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Political and social historians in the last twenty years have challenged the accuracy of the interpretation that the 19th century was an era of laissez-faire which then transcended to an era of interventionist public rule during the 20th century. However, understanding the American state between these two centuries has proceeded slowly due to the increasing complexity of American state, thus, generalizing and charting its institutional and functional character and change over time has become more complicated. This chapter focuses on the continuing importance of federalism in constituting the American state and the roles played by state governments in 19th-century economic development and regulation. The chapter likewise examines the considerable role of state governments in the regulation of race, sexuality, and morality.

Looking at the disruptions of industrialization and urbanization that occurred during the late 19th century, the development of the modern American state during this period has been described by Stephen Skowronek as the result of a process of “patchwork” and “reconstitution”. This chapter focuses on federalism, an often ignored aspect of the American institution, and looks at how it played a critical role during the end of the late 19th century to the early decades of the 20th century in the development of American state. The political and institutional order that developed due to federalism is termed by this chapter as the “First New Federalism”.

This chapter explores the historic roots of feminist activists in the United States and the consequences of this that lead to the development of the American state. It begins by conceptualizing feminist activists within the state as a state-movement intersection and then proceeds on presenting the role that the historical development of state and society can play in allowing other interests into the state. The changing nature of women's education and employment is then discussed and the chapter looks at how they attained significant presence in the federal bureaucracy. Due to the increasing number of feminist activist around during the period under discussion in this chapter, numerous changes in the nature of the federal government transpired.

With the upheaval of the American economic and financial system, a large number of banks and firms are forced to declare bankruptcy while private markets and key industries have collapse as well. These reflect not only an unsustainable collection of government administrative practices and capacities but also question the legitimacy of the American state as a representative of democracy as well. In this chapter, the primary strains surrounding the American state are discussed. It also points out the deep-rooted dysfunctionalism in the operation of the American state's administrative institutions. To be able to understand current financial and economic turmoil occurring, the nature of unsustainability is presented in detail. Situated functionalism value in studying state sustainability is also illustrated.

Looking at the rising economic inequality of the last quarter century and how it undermines Americans' confidence that their democratic capitalist system remains sufficient in distributing political and economic benefits to its citizens, the chapter begins by explaining the complex connections between the state and inequality through time. It argues that a better understanding can be attained only if the issue is historically contextualized and considered as part of the long evolution of the American state. Thus, in this chapter, a schema of five regimes of state building and their consequences for the shifting nature of inequality in American society is presented.

This chapter argues that many scholars still have failed to understand the American state as a “state” and that issues before regarding “sustainability”, “fiscal crisis”, and “legitimation crisis” are still eminent up to now. This raises questions about the state' capacity and responsibility. In addition, the American state remains to be described in terms of false dichotomies–strong versus weak, active versus passive, conservative versus liberal, even state versus society. Also, the chapter presents how the American state appears to be increasingly egalitarian but continues to be hierarchal. The American state's apparent changeability and un-state-like characteristics such as volatility, unpredictability, and reversibility may likely be exacerbated than resolved by the Obama administration.

The central argument is that US power, once established as predominant in the hemisphere, has been nothing short of decisive in the founding, nature, and functioning of the regional multilateral institutions/organizations in the Americas in which it has taken part. The examples of the Pan American Union (PAU) Organization of American States (OAS) and of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are used to show this state of affairs in play; the most attention is paid to the OAS because of the lessons that can be derived from the very long history of US membership of this organization. In another case, that of Mercado Comun del Sur (Mercosur, or the Common Market of the South), it is shown how, even where the US is not a member of a multilateral organization in the hemisphere, its weight is still felt in terms of the aims and behaviour of that body. At the same time, it is seen that such organizations may on occasion be useful for the smaller states in restraining to at least some extent US behaviour, although in general such a restraining role is reserved for moments when US vital interests tend not to be involved and where Latin American, or more recently Canadian, actions to limit US unilateralism do not negatively affect goals perceived to be key by Washington. The first section gives an overview of the US and the hemisphere over the more than two centuries of its diplomatic and related action therein, the next looks at the specific experience of the PAU and the OAS, and the following two at NAFTA and Mercosur.

This chapter examines the competing images of the regulatory state. It looks at the regulatory state as an American state, a European Madisonian state, a smart state, and a risk state. It then analyses the British state as a regulatory state. The discussion of risk society and regulatory society sketches a very different kind of hypothetical understanding, one that promises to account for the hyper-innovation of recent decades.

The conclusion ends the book with an explication of the Federalists’ idea of an American national state.

It starts by pointing out that the ratification of the US Constitution did not mean the end of politics, nor the end of the debate about the future course of the American republic, for now the Federalists faced the next step of state building: creating the institutions of government that would realize their ideas about a national state in America. The mainstream interpretation of the Federalist argument presents it as a call for limited government and protection of minority rights, but this study has offered a different interpretation. It sees the Federalist argument as an attempt to convince the American public about the need to build a powerful state and to explain how this state would work – the idea of an American national state that the Federalists developed during the ratification debate was the result of creative thinking in the face of serious challenges. This conclusion is devoted to an explication of both the challenge that the Federalists faced and the concept of the state they developed, but the basic issue may be summed up as follows: what the Federalists had to do, and what they did, in the debate over ratification, was to develop a conceptual framework that made it possible to accommodate the creation of a powerful national government to the strong anti‐statist current in the American political tradition.

This chapter describes in detail the three worlds, focusing on the factors—labor, race, and politics—that will best explain the differential incorporation of blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants into the American welfare state and the scope, form, and function of relief provision across regions. On the eve of the Great Depression, the vast majority of European immigrants lived in the Northeast and Midwest, Mexicans lived overwhelmingly in the Southwest, while most blacks still lived in the South. So different were their experiences with the racial, political, and labor market systems in these regions that these groups could be said to be living in separate worlds. Each of them suffered from significant discrimination at the hands of native-born whites in the early part of the twentieth century. European immigrants were largely included in the social welfare system, blacks were largely excluded, while Mexicans were often expelled from the nation simply for requesting assistance.

This chapter lays out the history and background of the federal government's growing involvement in American higher education, arguing that the latter had emerged as a predominant “parastate” in the twentieth century. Situated between citizens and the state, completely beholden to neither party but expected and committed to serve both, higher education proved perfectly suited for the task. The potential for higher education's ideas and individuals to migrate into the heart of society proved particularly seductive to state builders. That higher education could be used to shape citizens' political commitments resonated with national leaders, such as Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who wanted to build a new and more powerful state but had to do so using homegrown materials, all the more effective if they were locally produced. From such stuff was the American state made.

This chapter examines the development of the protection of economic, social, and cultural rights (ESC rights) in the Inter-American System. It reviews the substantive recognition granted to ESC rights by Organization of American States (OAS) member states followed by an account of the tools available for monitoring and assessing compliance with ESC rights. Strategies so far employed towards the judicial and quasi-judicial protection of ESC rights are addressed in the final section of the chapter.

This chapter examines the history of U.S. residential care in an attempt to understand the factors that have influenced its development. It describes recent trends in and the current state of residential care, and speculates about its future. The chapter focuses on the use of residential care for children removed from their families due to abuse or neglect.

This chapter considers what drives differences in political and legal institutions across countries, narrowing the focus to the evolution of legislatures and courts in the American states. The American states have relatively diverse geographic and colonial initial conditions, well-documented historical experiences, and rich data on politics and courts going back to the 1860s, making it ideal for the study methods this chapter introduces. Hence, to document how and why geography and other historical factors have had a persistent influence on political and legal institutions, this chapter plots out the structure of an argument to be used in the remainder of this volume, and argues that initial conditions played early and enduring roles in shaping political and legal institutions in the American states.

This chapter presents four case studies on human rights that analyze the use of non-binding norms in four contexts. The first presents the case of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), whose participating states have deliberately chosen not to conclude treaties, but instead have adopted a series of legally non-binding normative instruments. The second considers the use of recommendations and non-binding instruments in the International Labor Organization (ILO), which also concludes treaties, and the extent to which compliance differs with the nature of the instrument. The third case study considers a similar dual normative structure in the Organization of American States (OAS). The fourth case study compares the McBride and Sullivan Principles, examples of increasingly frequent codes of conduct for transnational corporations.

It is striking the extent to which Tocqueville's vision of US politics has trumped all other visions of the American state abroad during this formative period. This essay is part of a broader attempt to explore writers and historians who uncovered a very different American state in the nineteenth century. By focusing on other interpretations of the American state—especially that of Adolphe Thiers—it attempts to puncture the reigning myth of nineteenth-century American statelessness from the oblique angle of Europe at the same time that it gives voice to those observers whose interpretations more satisfactorily reconcile the past and present of American public power and its legacy across the world.

This chapter leaves behind the standard accounts of federal agencies to examine the role of the presidency in fashioning regulatory outputs. It recounts — and with reference to American ‘checks and balances’ ideas — a steady accretion of power at the centre, the result of which has been to render rulemaking increasingly a political rather than ‘expert’ activity. Whether the process is reversible, or whether ongoing crises in finance and security will serve to concretize this profound constitutional development, remains to be seen.