This book provides an innovative interpretation of industrialization and statebuilding in the U.S. by tracing the development of regulated competition. Conceptualized by Brandeis and implemented by trade associations and the Federal Trade Commission, regulated competition checked economic power by channeling competition from predation into improvement in products and production processes.
"This work is a history of US aviation regulation in the interwar period of the early twentieth century. The author presents the Air Commerce Act as the institutionalization of a specific American regulatory ideology that arose in response to the technological nature of the airplane, the US Constitution, and the Paris Convention of 1919"--
Monica Prasad’s powerful demand-side hypothesis addresses three questions: Why does the United States have more poverty than any other developed country? Why did it experience an attack on state intervention in the 1980s, known today as the neoliberal revolution? And why did it recently suffer the greatest economic meltdown in seventy-five years?
A basic feature of the modern US administrative state taken for granted by legal scholars but neglected by political scientists and historians is its strong judiciality. Formal, or court-like, adjudication was the primary method of first-order agency policy making during the first half of the twentieth century. Even today, most US administrative agencies hire administrative law judges and other adjudicators conducting hearings using formal procedures autonomously from the agency head. No other industrialized democracy has even come close to experiencing the systematic state judicialization that took place in the United States. Why did the American administrative state become highly judicialized, rather than developing a more efficiency-oriented Weberian bureaucracy? Legal scholars argue that lawyers as a profession imposed the judicial procedures they were the most familiar with on agencies. But this explanation fails to show why the judicialization took place only in the United States at the time it did. Okayama demonstrates that the American institutional combination of common law and the presidential system favored policy implementation through formal procedures by autonomous agencies and that it induced the creation and development of independent regulatory commissions explicitly modeled after courts from the late nineteenth century. These commissions judicialized the state not only through their proliferation but also through the diffusion of their formal procedures to executive agencies over the next half century, which led to a highly fairness-oriented administrative state.
Rather than viewing the history of American capitalism as the unassailable ascent of large-scale corporations and free competition, American Fair Trade argues that trade associations of independent proprietors lobbied and litigated to reshape competition policy to their benefit. At the turn of the twentieth century, this widespread fair trade movement borrowed from progressive law and economics, demonstrating a persistent concern with market fairness - not only fair prices for consumers but also fair competition among businesses. Proponents of fair trade collaborated with regulators to create codes of fair competition and influenced the administrative state's public-private approach to market regulation. New Deal partnerships in planning borrowed from those efforts to manage competitive markets, yet ultimately discredited the fair trade model by mandating economy-wide trade rules that sharply reduced competition. Laura Phillips Sawyer analyzes how these efforts to reconcile the American tradition of a well-regulated society with the legacy of Gilded Age of laissez-faire capitalism produced the modern American regulatory state.
Two late Victorian ideas disrupted American legal thought: the Darwinian theory of evolution and marginalist economics. The legal thought that emerged can be called 'neoclassical', because it embodied ideas that were radically new while retaining many elements of what had gone before. Although Darwinian social science was developed earlier, in most legal disciplines outside of criminal law and race theory marginalist approaches came to dominate. This book carries these themes through a variety of legal subjects in both public and private law.
Regulatory change is typically understood as a response to significant crises like the Great Depression, or salient events that focus public attention, like Earth Day 1970. Without discounting the importance of these kinds of events, change often assumes more gradual and less visible forms. But how do we ‘see’ change, and what institutions and processes are behind it? In this book, author Marc Eisner brings these questions to bear on the analysis of regulatory change, walking the reader through a clear-eyed and careful examination of: the dynamics of regulatory change since the 1970s social regulation and institutional design forms of gradual change – including conversion, layering, and drift gridlock, polarization, and the privatization of regulation financial collapse and the anatomy of regulatory failure Demonstrating that transparency and accountability – the hallmarks of public regulation – are increasingly absent, and that deregulation was but one factor in our most recent significant financial collapse, the Great Recession, this book urges readers to look beyond deregulation and consider the broader political implications for our current system of voluntary participation in regulatory programs and the proliferation of public-private partnerships. This book provides an accessible introduction to the complex topic of regulatory politics, ideal for upper-level and graduate courses on regulation, government and business, bureaucratic politics, and public policy.
Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics - and thus they question stylized facts about America's political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time - and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance? Featuring contributions from leading academics in the field, The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development provides an authoritative and accessible analysis of the study of American political development.
Americans today worry about concentrated power in private industry to an extent not seen in generations. Not only do they find diminished diversity of service-providers and producers, but they are disquieted by the power of a few large companies to shape and constrain democratic processes. Americans across the political spectrum, from former President Donald Trump to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, have sounded alarms about the overlarge power of business in both public and private life. While many of the technologies and industries that worry Americans are new, the concerns they've raised are not unprecedented. Antimonopoly and American Democracy traces the history of antimonopoly politics in the United States, arguing that organized action against concentrated economic power comprises an important American democratic tradition. While prevailing narratives tend to treat monopoly as a risk to people mainly in their roles as consumers--by causing prices to increase, for example--this study broadens the conversation, recounting ways in which monopolism can hurt ordinary people without directly impacting their wallets. From the pre-revolutionary era to the age of Big Tech, the volume explores the effects that historical monopolies have had on democracy by using their wealth and influence to dominate electoral politics and regulation. Chapters also highlight a range of sites of economic concentration, from land ownership to media reach, and attempts at combating them, from labor organizing to constitutional revision. Featuring original scholarship from some of the world's leading experts in American economic, political, and legal history, Antimonopoly and American Democracy offers important lessons for our contemporary political moment, in which fears of concentrated wealth and influence are again on the rise.
