now have such policies in place, but the United States lacks such policies, which accounts for its laggard status with regard to the political representation of women.

The “Welfare Rights State” and the “Civil Rights State”: Policy Paradox and State Building in the Progressive Era *

An enduring contribution of the new institutionalism is its affirmation of the significance of the Progressive era. As a result, we have learned not only how the “big bang” explosion of welfare legislation in the New Deal rests upon structures and precedents set in the early twentieth-century decades, but also how this early reform period continues to influence contemporary policies and politics. Alan Dawley, Bruce Ackerman, and Morton Keller, for example, point to an activist state established in the Progressive era to check a laissez-faire governing system as the foundation of subsequent New Deal accomplishments upon which reformers built “where progressives had left off.” Theda Skocpol adds a cross-national perspective, showing how the American welfare state instituted in the early twentieth century evidenced a distinctive “maternalist” dynamic oriented toward addressing womens economic needs, in contrast to “paternalistic” norms in Western European nations assisting male workers.

Electoral Bases of Policy Innovation in the Progressive Era: The Impact of Grass-Root Opinion on Roll-Call Voting in the House of Representatives, Sixty-third Congress, 1913–1915

The 1900–1920 decades of the Progressive Era constitute a seminal period in American political history, evinced by successful invocation of government authority to contend with consequences of life in an urban, industrial, multicultural society. Legislative precedents established at the state and national level used public power to meet the needs of citizens unable individually to defend themselves against social and economic problems stemming from the brutal, take-off stage of industrial capitalism in the United States. Many scholars view the political transition marking these decades as profoundly significant for the development of public policies, if not for the very creation of the modern American state. This research investigates the electoral bases of national policy innovation in the Progressive Era.

The Eclectic Center of the New Institutionalism

This special section of Social Science History launches a series of five articles illustrative of what we believe is an eclectic center in the development of historical studies of institutions and policies, often termed the “new institutionalism.” The new institutionalism emerged in the early 1980s in reaction to “a long season in which social forces and processes were the predominant topics of study” (Orren and Skowronek 1986). While the precise role of institutions varies according to the practitioner, hallmarks of the new institutionalism include a portrayal of institutions as semiautonomous actors; a contextualization of institutions within sociohistorical processes (and vice versa); a recognition of inefficiency, contingency, and accident in history; and a recognition of the relative autonomy of ideas and symbolic action in historical development (March and Olsen 1984, 1989; Krasner 1984; Smith 1988; Katznelson 1992). As is expected of new paradigms, the entry of the new institutionalism into the intellectual community has been marked by an array of polemics against its predecessors, “old” schools defined by “old institutionalism,” behaviorism, and structural functionalism. It has also generated a wave of spirited counterattacks (Mitchell 1991; Bendix et al. 1992; Ethington and McDonagh forthcoming).

The Family-State Nexus in American Political Development: Explaining Women’s Political Citizenship

The United States was a suffrage pioneer for eliminating restrictions based on class and race, but not for prohibiting the use of sex classifications as a voting qualification. This contribution focuses on the relationship between the family and the state to explain this discrepancy. In the context of America’s liberal heritage, the family and the state are separated by virtue of being ruled by opposite principles: parental rule versus political rule. I argue that women’s suffrage was delayed in the United States because women’s identification with the family as an institution separated them from formal inclusion in the state. Reformers had to solve, therefore, the relationship between the family and the state in order to achieve women’s political citizenship. Using a new data set that tracks family-state frames used by women’s suffrage and women rights leaders from the founding of the American state to the addition of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, I show how configurations of the family and the state developed over time. It was when the family and the state were eventually conceptualized to be analogous, rather than opposite, institutions that women finally achieved the right to vote.

Ripples from the First Wave: The Monarchical Origins of the Welfare State

Before the welfare state, people were protected from disabilities resulting from illness, old age, and other infirmities by care work provided within the family. When the state assumes responsibility for care-work tasks, in effect it assumes parental roles, thereby becoming a form of familial government in which the public provision of goods and services is analogous to care work provided in the family. My research pushes back the origins of the state’s obligation to care for people to a preindustrial form of government, hereditary monarchies—what Max Weber termed patrimonialism. It explicates how monarchs were cast as the parents of the people, thereby constituting kingship as a care work regime that assigned to political rulers parental responsibility for the welfare of the people. Using historical and quantitative analysis, I establish that retaining the legitimacy of monarchies as the first form of familial government in the course of Western European democratizing makes it more credible to the public and to political elites to accept the welfare state as the second form of familial government. That, in turn, promotes a more robust public sector supportive of social provision. The results reformulate conceptions of the contemporary welfare state and its developmental legacies.

The Constitution as Social Design: Gender and Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order. By Gretchen Ritter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2006. 400 pp.

American political development (APD) as a field has made its way into the forefront of political science literature. One of its most important assumptions is that the best way to understand the present is by locating the roots of current policies and politics in the historical contexts of the past. Suffice it to say, this does not mean that “history repeats itself,” but rather that the only way to understand what happens today is to connect the dots between previous and current political phenomena. In this way, it becomes more possible to discern the developmental paths that define the parameters available for contemporary and future political analysis and action. The field of APD has produced remarkable scholarship challenging the most basic assumptions about what makes the American state tick. Initially, the canon defined by Alexis de Tocqueville, Gunnar Myrdal, and Louis Hartz argued that the development of the American state was based upon a liberal consensus that American political institutions should treat all individuals as equal “in spite of” ascriptive group differences, such as their class, race, or sex. Hence, contrary examples such as slavery, to say the least, which violate the consensus assumption, but are viewed as anomalies or bumps in the liberal road that need to be removed in order to continue the liberal “individual equality” project ideologically and historically. Suffice it to say that this consensus view was overturned by the pioneering work of Karen Orren (Belated Feudalism, 1992) and Rogers Smith (Civic Ideals, 1997).