organized in the minds of national political leaders and then articulated to the
masses, Bensel sees party leaders instrumentally brokering bargains among
coalition factions who have very diVerent policy interests, and then herding them
into a corral thatXies an ideological banner (Bensel 1991 , 2000 , 2004 ).
Bensel parses out the institutional complexity that buttressed Republican
ideational and policy dominance for half a century by allowing diVerent coalitional
interests to hold sway in diVerent institutions. He shows that diVerent aspects of
the GOP postwar program (policies concerned with the tariV, gold standard, and
creation of an unfettered national market) were parceled out to Congress, the
White House, and the federal courts—andthatinstitutional diVerentiation, rather
than a national consensus on ideas, held the GOP together, in his account
(Bensel 2000 ).
5 Societal Agents in Institutional
Development and Change
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
Political scientists, historians, and sociologists of the 1960 s– 80 s grew uncomfort-
able with the implication that elites were the motor of history, even as they
condemned the ‘‘naive’’ assumptions of dispersed power so dear to pluralism.
Sociologists and historians made vital contributions to knowledge by disputing
the reigning ideas about social movements of the poor and marginalized that had
marked post-Second World War scholarship. American Greenbackers and Popu-
lists, once condemned as clownish or dangerously atavistic factions of an otherwise
healthily modernizing polity (or worse, as proto-fascists), were subjected to new
and much more rigorous analyses that revealed them to be impressively rational,
inventive democratic reformers responsible for much of the social, political, and
economic progress of later periods (McMath 1975 ; Schwartz 1976 ; Goodwyn 1976 ;
Pollack 1987 ).
His own participation in the civil rights movement of the 1960 s led Doug
McAdam ( 1982 ) to undertake an analytical history of the rise of that movement
that set out a whole new theory of social movement formation and interaction with
the state, one that stressed grassroots organizational resources and the opportun-
ities available to movements of the disadvantaged in times of serious elite conXict.
By the end of the 1980 s, theXaws in previous journalistic and literary works on
populism and other ‘‘petit-bourgeois,’’ presumably status-obsessed movements
(work typiWed by Hofstadter 1955 ) were clearly revealed, and the superWcial
48 elizabeth sanders