War making and state building: The dynamics of American institutional development, 1917-1935

This state-centric study analyzes the impact of national crises on the development and outcomes of American national public policy and political institutions in labor policy and industrial policy during World War I (1917-1918) and the early New Deal (1933-1935). The dissertation is concerned with explaining how and why the policy and institutional outcomes during World War I in both labor and industrial policy were successful responses to the exigencies of that crisis, while such outcomes in the New Deal were successful only in labor policy.;The study's central finding is that, in contrast to much of the existing literature, which is largely society-centric, the development and outcomes of policies and institutions in both policy eras during both periods were structured far more by state-centric than society-centric variables. Society-centric theories of the political process, the most important of which are interest group liberalism and neo-Marxism, understand public policy and political institutions to be largely a response to pressures interested social groups or classes exert on the governmental system. Accordingly, most society-centric accounts of the political phenomena analyzed in this study have largely ignored "statist" variables, and consequently have found public policy and political institutions do indeed broadly reflect the distribution of relevant societal resources.;This study found that three state-centric variables (central state decision makers, substantive ideas and political ideology, the state's existing institutional structure, and the historical experiences that gave rise to existing institutions) provided greater explanatory power in these cases than do society-centric variables (social groups or classes and the relevant economic, political, and social resources available to them and brought to bear on the governmental system on behalf of policies of interest to those groups).;The dissertation's findings suggest the American state is neither as weak or penetrated as numerous studies have concluded, but is a potentially autonomous entity whose potential for autonomous action is regularly realized. Thus, to "black-box" the state by assuming it can provide little additional explanatory power may result in incomplete and inadequate explanations of the political process and its policy and institutional outcomes. The implications of these findings for the development of a richer state-centric theory of the political process are explored.