Past American Politics Seminar

Much of what the federal government does today is carried out by people the public rarely sees. While debates focus on bureaucrats and political appointees, agencies increasingly rely on a vast contractor workforce to perform functions ranging from tech support to policy analysis to regulatory drafting services. This quiet transformation has altered how the government functions while simultaneously preserving the public-facing image of a bureaucracy run by civil servants.. The federal government does not keep reliable data on how many contractors it employs, but many estimates suggest that contractors outnumber career bureaucrats.

In Going Private, Rachel Augustine Potter explains how this shift reshapes the everyday operation of the administrative state and coalesces power within the presidency. Easily hired and easily fired, contractors have strong incentives to please their clients, making them malleable to the president’s will. Presidents from both parties have leveraged these features and learned to rely on contractors to advance political priorities, bypass uncooperative bureaucrats, and gain increased control over agency work. 

Drawing on new data and interviews, Going Private argues that outsourcing is not merely an administrative convenience. Rather, it is a defining feature of contemporary governance—one that complicates accountability, blurs the boundaries of the administrative state, and alters the exercise of presidential power.

When the Supreme Court strikes down an act of Congress, normative questions arise about the proper role of life-tenured, unelected judges in a democracy. Similar questions arise when lower courts strike down congressional statutes, but political science research has given considerably less attention to these decisions. Using a novel dataset of Courts of Appeals invalidations of federal legislation from 1979 to 2019, I find that any given law is more likely to be struck down at the circuit court level than at the Supreme Court level. Furthermore, most Supreme Court invalidations were preceded by an invalidation at the circuit level, and circuit court behavior strongly shapes the Supreme Court’s certiorari decisions. Thus, when theorizing about the Supreme Court’s treatment of congressional legislation, we must take into account the prior behavior of the Courts of Appeals. So doing, we gain a broader understanding of the relationship between the courts and Congress. 

Interest groups today have deviated far from the Framers' expectations of them as factional brokers of fluid societal coalitions. More surprisingly, they have also become something other than the parochial, corrupting special interests that observers of American politics have long critiqued. We argue that many interest groups have evolved into something less parochial and more programmatic and, distinctively, more partisan. To examine this evolution's timing, extent, and consequences, we analyze the largest dataset ever compiled of interest groups' publicly observable positions on congressional legislation, covering virtually every issue area from the mid-1970s to the present. These data illuminate how the onset of modern party competition has encouraged groups to align with parties, taking more extreme positions on bills outside their core issue interests but that serve party goals. When groups take sides, they sclerose once-fluid lobbying coalitions into hardened recurring sides, distort the parties' understanding of the electorate, and paradoxically weaken their own influence over policy outcomes even when their preferred party is in power. American democracy suffers---as do the groups themselves---when interests are no longer special.

The author argues that the Great Migration changed how Democratic Party elites interacted with Black communities in northern cities. In particular the author argues that (1) Black Americans moved out of the South into the North, (2) that this migration changed Black citizens ability to participate in politics, and (3) this change in participation led Democratic Party leaders to conclude that Black Americans could help the Democratic Party achieve their electoral goals.

This chapter documents the party-group alignment of the NRA and the GOP, detailing the constellation of factors that collectively facilitated this alignment. Building directly on chapters 3 and 4, it shows how the NRA’s cultivation of a group social identity and ideology laid a foundation for its eventual incorporation into the Republican coalition. The chapter also highlights the institutional conditions that catalyzed this process, including the changing incentives of both the NRA and GOP politicians. Finally, the chapter explores the intensification of the NRA’s relationship with the Republican Party over the past few decades, including its relationship with Donald Trump, and reflects on what the NRA case tells us about the nature of party coalitions.

In this workshop talk, I am eager to share some new work that builds on my efforts to understand the relationship between the politics of respectability, in-group policing, and Black Americans’ punitive attitudes (under review). In particular, I propose a new construct for consideration, “perceptions of collective costs”—the sense that in-group members’ behaviors have cascading consequences for the whole. For the first part of the talk, I will outline a new measure that I use to capture this construct, discuss its correlates, demonstrate its distinctiveness from other familiar constructs, and showcase how it matters in shaping in-group members’ attention and reaction to stereotype-confirming behavior. Following this discussion, I will present preliminary results from an experiment that examines the conditions under which collective cost concerns are activated. I will conclude with a discussion of the implications this work has for the study of identity and punishment in the United States and beyond.

White evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, producing extensive debate as to who evangelicals are, what it means to be an evangelical in the United States today, and whether the electoral results are surprising or not. This paper offers empirical clarity to this protracted discussion by asking and answering a series of questions related to Trump’s victory in general and his support from white evangelicals in particular. In doing so, the analyses show that the term “evangelical” has not become a synonym for conservative politics and that white evangelical support for Trump would be higher if public opinion scholars used a belief-centered definition of evangelicalism rather than relying on the more common classification strategies based on self-identification or religious denomination. These findings go against claims that nominal evangelicals, those who call themselves evangelicals but are not religious, make up the core of Trump’s support base. Moreover, high levels of electoral support among devout evangelicals is not unique to the 2016 election but is rather part of a broader trend of evangelical electoral behavior, even when faced with non-traditional Republican candidates. Finally, the paper explores why white evangelicals might support a candidate like Trump. The paper presents evidence that negative partisanship helps explain why devout evangelicals–despite Trump’s background and behaviors being cause for concern–coalesced around his presidential bid. Together, the findings from this paper help make sense of both the 2016 presidential election and evangelical public opinion, both separately and together.

Why, despite high rates of reported political discussion, do so many Americans dislike talking about politics? And how do the mixed considerations people hold about discussion affect the way that they communicate? We argue that we need to consider the psychological experience of political discussion as navigating a social process that is rife with potential challenges to our sense of self and our relationships with others. Variation in the cognitive resources of political conversation, such as interest or knowledge, or in instrumental goals related to learning and persuasion cannot fully explain people’s motivation to seek or avoid discussion, although considerations related to information certainly are part of the story. Discussion is an inherently social behavior, and we argue that without assessing the social factors influencing the decision to talk about politics, we can’t fully understand who talks about politics, with whom, under what conditions, and with what consequence. 

This book is an effort to open the lid on the processes that lead up to a political discussion and the implications of the conversations that do happen. Our approach is to build on what we already know about political discussion, focusing on the gaps in our knowledge resulting from untested assumptions and limited methodologies in previous work. We apply new measurement techniques in order to better understand the decision-making processes that lead to the initiation of discussion, the nuances of the interactions that do occur, and the consequences of those conversations on a wide set of political and social outcomes.

What are the downstream political consequences of state activity explicitly targeting an ethnic minority group? This question is well studied in the comparative context, but less is known about the effects of explicitly racist state activity in liberal democracies such as the United States. We investigate this question by looking at an important event in American history—the internment of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. We find that Japanese Americans who were interned or had family who were interned are significantly less politically engaged and that these patterns of disengagement increase with internment length. Using an identification strategy leveraging quasi-random camp assignment, we also find that camp experience matters: those who went to camps that witnessed intragroup violence or strikes experienced sharper declines, suggesting that group fragmentation is an important mechanism of disengagement. Taken together, our findings contribute to a growing literature documenting the demobilizing effects of ethnically targeted detention and expand our understanding of these forces within the U.S.

Though sexism is often understood, by analogy with racism, as hostile prejudice toward women, I argue that gender prejudice includes a second face, so-called “benevolent” sexism. Analyzing unique nationally-representative survey data I demonstrate that both shaped presidential candidate evaluations and voting. Moving to the congressional level, I show that each face operates differently. In analyses of actual congressional candidates and in a conjoint experiment, I nd that hostile sexism is moderated by candidate sex: those high in hostile sexism oppose (and those low in hostile sexism favor) female candidates. Benevolent sexism, on the other hand, is moderated by a candidate’ gendered leadership style: those high in benevolent sexism oppose candidates with feminine styles and they favor candidates with masculine styles, regardless of whether the candidate is male or female. I conclude with consideration of a two-faced conception of sexism for our analysis of the political psychology of gender and power.

It is commonplace to equate the arrival of a new conservative administration in Washington, DC with the “rolling back” of the federal activities. . We disagree with this conventional perspective, and seek to demonstrate that the equation of conservative Republicanism and retrenchment elides a critical change in the relationship between party politics and State power – a relationship that Donald Trump seems determined to nurture. Drawing on primary research, we argue that partisanship in the United States is no longer a struggle over the size of the State; rather it is a contest to control  national administrative power. Since the late 1960s, conservative administrations have sought to redeploy rather than dismantle or roll back state power. Through “redeployment,” conservative presidents have sustained previous levels of State spending or State activity, but in a way reflecting a new administration’s ideology.

James Morone is the John Hazen White Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and director of the the A. Alfred Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy. He grew up in Rio de Janeiro and New York, received his BA from Middlebury College and his PhD at the University of Chicago.

Morone has been a visiting professor at Yale University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Bremen, Germany. The Brown University classes of 1993, 1999, 2001, 2007, and 2008 voted him the Hazeltine Citation as the teacher that most inspired them. Morone has served as chair of the political science department and currently chairs the faculty executive committee, which is responsible for faculty governance at Brown.

Morone has written ten books and more than 150 articles, reviews, and essays on American political history, health care policy, and social issues. His first book, The Democratic Wish, was named a “notable book of 1991” by The New York Times and won the American Political Science Association’s Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book on US national policy. His Hellfire Nation: the Politics of Sin in American History was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and named a top book of 2003 by numerous newspapers and magazines. His The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office (co-authored with David Blumenthal, MD) was featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. According to unreliable sources, President Obama was seen reading the book at Camp David. Morone’s most recent book, The Devils We Know, was published by University Press of Kansas in November 2014.

My research considers the potential for power in information. I integrate psychology and political science in order to identify points at which new information can have the most profound effect on the way people form political opinions, make political choices and, ultimately, take political actions.

In a democracy, government policies should not just be correlated with citizens’ preferences, but also respond dynamically to them. Using eight decades of data, we examine the magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators of dynamic responsiveness in the American states. We show that on both economic and (especially) social issues, the liberalism of state publics predicts future changes in state policy liberalism. Dynamic responsiveness is gradual, however; large policy shifts are the result of the cumulation of incremental responsiveness over many years. Partisan control of government mediates only a fraction of responsiveness, suggesting that, contrary to conventional wisdom, responsiveness occurs mainly through the adaptation of incumbent officials. Dynamic responsiveness has increased over time but does not seem to be influenced by institutions such as direct democracy or campaign finance regulations. We conclude that our findings, though in some respects normatively ambiguous, on the whole paint a reassuring portrait of statehouse democracy.