Since its inaugural use in Oregon in 1904, direct democracy—as practiced in twenty-seven American states—has garnered its share of defenders and critics. While the debate over the merits and drawbacks of citizen lawmaking remains as contentious as ever, critics and proponents alike usually concur that two extra-legislative tools—the “citizen” initiative and the “popular” referendum—were most effectively used to counteract the legislative might of special interests during the Progressive Era. Citing the clout of corporate monopolies that dominated numerous state legislatures at the turn of the century, contemporary observers of direct democracy approvingly note how citizen groups during the Progressive Era used the mechanisms to take on an array of vested interests. As evidence, they submit the popular adoption of numerous progressive reforms during the 1910s, such as the direct primary, women's suffrage, prohibition, the abolition of the poll tax, home rule for cities and towns, eighthour workdays for women and miners, and the regulation of public utility and railroad monopolies. Circumventing their partisan state legislatures, defenders of the plebiscitary mechanisms evoke how citizens successfully employed the initiative and popular referendum, as one Progressive Era supporter of the “pure” democratic process championed, to rouse “a great forward movement toward stability, justice, and public spirit in American political institutions.”

The last quarter century has witnessed a rising tide of skepticism among scholars about the link between information-gathering and policymaking. Drawing on several decades of research and rethinking, students of organizational behavior concluded that organizations collect information for reasons that have more to do with organizational dynamics than with the making of choice. Students of public policy found high-stakes policy controversies deeply resistant to recourse to “the facts.”

As many commentators note, American political discourse is not generally characterized by a receptivity to “big” theories; nor, in particular, is policy analysis. But two writers, one at the beginning of the Cold War and one at the end, offered theories that are notable exceptions to this generalization. James Burnham and Francis Fukuyama, anchoring their theories on their observations of the Cold War, construct dramaturgical philosophies of history, synthesize and append European architectonic writers to their accounts, and offer comprehensive critiques of American liberal democracy. Moreover, both “big” theories, despite their apparent incongruence with American political discourse and conventional policy counsel, attract wide attention and are well received by economic and political elites.