In the 1980s, many scholars of both comparative and American politics argued that states often act au- tonomously from social demands. 1 Rejecting reduc- tionist assumptions regarding the primacy of social groups for public policy, both groups of scholars ex- amine how government actors and preexisting insti- tutional constraints influenced policy implementa- tion. 2 Since then, however, while the state has been retained as the primary unit of analysis for most stud- ies of American political development, interest in the autonomy of the state has dwindled, and scholars have increasingly focused on how social groups and elec- toral outcomes explain state formation and public policy, especially in the nineteenth century. 3 In some instances, scholars have even denied that state autono- Studies in American Political Development, 19 (Fall 2005), 117–136. © 2005 Cambridge University Press ISSN 0898–588X/05 $12.00 117 State Autonomy and American Political Development: How Mass Democracy Promoted State Power Samuel DeCanio, Ohio State University The danger in presuppositions does not lie merely in the fact that they exist or that they are prior to empirical knowledge. It lies rather in the fact that an ontology hand- ed down through tradition obstructs new developments, especially in the basic modes of thinking, and as long as the particularity of the conventional theoretical framework remains unquestioned we will remain in the toils of a static mode of thought which is inadequate to our present stage of historical and intellectual de- velopment. —Karl Mannheim Thanks to Paula Baker, Nicholas Barreyre, Emery Beneby, Michael Brown, Greg Caldeira, Stephen DeCanio, Jeffrey Friedman, James Gutowski, Ted Hopf, Richard John, Dean Lacy, Patrick Lynch, Mor- gan Marietta, Amanda Miller, Kathleen McGraw, Kevin Miles, John Mueller, Irfan Nooruddin, Kristin Roebuck, Elizabeth Sanders, James C. Scott, and David Stebbene for comments on prior drafts. Special thanks to the extensive comments provided by an anony- mous referee. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL. 1. Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Pe- ter Evans et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1982); Stephen Krasner, Defending the Na- tional Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Eric Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Eric Nordlinger, “Taking the State Seri- ously,” in Understanding Political Development, ed. Myron Weiner and Samuel Huntington (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1987); Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968); J.P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20 (1968): 559 – 92. 2. David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1956); Robert Dahl, Pluralist Democracy in the United States: Conflict and Consensus (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967); Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton Books, 1970). 3. For example, one scholar claims that “what previously passed for an agenda is now common wisdom – the state is ‘back in’ . . . politics is now the new center piece of the social problem, not a mere epiphenomenon” (Stephen Skowronek, “What’s Wrong with APD?” Studies in American Political Development 17 [2003]: 110). For studies focusing on the social basis of political conflict, see Richard Bensel, The Political Economy of American In- dustrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The Amer- ican Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859 –1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge Universi- ty Press, 1990); Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999); Daniel Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autono- my: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).