Of course, the marshalling of suYcient empirical evidence to make one’s casewill inevitably limit the time period covered, and the fullest understanding of
policy paths and policy change can probably be gained by studies that concentrate
on single-country experiences, like that of Daniel Tichenor’s ( 2002 ) comprehensive
HI analysis of social pressures and the twists and turns of US immigration policy in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Jacob Hacker’s ( 2002 ) masterful,
theoretically original treatise on the development of the peculiar public/private
hybrid welfare state that grew up in the USA after the mid- 1930 s.
7 Conclusion
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Those who ignore history, as the old adages go, are doomed to repeat it... as farce
and tragedy. Reason enough to learn what we can from the history of institutions.
But there are two aspects of political institutions that remain under-explored, and
considering their importance, this is both a mystery and a concern. There is a
perhaps inevitable modernization focus in HI. The expansion and elaboration of
national states is implicitly applauded, and that may account for the minute
attention given to deregulation, privatization, devolution, and the other state-
shrinking processes of the post-Reagan/Thatcher era which so violate the path
dependent assumption. But one area of the state hasnotshrunk in the United
States: the presidency and the war-Wghting bureaucracies. These agencies are now
of historically gargantuan size, and the pathological consequences of such un-
checked (by internal or external rivals) power are increasingly apparent.
But expanded executive power, control of news, manipulative propaganda, wars
of dubious necessity, and the starving of the domestic social and regulatory state to
pay for the warfare state—all these conditions have existed in the past, and may be
more implicit in the incentive structure of executive power, even in (or perhaps
especially in) a democracy. Stephen Skowronek’sThe Politics Presidents Make( 1997 )
calls attention to the timeless qualities of executive behavior in a two-party
democracy, but lacks a critical perspective on the pathologies that recur in regime
cycles (such as the attractiveness of war-making for ‘‘articulating’’ presidents).
That is not a weakness of his analysis, so much as an opening to further
reXection on the unanticipated, largely unacknowledged ‘‘moral hazards’’ entailed
by the growth of executive power. Changes in the candidate recruitment process
that aVect the personal qualities, and group and class ties, of presidents since 1972 ,
and the amassing of enormous military resources and extensive control of infor-
mation that accompany the rise of the USA to unrivaled global power, suggest that
52 elizabeth sanders