Building the American Administrative State: 1870–1920

The State of Courts and Parties

According to Skowronek, America did not begin with a "state" in the modern administrative sense. During the earliest years of the republic, the government chiefly functioned through courts and political parties. Skowronek refers to this arrangement as "the state of courts and parties" (1982). This state was organized with a regional focus for governmental action. Moreover, the state of courts and parties actively stood in the way of the rise and modernization of national administrative power, serving as an institutional obstacle rather than a foundation for centralized governance.

"Statebuilding as patchwork" (Skowronek 39) between 1877 and 1900 began when advocates of a national administration started pushing for reforms that would create a strong administrative state. However, they were not successful. Reforms could only emerge from within existing political institutions, and the politicians and administrators who held power had no compelling reason to reform the very institutions that granted them their authority.

Statebuilding as Patchwork: 1877–1900

Skowronek explains that patchwork reforms were the practical result. Some new institutions did emerge to meet growing demands on government, but government elites largely spent their efforts perfecting existing institutions rather than replacing them. The period thus produced incremental adjustments rather than structural transformation.

In the period Skowronek calls "Statebuilding as reconstitution: 1900–1920," the central argument is that a fundamentally new state had to be — and indeed was — created. Supporters of national administrative development began to win broader support for a new national administrative agenda. The bureaucratic state emerged from this contested political environment. Yet the American state that took shape during this period was not an entirely clean or practical response to the new demands of a modernizing society. Rather, pre-existing institutions substantially shaped and constrained its form, embedding older structures within the new administrative order.

Statebuilding as Reconstitution: 1900–1920

"The institutional context of reform" illustrates that, while reform was occurring, it was not occurring on a dramatic scale by any measure. During the years between 1877 and 1920, the state-building taking place unfolded within the context of institutions already in place, and debates over how to manage government reform were significantly shaped by that institutional context.

Chapter three of Nelson's The Roots of American Bureaucracy is among the most significant because of the way it depicts reformers — for example, as anti-slavery advocates who wanted the government to recover a sense of public morality. Reformers wanted the government to operate within limitations, and they believed those limitations should protect individual rights. There was a sense of a new type of morality emerging, one that reformers sought to extend into all aspects of government. Nelson's analysis is important in that it explains the tensions within American governmental institutions, particularly the enduring conflict between majoritarianism and pluralism.

Reformers and the Institutional Context

Carpenter focuses on the emergence of bureaucratic policy innovation in the United States during the Progressive Era, questioning why the Post Office Department and the Department of Agriculture became politically independent writers of new policy while the Interior Department did not. To explain these developments, Carpenter advances an essentially new theory of bureaucratic autonomy grounded in organization theory, rational choice models, and network concepts.

In Carpenter's view, bureaucracies with distinct goals achieve autonomy when their middle-level officials build and maintain reputations among diverse coalitions for effectively providing distinct services. These coalitions enable agencies to resist political control and make it politically costly for politicians to ignore the agencies' policy ideas. To support his argument, Carpenter draws on historical narratives, statistical analysis, and carefully constructed policy comparisons across agencies and time periods.

Carpenter and Bureaucratic Autonomy

Cook's analysis invites a comparison of Herbert Croly's and Woodrow Wilson's respective views concerning the appropriate role of public administration in the American state, and how these views relate to Cook's broader theme of instrumental and constitutive reasoning in public administration.