For a long time the question of whether the framers of the U.S. Constitution intended to establish judicial review of legislation was the subject of extensive and repeated investigation. The issue, however, was never definitively resolved, a consequence, it is widely agreed, of ambiguities and internal contradictions in the early record. More recently, interest in this basic question has declined, and it has simply been assumed that some form of judicial review was contemplated by the framers. At the same time support for the practice has deepened, and the debate, although still heated, has shifted to different grounds.

War has probably been the single most important influence on the development of central state authority in the United States. Although the state-centered mobilization of economic resources and manpower that accompanies military conflict is commonly conceded to have had this effect throughout American history, the centralizing influence of the Civil War on the southern Confederate government has not been accorded the precedent-setting importance it deserves. The consolidation of economic and social controls within the central government of the Confederacy was in fact so extensive that it calls into question standard interpretations of southern opposition to the expansion of federal power in both the antebellum and post-Reconstruction periods. Southern reluctance to expand federal power in those periods has been attributed variously to regional sympathy for laissez-faire principles, the “precapitalist” cultural origins of the plantation elite, and a general philosophical orientation hostile to state development.

The last decade has been a time of rapid development in comparative social scientific research on modern welfare states—or more concretely, research on social insurance, pensions, and public assistance policies. Synchronic studies, using highly aggregated measures to make causal inferences about policy developments in all the nations of the world, have declined in favor of longitudinal comparative studies of up to eighteen advanced industrial capitalist democracies. Concomitant with this shift, analytic interest has moved away from industrialization and urbanization and toward more political explanatory variables—including class power and class alliances, the structures of political regimes, political parties, and party systems, and the activities of administrators and policy intellectuals.

In 1930, Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the last of the major tariff bills that redistributed millions of dollars from consumers to domestic manufacturers. The Smoot-Hawley bill, E. E. Schattschneider observed, arose not from a process that was open and attentive to all but from “a free private enterprise in pressure politics which administered itself”, a process accessible only to protected industrialists and their congressional and bureaucratic allies. The outlines of public policy, he concluded, mirrored the membership of this “private enterprise”: “The nature of public policy is the result of ‘effective demands’ upon the government”.

In the past century the American political system has changed in dramatic ways. A new national state has been created, and a substantial part of the nation's goods and services has been entrusted to its care. New administrative agencies allocate most of those resources, working in tandem with a multitude of private and other public organizations. Complex webs of fiscal interaction tie state and local governments—themselves greatly enlarged—to the nation state. All these public bodies are surrounded by and closely allied with formidable interest groups, with political action committees, with business corporations and foundations, and with various professional organizations. Swirling about this great governmental mass in recent years are the consultants, lawyers, and technicians who slip in and out of the public sector as administrations change or their careers dictate; these policy professionals, wherever they land, make use of their special knowledge and contacts in particular areas of public activity.

The claim that institutions “matter” is a subject of lively debate in the study of politics today. It is also something of a nonissue that is not really being debated at all. The reason it can be both at once is that the claim is loaded with theoretical baggage. If it is taken to mean that the actions of politicians or bureaucrats are in fundamental respects autonomous of social interests, the statement can easily prove controversial. If it is taken to mean that institutional context shapes the decisions of political actors, or that the relation between social interests and political outcomes varies with the institutional setting, then there is not much to debate; for there has long been a virtual consensus among students of politics that institutions do matter in these general respects.

When political activists talk about strategy and when they address each other, legal forms are an integral part of their language. Some movements, like alternative dispute resolution, build on a general critique of the legal process. Others, like gay rights, seek to fulfill legal promises or, as in the feminist antipornography campaign, they present broadsides against the law's oppression. These ideas about law are not bound in standard law books; but they give meaning to social relations, and they must be understood as significant parts of the legal order. To attend to them is to illuminate a part of law's social reality and, more specifically, to see how law informs social action. Such ideas and the relations they create are law in society.

There is perhaps no political topic that has been given such relentlessly comparative treatment as the American labor movement. It is rare to read any comprehensive political or historical study of organized labor that is not cast, implicitly or explicitly, against the greater class consciousness of European counterparts. The explanations advanced for the uniqueness or the lack of vigor in the American strain—abundance of land, immigration, early suffrage, a revolutionary heritage of “republicanism”—constitute most of what exists in the way of theories about American labor politics.

Samuel Kernell's article “The Early Nationalization of Political News in America,” in Studies in American Political Development: An Annual (1986), 1: 255–78, raises issues that are at once interesting and puzzling. He measures the number and length of all political articles in leading Cleveland newspapers through the middle decades of the nineteenth century in order to ask about the amount of newspaper attention paid to local, state, and national political issues. He observes that local issues were predominant only very early in the nineteenth century and that they declined quickly over time. Kernell concludes that politics nationalized far earlier than historians like Robert Wiebe had ever thought. Wiebe's “island communities” were gone by 1845. It is a clever piece of research of substantial significance.