Margaret Weir

Bringing the State Back In: State Structures and the Possibilities for “Keynesian” Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States

When the Great Depression of the 1930s swept across the Western industrial democracies, it undermined classical liberal orthodoxies of public finance. Economic crisis called into question the predominant conviction that government should balance its budget, maintain the gold standard, and let business reequilibrate of its own accord during economic downturns. Demands were voiced for extraordinary government actions on behalf of industrial workers, farmers, and other distressed groups. Established political coalitions came unraveled, and new opportunities opened for politicians and parties that could devise appealing responses to the exigencies of the decade. One of the greatest dilemmas was how to cope with an unprecedented volume of unemployment in suddenly and severely contracted economies. Out of the traumas of the 1930s came new political and theoretical understandings of the much more active roles that states might henceforth play in maintaining growth and employment in advanced industrial-capitalist democracies. Thus was born the “Keynesian era,” as it would retrospectively come to be called in honor of the breakthrough in economic theory embodied in John Maynard Keyness 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money . National reactions to the crisis of the depression varied widely, however. In many cases either conservative stasis or a turn toward authoritarianism prevailed. Among the countries that avoided the breakdown of democratic institutions, Sweden and the United States were the sites of the boldest responses to the crisis by reformist political leaderships.

The Calculus of Coalitions Cities, Suburbs, and the Metropolitan Agenda

Reductions in federal urban assistance and devolution have made cities increasingly reliant on their state governments at a time when cities have lost political strength in state legislatures. This article identifies three types of coalitions that historically supported cities: party-imposed coalitions, interest-based coalitions, and governor-brokered coalitions. It shows how institutional, demographic, and economic changes have made these legislative coalitions less reliable. The article then considers prospects for constructing new city-suburban legislative coalitions. It argues that institutional constraints have limited the scope of preferences expressed by city and suburban legislators. The article concludes that prospects for city-suburban coalitions will depend on new issue definitions, institutional rules, and organizations that help city and suburban legislators redefine their policy preferences.

States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism

There is no escaping the New Deals pivotal place in studies of twentieth-century American politics. Social scientists have vigorously debated the causes of the New Deals distinctive features and continue to argue about its consequences for subsequent American political development. The predominant perspective advances a coherent linear history in which the central features of New Deal reform shape the understanding of political developments both before and after the 1930s. The era of Progressive reform is viewed as a precursor to the expanded public power and the practice of activist government that was consolidated in the 1930s. The Great Society is the effort to extend the benefits of liberal reform to African Americans, who had reaped only scant benefits from the central achievements of New Deal reform. When this effort went “too far,” it resulted in a far-reaching backlash against activist government. The “rise and fall” of a New Deal order that had the creation of active government at its core has thus provided a central narrative for the study of twentieth-century politics.

Public Schooling and Working-Class Formation: The Case of the United States.

This essay examines the role of the working class in the expansion of the American public school system from 1870 to 1900. In contrast to progressive and recent revisionist historians, the authors identify the nature and limits of conflict as the key to explaining the growth of public education in the United States. Four empirical claims are made: (1) The working class did not provide the central agency struggling to expand the school systems created before the Civil War. This role was taken by educators finding their professional voice. (2) The American working class did not engage in school politics as a class. (3) Rather, when working-class Americans fought school battles they did so in more narrowly defined terms, either as labor or as ethnics. (4) This pattern of selective attention is accounted for by the fact that (white) workers did not have to struggle against significant opposition to secure access to free common public schooling and, second, by the features of class formation which post-Civil War Americans inherited from the antebellum period. These assertions are empirically examined in a study of compulsory education legislation and curricular expansion in Chicago and San Francisco during the late nineteenth century.

Innovation and Boundaries in American Employment Policy

For the thirty years that followed World War II, American presidents, in words, if not always in their actions, supported the goal of full employment. For Democrats the objective was especially salient, but, wary of the electoral repercussions, Republican politicians also highlighted employment concerns. During the later 1970s, in an economic context of sharply rising inflation, full employment receded as a political issue. And as full employment lost its place as a pivot of partisan competition, ideas arguing that government could only play a limited role in affecting employment began to set the terms for public policy. What accounts for this change in the position of employment as a political issue, and how did ideas about limiting the government role become influential? Two major explanations, each linked to broader arguments about American exceptionalism, have been offered to account for shifts in economic policy in the late 1970s. One traces the shift to business influence, pointing to the striking political mobilization of American business and financial interests during the 1970s.I A second explanation highlights the role of public opinion: strong and

The Power of Coalitions

Between 1980 and 2010 California’s health care policy field shifted from a business-dominated, closed-door pattern of decision making to a more open political arena. Through this process, a wide-ranging and diversely resourced coalition advocating on behalf of beneficiaries became an accepted partner in policymaking. This article examines this transformation, considering its broader implications for the political dynamics of the public-private welfare state and the role of advocacy groups in defending beneficiary interests. We argue that multifaceted coalitions exploit three vulnerabilities of the public-private welfare state, which presents openings for advancing public priorities: 1) diverse and shifting interests, which allow advocates to build broad coalitions that include labor and some providers 2) service gaps that, when publicized, can generate public outrage; and 3) the hybrid institutional form of the public-private welfare state, which can connect service delivery organizations with a broader pro-public coalition.

Justice for the Poor in the New Metropolis

Poverty, in the public imagination and the academic literature alike, has long fixated on the system of “urban containment” that trapped the minority poor in low-income urban neighborhoods. The face of poverty that became anchored in the American public mind was African American, urban, and nonworking. The increasing dispersion of poverty throughout the metropolitan area requires reconceptualizing the problem of metropolitan poverty. The paper provides a new typology of to frame the institutional context of metropolitan poverty.

In the Shadows: Central Cities' Loss of Power in State Politics

The article argues that big cities in the United States have lost power in State poli tics. This development is partly due to declining city populations, but it is also a product of changes in the organization of State politics. Foremost among these changes are the decline of political parties, the rise of interest-based politics in State legislatures, and the growing power of legislatures over Governors. These changes in State politics have made it harder to build policy coalitions that address urban problems, and they have limited the scope of the States metropolitan agenda at a time when the Federal Government has sharply reduced assistance to big cities.

Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States.

Americans claim a strong attachment to the work ethic and regularly profess support for government policies to promote employment. Why, then, have employment policies gained only a tenuous foothold in the USA? To answer this question, Margaret Weir highlights two related elements: the power of ideas in policy-making and the politics of interest formation. Rather than seeing policy as a straightforward outcome of public preferences, she shows how ideas frame problems and how interests form around possibilities created by the interplay of ideas and politics. By examining Keynesian macroeconomic policy in the 1930s and 1940s, labour market policies in the 1960s and 1970s, and efforts to develop new planning mechanisms in the late 1970s, Weir shows how early decisions restricted the scope for later initiatives. As a result, policies in the 1960s emphasized racial differences and thus drew opposition for creating special interest measures for Afro-Americans.