science, Lowi pioneered both the ‘‘return to the state’’ and an early formulation of
path dependence.
His deWnition of institutions was the legalistic one that most historical institu-
tionalists have adopted: institutions for Lowi were not just any set of behavior
constraining rules or social norms, but theformalrules and procedures established
by the action of governments, and backed, ultimately, by the coercive power of the
state. Less interested than his students would be in how and why institutions had
been created in theWrst place, or in the reformers who pressed for new laws and
institutions, Lowi urged attention to what happenedafterinstitutions are estab-
lished, and demanding and sustaining interests become attached to, and evolve in
tandem with, the agency.
Perhaps the most closely examined, mutually constitutive relationship between
state institutions and social movements is the case of organized labor. Long
identiWed as a major determinant of national diVerences in social policy, the
strength of labor movements and their relationship with political parties and
courts has been a favorite subject of HI scholars. In the United States, with its
powerful, independent judiciary, the doctrines handed down by the courts shaped
labor’s organizational and political strategies, its language, and its very self-
conception (Tomlins 1985 ; Forbath 1991 ; Hattam 1993 ; Robertson 2000 ). And yet,
when and where it could manage to amass suYcient political strength, organized
labor might change the law and the personnel on the courts, and even emancipate
itself from ancient feudalisms embedded in the common law (Orren 1991 ).
Racial divisions and animosities among workers have further burdened the
politics of American labor, and diminished the political support for social welfare
policies. Discriminatory racial norms were frozen in 1930 s labor and social policy,
their mitigation dependent on presidential political and wartime manpower needs,
the slow amassing of voting power in northern cities, and sometimes—in
a departure from its constraining role in labor organizational rights—racial
accommodation leadership from the federal courts (Mettler 1998 ; Lieberman
2001 ; Kryder 2001 ; Frymer 2003 ). In Congress, however, disfranchisement of blacks
in the south and segregationists’ fears that trade unions would undermine white
supremacy led southern Democrats to ally with conservative Republicans and use
their institutional power to build an ediWce of labor law that sapped the legal
foundations of worker organization in the decade of labor’s greatest membership
growth (Katznelson, Geiger, and Kryder 1993 ; Katznelson and Farhang 2005 ).
Those who seek to unravel the complex and interactive evolution of parties,
unions, cultural norms and ideologies, and state policy are logically drawn to
comparative studies of two or more nations. Among the important contributions
in thisWeld are economist Gerald Friedman’sState-Making and Labor Movements:
France and the United States, 1876 – 1914 ( 1999 ), which analyzes and compares labor
organizational and partisan strategies, and national government responses in those
two countries.
historical institutionalism 51