Remaking Government Institutions in the 1970s: Participatory Democracy and the Triumph of Administrative Politics

1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidney M. Milkis
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Public Action ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The New Deal

Interpreting the 1970s is a difficult business. On the one hand, reformers struggled earnestly and effectively to codify the exalted vision of a good society that was celebrated during the 1960s. And yet in doing so, they appeared to routinize rather than resolve the virulent conflicts of the previous decade. Scholars tend to agree that the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s marked a transformation of political life no less important than the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Unlike these earlier reform periods, however, the 1960s and 1970s did not embrace national administrative power as an agent of social and economic justice. Instead, reformers of the 1960s and 1970s championed “participatory democracy” and viewed the very concept of national governmental authority with deep suspicion. Indeed, Hugh Heclo characterizes the reform legacy of the 1960s and 1970s as one of intractable fractiousness, as a “postmodern” assault on the modern state forged on the anvil of reforms carried out during the Progressive and New Deal eras. “In the end, it appears that a great deal of postmodern policymaking is not really concerned with ‘making policy’ in the sense of finding a settled course of public action that people can live with,” he writes. “It is aimed at crusading for a cause by confronting power with power.”

Constitutional Conservatives Remember the Progressive Era

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken I. Kersch
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Government ◽  
Movement Building ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Intellectual Movement

This chapter maps the contemporary right's nascent obsession with the Progressive era as a developmental phenomenon—as a stage in the trajectory of a political-intellectual movement advancing through time. To that end, it ventures three main claims. First, the recent conservative focus on Progressivism represents a shift on the right of understandings of the historical location or source of contemporary constitutional problems, an understanding informed by the sequence of constitutional conservatism's development through time: whereas (old) “originalist” legal conservatives adopted Progressive thinking in focusing their attention on countermajoritarian “activist judges” and criticized the New Deal for its weightless, substance-free pragmatism, recent conservatives have forged a more global critique of contemporary constitutional practice that moves beyond judges to the entire modern structure and theory of American government, finding its weighty and substantive blueprint in the Progressive era, and its extension and institutionalization in the New Deal. Second, this more foundational and comprehensive constitutional critique was forged outside legal academia in political science, particularly by Straussian political theorists. And third, the overarching character of this critique centered on the Progressive era serves a movement-building function by offering a set of understandings that can win the assent of the movement's diverse factions, including social conservatives and religious traditionalists, on the one hand, and economic conservatives and libertarians on the other.

“We Have Run Out of Poor People”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Bell
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter examines how the changing concept of liberalism within the Democratic party ultimately contributed to the erosion of consensus; it contends that the challenge to consensus from the left was as significant as the one from the right in changing the character of American politics. Liberals increasingly chafed throughout the second half of the 1950s at the Democratic party’s limited agenda of maintaining rather than expanding the New Deal legacy, managing prosperity, and containing communism.In their view, this embodied a centrist strategy aimed simply to hold the diverse elements of the Democratic coalition together rather than address a changing America and its needs.As the 1960s dawned, these progressive Democrats reconfigured liberalism around questions of social rights and identity politics that could not be accommodated within the confines of consensus. In parallel with similar developments within the GOP, Democratic factionalism did much to undermine the ideology of the liberal consensus.

Transformations: The New Deal through the 1950s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter traces the changes in federal and state protective policies from the New Deal through the 1950s. In contrast to the setbacks of the 1920s, the New Deal revived the prospects of protective laws and of their proponents. The victory of the minimum wage for women workers in federal court in 1937 and the passage in 1938 of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which extended labor standards to men, represented a peak of protectionist achievement. This achievement rested firmly on the precedent of single-sex labor laws for which social feminists—led by the NCL—had long campaigned. However, “equal rights” gained momentum in the postwar years, 1945–60. By the start of the 1960s, single-sex protective laws had resumed their role as a focus of contention in the women's movement.

Structural Transformation and Inclusive Growth

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Sumner
Keyword(s):  
Structural Transformation ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Import Substitution ◽  
National Development ◽  
Inclusive Growth ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
Import Substitution Industrialization

This chapter reviews currents in theory with a focus on modernization and neoclassical statements of comparative advantage on the one hand, and structuralism, dependency, and other theories of underdevelopment on the other. The latter theories of underdevelopment hit their zenith in the policies of the import-substitution industrialization of the 1960s and 1970s. They were largely dismissed in the 1980s as the limits of import-substitution industrialization became apparent and as East Asia industrialized, undermining any argument that structural transformation was problematic in the periphery. This chapter theorizes that neither orthodox nor heterodox theories of structural transformation adequately explain the development of late developers because of the heterogeneity of contemporary capitalism. That said, heterodox theories, which coalesce around the nature of incorporation of developing countries into the global economy, do retain conceptual usefulness in their focal point, ‘developmentalism’, by which we mean the deliberate attempts at national development led by the state.

Counting on Relief: Industrializing the Statistical Interviewer during the New Deal

2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Didier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Deal ◽  
White Collar ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
White Collar Workers ◽  
Statistical Studies ◽  
The One ◽  
The New Deal

ArgumentWhen the New Deal administration attained power in the United States, it was confronted with two different problems that could be linked to one another. On the one hand, there was a huge problem of unemployment, affecting everybody including the white-collar workers. And, on the other hand, the administration suffered from a very serious lack of data to illuminate its politics. One idea that came out of this situation was to use the abundant unemployed white-collar workers as enumerators of statistical studies. This paper describes this experiment, shows how it paradoxically affected the professionalization of statistics, and explains why it did not affect expert democracy despite its Deweysian participationist aspect.

Globalization and Corporatism: The Growth and Decay of Organized Labor in Venezuela, 1900–1998

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 180-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trudie Coker
Keyword(s):  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Foreign Debt ◽  
The State ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Private Capital ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
State Capital ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

The contradictory goals of state capital accumulation and redistribution eventually led to the demise of corporatism in Venezuela and probably in much of Latin America. When the Venezuelan state was at its zenith of intervention in the economy, it globalized accumulation via foreign debt. Rather than emphasize accumulation and redistribution as it had during the 1960s and 1970s, accumulation to service the debt became the state's central goal by the 1980s. Declining oil prices by the early 1980s highlighted the weakness of a state caught in the grips of antithetical demands from labor and an increasingly impoverished population, on the one hand, and private capital demanding debt repayment, on the other hand. By definition, corporatism creates a dependency between the state and organized labor. Historically, labor depended on the state for economic subsidies, and the state relied on labor to maintain legitimacy. By the late 1990s, lack of labor autonomy literally dragged labor down with a state drowning in debt and incapacitated by lack of legitimacy. While corporatism is more a relic of things past, the positive implications of increasing labor autonomy are dismal as organized labor has been disarticulated and the democratic state is all but a skeleton.

Nine The Fall of the Original Ninth Amendment and the Rise of New Deal Constitutionalism

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lash Kurt T
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Present Discussion ◽  
Ninth Amendment ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter begins with a fairly exhaustive account of the use of the Ninth Amendment in state and federal courts prior to the New Deal. There is nothing new here in terms of theory: one finds the same analysis of the Ninth Amendment already developed in prior chapters repeated over and over again in state and federal courts throughout the Progressive era. There is a purpose, however, to including this history. One of the most durable myths about the Ninth Amendment is that it attracted little attention prior to the modern Supreme Court's discovery of the Ninth in Griswold v. Connecticut. The present discussion puts this myth permanently to rest. The second half of the chapter helps explain how the myth arose in the first place.

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