The Great Interstate Divergence: Partisan Bureaucracies in the Contemporary United States

Abstract

Among American states, differences in welfare programs and civil rights protections are growing. Conventional explanations point to conservative organizations that score flashy legislative victories. We draw on case studies of Medicaid and election administration in Rhode Island and Kansas to show that much policy divergence is due to a banal and ideologically symmetric process of partisan administration. Most federal policies rely on state governments for implementation. In the cases studied here, agency workers turned to interstate networks of experts, advocates, and nonprofit workers that provide competing models of policy implementation that mirror party priorities: backdoor expansion of social services and voter registration in Rhode Island and introduction of market principles into Medicaid and restrictive registration practices in Kansas. Partisan administration makes state implementation of federal policy a key field of political struggle, on which administrators working beyond public view advance partisan priorities that often cannot be realized by other means.