Two volumes have recently challenged the assumption that institutional change either (1) takes the form of gradual adaptation in the service of continuity, or (2) entails the abrupt breakdown of existing arrangements. This scholarship has demonstrated that change can also be simultaneously gradual and transformative. Conversion represents one type of such change; it involves the use of institutional resources for new purposes. I chronicle the conversion of the Bank of the United States (1791–1811) from a fiscal auxiliary of the federal government to an institution with both fiscal and monetary capacities. More generally, I ask whether this change squares with existing understandings of how conversion unfolds. Conversion is thought to occur when (1) new actors assume control, or (2) new challenges prompt the redeployment of resources. I ask whether the Bank's conversion resulted from (3) efforts by institutional elites to invent a rationale for deployment. I find that the change in question resulted from genuine concerns about the supply of bank credit in the Early Republic. With the details of this historical transformation in mind, I briefly digress in order to address repeated claims that the Bank of the United States was or became a “central bank” during this period.

Few political observers would readily assume that a present-day politician's or interest group's claims about their preferences accurately reflect their genuine views. However, scholars often unwittingly make this very assumption when inferring the preferences of historical political actors. In this article I explore the influence of business groups on Medicare's passage to illustrate how inattention to political actors’ strategic misrepresentations can bias qualitative and quantitative research. An ongoing debate wrestles with the pattern that businesses often grant support to welfare-state expansions just before they occur, a regularity some take as evidence that business interests dictate these expansions. I use Medicare as a case study and document that key business groups and their allies did not truly favor the program. However, I also show that these actors strategically misrepresented their preferences as Medicare's passage became likely in order to advance more limited alternatives. The strategic nature of this position is exceptionally easy to miss; yet inattention to it produces the opposite, erroneous conclusion about these actors’ historical role. Medicare's legislative history thus illustrates the methodological necessity of documenting whether political actors are misrepresenting their preferences. I discuss how scholars can do so by tracing actors’ stated preferences across strategic circumstances, including audiences and time.

Eighty percent of American cities today hold their general elections on different days than state and national elections. It is an established fact that voter turnout in these off-cycle local elections is far lower than turnout in local elections held concurrently with state and national elections. In this paper, I demonstrate that the timing of city elections has been an important determinant of voter turnout since before the Civil War. By examining three large American cities over the course of the nineteenth century, I find that American political parties regularly manipulated the timing of city elections to secure an edge over their rivals. I show that the decisions to change the election dates of these cities were contentious, partisan, and motivated by an expectation of subsequent electoral gain. The Progressive municipal reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued in this tradition when they separated city elections from state and national elections, and the local election schedule they implemented has largely persisted until today.

This article reconsiders early American state capacity through a close examination of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. The topographical corps, a bureau in the antebellum War Department, developed a form of conditional bureaucratic autonomy far earlier than recognized in previous scholarship, giving it a central role in shaping national economic development policies, especially in the nation's periphery. Unlike robust bureaucratic autonomy, such as that described by Daniel Carpenter (2001, 2010; see footnote 4), conditional autonomy is highly contingent and can quickly fracture if the surrounding environment changes. The long-serving chief of the corps, Col. John J. Abert, shaped the opinions of his supposed principals by managing the ideas, information, and proposals directed to them. When faced with challenges, the corps proved to be a flexible organization that adapted its methods to accomplish its preferred ultimate goals using different instruments. In the end, however, the corps' autonomy was threatened when it became involved in the sectional politics surrounding the potential building of a transcontinental railroad line. Once the corps lost several of the conditions supporting its autonomy, its downfall was swift. This article thus joins a recent wave of scholarship highlighting strengths within the early American state by foregrounding the role of the armed forces in statebuilding.

Institutional theorists have made major progress in recent years examining gradual processes of endogenous institutional change. Building on this line of theorizing, this article highlights an often overlooked source of incremental change in political institutions: investments in institutional resources. Unlike path-dependent processes, which are relatively open at the front end and relatively closed at the back end, resource investments made in one period serve to widen an institution's path and enhance its capacity to undertake a broader range of activities in subsequent periods. Drawn out over time, these investments can gradually transform institutional operations and purposes. To illustrate these dynamics, this article reconsiders the transformation of the national party committees into “parties in service” to their candidates. The most influential theoretical explanation for this change is supplied by actor-centered functionalist accounts that either ignore the parties' institutional forms or treat them as mere reflections of actors' preferences. As an alternative, I suggest that investments in two types of institutional resources—human resources and information assets—were integral to the process through which each party changed. Piecemeal investments in these resources gradually enabled each national party committee to provide a wider range of campaign services to its candidates, thereby producing ostensibly new “functions” over time. Though the process of institutional change unfolded at very different times in each party, the same dynamics were on display in both cases.

This article analyzes the emergence of national public health capacity in the United States. Tracing the transformation of the federal government's role in public health from the 1910s through the emergence of the CDC during World War II, I argue that national public health capacity emerged, to a great extent, out of the attempts of government officials to deal with the problem of tropical disease within the southern United States during periods of mobilization for war.

Proceeding inductively, starting with three standard examples of major constitutional change, this short essay offers a theory of the Constitution, derived from its historical imposition on the criminal law. The theory proposes to unite constitutional provision, structure, and operations within a single framework over time.

For students of American Political Development, the emergence of globalization and Americanization as themes of inquiry has spurred a growing interest in explaining America's rise as “a legal-economic and geopolitical hegemon.” An important episode in this rise came during the American occupation of Germany after World War II. In postwar Germany, America's military government realized that the American public remained unwilling to support (over the long term) the global projection of what Michael Mann has called “despotic power.” To achieve its fundamental goal of reorienting Germany toward a peaceful coexistence with the Unites States, military government turned instead to what Mann has called “infrastructural power” (power projected “through” society by state institutions). In pivoting from despotic to infrastructural power, three important consequences followed for the occupation. (1) Because it relied on the development of new infrastructures within a new German state, the occupation saw institutional “genesis” in which the Germans themselves influenced the pathway and timing of military government policy. (2) In creating new state institutions, military government performed “policy bricolage,” creatively reconstructing institutions “from” the ruins of war-torn Europe (as opposed to “on” its ruins). (3) Financial policy took a central place in military government's focus because it allowed for “increasing returns” in advancing military government's interests. Collectively, military government's experience provided lessons for an American state in the world.

The U.S. Army's recent embrace of counterinsurgency warfare and nation building complicates theories of military politics. For decades, critics declared the army too risk averse, too parochial, and too insulated to change, often thwarting civilian demands for greater flexibility. How should we understand these recent, unexpected changes? In this article I synthesize insights from historical institutionalism and American political development to derive a micropolitical perspective on institutional change. This approach advances two components as necessary before an institution transforms. First, mid-level agents shift the unofficial discourses through which they understand and describe the institution's core missions and capabilities. These slow and often subtle changes create a mismatch between the mid-level actors and the institution's paradigm. This erosion of institutional order provides an opportunity to reformers. The second component of transformation is the work of these reformers to forge coalitions with elites inside and outside government and press institutional leaders for change. In the rest of the article, I demonstrate the efficacy of the micropolitical approach by investigating how the army developed its AirLand Battle doctrine after the Vietnam War. My analysis of recently declassified correspondence, oral-history interviews, and the writings of officers and experts shows how mid-level officers and external reformers were able to shift the discourses of army leaders and develop an institutional paradigm that endured for decades. Indeed, AirLand Battle influenced the Weinberger criteria for deploying American troops, and it shaped U.S. conduct during the Persian Gulf War of 1991. This suggests a research program that could demonstrate why and how the U.S. Army's way of war changed during the 2000s, as well as how durable this transformation will be.