post-New Deal Research Articles

Dealignment affirmed or explosion deferred? The american mid-term elections of 1986

Within days. there was an orthodox wisdom on the American mid-term elections of 1986. At one level, they were a collection of individual races, lacking common themes from above and common responses from below, in which the best candidate-determined somewhat circularly-won. At a second level, while great new issues or grand social forces were not effectively present, there was still an available larger generalization: the alleged partisan realignment of the post-New Deal era in American politics, whose realization (or not) had itself become a staple of partisan debate, was not discernible in final election results. It was not conclusively dismissed. It surely was not advanced, and it was clearly somewhat retarded by the final mosaic of individual election outcomes. Nicol Rae has very ably set out this view, with a sophistication rare to post-election analyses, and with subtle elaborations and elucidations all his own. History is likely to make him right. Further concrete embodiments of the alleged theoretical elements of a classic and continuing partisan ‘dealignment’ were evident and abundant in the aftermath of the 1986 elections.’ Different parties advanced at different levels, simultaneously; the same voters went different ways with different elective offices, in apparent disregard of their (apparent) partisan loyalties. Nevertheless, it is still history, in the form of the results of the next several American elections, which will ultimately make the post-mortems of 1986 either right or wrong. Which is to say, those central elements which are most consistent with an evolving dealignment were themselves only capable of isolation after the ballot in 1986. The place of the 1986 elections, in turn, when viewed as one single, composite event, must inevitably be determined by the elections to follow. Even the two larger trends in American politics which were confirmed and expanded by these election outcomes, trends touched upon but under-emphasized in post-election accounts. can still in principle remain consistent with two grand, and ttlree specific. alternative historical movements.

Urban Elders: Family, Work, and Welfare Among Boston's Aged, 1890-1950

How has the post-New Deal Era affected the aged in America? Urban Elders focuses upon the elderly residents in the city of Boston to illustrate a shared experience among America's elderly community: during the first half of the twentieth-century the American aged left behind the relative anonymity of a family-determined fate and became public clients of the welfare state. Until 1930 most older men enjoyed relatively good access to occupations, remained in the labor force, and retained continuity and stability in their household and family relationships. Gratton's engrossing analysis reveals that the labor force activity of older men first sharply declined after the institution of welfare benefits.The discussion presented in Urban Elders addresses the central question that if the welfare system has tended to create the distinct circumstances of the aged, rather than to react to them, what prompted its development. Gratton asserts that the history of old age should be divided into three parts: pre-industrial, industrial, and post-New Deal. By the 1950's, as this book reveals, the common experiences had changed from work or dependence upon the family to retirement and dependence on the state. The new arrangement is precisely what troubles us as a nation; its origins, closely followed in this book, deserve our careful attention. Author note: Brian Gratton is Assistant Professor of History at Arizona State University.

The Supreme Court and Public Opinion: Judicial Decision Making in the Post- New Deal Period

The countermajoritarian activism of the Supreme Court is usually assessed in terms of the willingness of the Court to overturn legislation and/or to protect minorities. Using these criteria, the post-New Deal Supreme Court emerges as an exceptionally active countermajoritarian decision-making institution. It is also important, however, to examine the relationship between the Court's decisions and public opinion. Such an examination reveals that the Court's decisions overturning legislation and/or protecting minority rights were often supported by the distribution or at least the trend of nationwide public opinion and that when such support was lacking, the Court seemed reluctant to act. Thus, the policymaking activism of the post-New Deal Supreme Court was perhaps more consistent with majoritarian principles than is sometimes supposed.

Will the New Industrial Relations Last? Implications for the American Labor Movement

This article reviews changes occurring in the U.S. industrial relations system at the work place, in collective bargaining, and at the level of strategic decision making within business and labor organizations. By relating these current developments to longer-term pressures on the post-New Deal industrial relations system, we suggest that the system is undergoing fundamental transformation. To adapt to these changes unions will need to redefine their roles at the work place by reorganizing work and fostering worker participation, adjust their wage bargaining objectives to promote employment continuity and compensation systems that are more closely tied to firm performance, and play a more direct and central role in business strategy decisions within the firm. These changes at the micro level of industrial relations are likely to be successful only if macroeconomic policies are reformed to provide a more supportive role for the labor movement in society.

Public Assistance, Post-New Deal Bureaucracy, and the Law: Learning from Negative Models

Public Assistance, Post-New Deal Bureaucracy, and the Law: Learning from Negative Models

Neoconservatism in Contemporary Political Science: Democratic Theory and the Party System

This essay examines one manifestation of neoconservatism in contemporary political science--the neoconservative analysis of the crisis of the American party system. A number of political scientists has argued that recent reforms have led to domination of the party system by ideological activists from the "New Class" and have undermined the accommodationist, coalition-building functions of political parties. These neoconservatives are defenders of the American party system of the 1950s and 1960s, and their arguments are derived from post-war democratic revisionism. The party system is now in crisis, however, primarily because the ideological consensus of the post-New Deal era has collapsed under the weight of social changes of the past several decades. Restoration of the "traditional" American party system is hardly likely to resolve the crisis.

Party and Bureaucracy: From Kennedy to Reagan

Among the most widely discussed trends in the recent development of our governmental process have been the declining role of organized parties and the problems of control over an immense and unwieldy bureaucracy. Both phenomena have changed significantly the strategies and effectiveness of presidential management. It is important, therefore, to consider the consequences of their convergence as factors in the contemporary political environment. The underlying assumption of this analysis is that we gain a clearer understanding of complex interrelationships by focusing on the shifting interface between institutions, as a complement to the separate study of each. The aim of this article is to examine the impact on the presidency of the evolving relationship between parties and the growing executive establishment over the past two decades. At the center of the discussion are the modern incarnations of patronage, that ancient and not always honored form of political barter. Data were collected to determine patterns of party affiliation among top-level presidential appointees during the period 1961-1980. Although several interesting trends emerge from the aggregate percentages, it is necessary to look beyond the numbers for an understanding of the broad changes which have occurred in the post-New Deal era. The evidence of the five most recent administrations indicates that extensive use of scarce presidential appointments to reward party stalwarts or to bolster party organizations is no longer viewed by the White House as a profitable exercise. That is not to say, however, that patronage no longer exists nor that presidential appointments are now nonpartisan. Alternate reasons and mechanisms for the distribution of presidential plums have arisen, including the emergence

Environmentalism versus Energy Development: The Constitutional Background to Environmental Administration

The primary institution in American society for the allocation of resources is the free-or at least theoretically free-market, working through privately negotiated exchanges between individual buyers and sellers. Given the priority of economics over politics in the American tradition, the governmental system must be viewed as a subordinate institution-as a secondary or back-up mechanism-to assist in the allocation of resources, or to correct gross inequities, when the market fails. Thus, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, published in the year of the Declaration of Independence, observed that we simply cannot rely on the market to provide certain kinds of goods. For instance, the private market invariably proves an inadequate mechanism for the production and distribution of public such as defense forces or constabulary services.' So in such cases, we see the operation of a fall-back system-the political process which, inter alia, mounts our armies, equips navies, raises police forces, and the rest. And if the political system, in its turn, does not work? Then the phrase typically leaps to the lips: Sue the bastards! Our judicial system, then, has been set up as a sort of secondary fall-back mechanism. Courts exist to help insure fair or decent or equitable allocation of the valued goods and services in our society. So when the market and the legislative-administrative process alike fail, the citizen may go to law for satisfaction. Such a theory explicitly underwrote the extreme activism of post-New Deal Supreme Court justices on behalf of the so-called Preferred Freedoms, such as freedom of speech, of assembly, and of the press.2 At least in its periods of greatest activity in the 1940s and 1960s, the Court showed a willingness to strike down acts of legislatures which trenched on such rights-justified on the ground that repression of First Amendment freedoms interfered with the workings of the democratic political process itself. Conversely, this doctrine implied, so long as the political process seemed to be working, judges would remain reluctant to inject judicial will into the workings of the more basic political system. Against this background, the following pages briefly recount the record of contemporary environmentalism in the economic market, in the political arena, and in the judicial process, in order to provide a setting for an analysis of the administrative context in which the energy versus environment confrontation of the late 1970s will probably have to be resolved.