4 Institutional Formation and Change
from the Top Down
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The 1980 s revival of HI among political scientists in the United States was strongly
centered on actors in the national state, and its explanation for the birth and
development of a modern centralized state tended to start at the top. Social
scientists rediscovering history (and the state in history) were inXuenced by the
work of the neo-Marxist and other elite focused historians with similar foci. Such
was the case with Theda Skocpol’s pioneeringStates and Social Revolutions( 1979 )
and the seminal article on the diVerential success of innovative agricultural and
industrial policies in the New Deal by Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold ( 1990 ), as well
as Stephen Skowronek’sBuilding a New American State: The Expansion of National
Administrative Capacities, 1877 – 1920 ( 1982 ). These scholars were pioneers in the
budding 1980 s sub-Weld of American political development, and in the creation of a
new section on politics and history in the American Political Science Association
(APSA). It might be noted that HI’s respectability, in a discipline dominated for the
previous half century by RC and ahistorical quantitative work, is evidenced by the
size of the politics and history section in its parent professional organization. It
ranks in the top quintile of APSA’s thirty-four sections, and has been joined by a
new political history section with an exclusively international focus.
As Skowronek and his co-author Karen Orren write inThe Search for American
Political Development, the historical analysis of politics assumes that political
institutional development unfolds onsites that are deWned by rule structures
and their enforcers, holders of ‘‘plenary authority.’’ It is not surprising, then, that
theWrst wave of HI in the United States has done its process tracing with a focus on
those plenary authorities in national government, the rules they promulgate and
uphold, and the ideas that motivate their actions. That is in itself a tall order, and in
practice leaves little space for attention to ‘‘ordinary people.’’ The latter are seen as
theobjectsof governance, not assubjectswhose ideas and demands might shape
institutional development and provoke institutional change.
Ironically, then, as historians were abandoning the study of powerful white men
for the lives of ordinary people, political scientists of an historical/institutional
bent were rediscovering the momentous agency of ‘‘state managers.’’ Social move-
ments of the poor and middling orders of society, if they were noticed at all, tended
to be viewed as inconvenient obstacles to the modernizing projects of political
elites, or as clients of reformist state actors. For Stephen Skowronek ( 1982 ), farmers
and their representatives in the progressive era Congress, along with judges jealous
of the power of the new regulatory agencies, were the main obstacles to the holistic
modernization schemes of a few visionaries in the Interstate Commerce Commis-
sion (ICC) and Senate. For Skocpol and Feingold ( 1990 ), workers were important
historical institutionalism 45