UC Berkeley

This study examines the origins of conservative efforts to reform the “activist American state” in the postwar period by reorganizing fiscal and administrative relationships between federal, state, and local governments. Existing scholarship suggests that conservatives’ efforts to grant sub-national governments greater decision-making authority over national policies were either an obvious extension of challenges to the New Deal or a reaction to liberal policies in the 1960s. Drawing on a combination of archival sources, secondary literature, and quantitative data, this study shows, in contrast, that conservative challenges to the activist state in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were shaped by institutional investments made in the early 1950s. Indeed, long before the Great Society, conservative policy entrepreneurs constructed what I call generative institutions that gradually reconfigured the political context in which debates over federalism occurred. These institutions reframed the critique of centralized government as a dilemma of proper administration and management, built broader political coalitions with state and local officials, and experimented with new policy alternatives that would become the basis of later reforms.

The institutions conservatives built were commissions for studying and deliberating about problems of “intergovernmental relations.” Intergovernmental commissions helped conservatives to recalibrate their engagement with a growing federal government in three ways. First, in the absence of wider support for reform, these commissions refocused conservatives’ arguments from ideological or constitutional claims into administrative ones by marshaling the power of existing executive-branch institutions to produce and publicize novel information about that branch’s own problems, helping to investigate and publicize concrete policy failures and tensions that agencies did not wish to expose. Second, the commissions’ bipartisan, intergovernmental composition provided conservatives in government with a single forum for organizational brokerage––the ability to build policy consensus with a diverse range of stakeholders, namely, state and local elected officials. As a result, the commissions’ research products came to be valued by a broader audience than conservative reformers alone. Third, over time, commissions accumulated strategic knowledge about intergovernmental relations, which allowed conservative policy entrepreneurs to criticize major categorical grant programs and recombine older policy proposals into viable new reforms. The result was not the retrenchment of the activist state, as some conservative policy entrepreneurs hoped, but a set of reforms that empowered state governments to play a more important role in shaping the outcome of federal policies.

In showing how intergovernmental commissions gave conservatives the capacity to reorganize authority within the activist state, this study also makes a larger claim about patterns of institutional change within studies of American Political Development (APD). While APD is concerned with explaining “durable shifts in governing authority,” recent historical-institutional scholarship suggests that major shifts may emerge not from systemic shocks but from gradual processes of drift, conversion, and layering; the recombination of ideas and interests by skilled entrepreneurs; or the formation of policy networks. These studies examine how entrepreneurial actors pursue direct policy changes, yet they fail to take into account how new institutions can help to subsidize the costs of entrepreneurship. Similarly, while scholarship on policy agendas focuses on the importance of venue shifting, it says little about what distinguishes venues that catalyze change from those that do not. Generative institutions, I argue, can pave the way for major reforms by routinizing the production of policy information, building consensus, and developing policy expertise.