Robert C Lieberman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3628136 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert C Lieberman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert C |
| FAMILY NAME | Lieberman |
| SIGNATURE | LIEBERMAN R C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9677-8946 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 515 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The American Civil Rights State: The Role of Federal Power in the Pursuit of Racial Justice
For most of American history, the American state has been an active agent of racial oppression. As the country democratized, it retained structures and practices of racial authoritarianism and coercion. But in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the United States underwent waves of racial democratization. For a brief while during those periods, the American state transformed itself, on balance, into an agent of racial equality. We ex…
Is the Constitution Past Its Sell-By Date? A Review Article
How well has the U.S. Constitution held up over time? Contemporary American government seems unable to deliver on the Constitution's promise of effective but limited government. Several recent books consider the limitations of trying to govern a complex twenty-first society with eighteenth-century institutions, although they suggest different reasons why the temporal challenge of American democracy is so acute. In We Hold These Truths, Stephen Ma…
The State, War-Making & Democratization in the United States: A Historical Overview
The process of American democratization and de-democratization has often involved organized violence, whether perpetrated by the federal government, against the government, or with the government on the sidelines. But we know little about the relationship between the state's war-making capacity and the prospects for democracy's advances and retreats over the course of American history. In this essay, I first briefly describe the long-run path of …
Virtual Issue: Race in the United States in Social Science History
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Compared to what: Setting American political development in comparative context
The recent crisis of democracy in the United States and around the world has highlighted the value of both historical and comparative analysis and brought the subfields of American political development and comparative politics into frequent conversation with each other. In fact, these subfields emerged from common origins and draw on similar conceptual and methodological tools. This essay identifies the historical and intellectual connections be…
Democratic Backsliding and Ethnic Politics: The Republican Party in the United States
Views diverge about whether ethnic politics undermines or reinforces democracy. While ethnic politics is typically understood as minority politics, we consider the case of political parties that represent majority rather than minority ethnic groups. Two contextual factors increase the likelihood that a party representing a majority ethnicity will engage in democratic backsliding behavior: population decline that threatens the group’s majority sta…
Courts, the state, and democratization in the United States
The United States is facing an era of acute democratic fragility. The Supreme Court is often understood as a key countermajoritarian institution that often impedes democratization. But adopting an interbranch perspective, we show that the court has been a stronger champion of democratization in the United States than is typically recognized. National power has generally been necessary to overcome antidemocratic subnational policy, and national st…
Can Social Movements Save American Democracy? A Review Article
Recent scholarship on the fragility of American democracy has generally focused on political elites rather than the mass public. Sidney Tarrow's Movements and Parties offers an essential corrective to this view. Tarrow shows how that social movements have been central to historical patterns of democratization and democratic backsliding in American history and how movements have systematically interacted with political parties in ways that have pr…
Daniel Carpenter’s Democracy by Petition: A Symposium Introduction
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The Crisis of American Democracy in Historical Context
The present is not the only time in American history that American democracy has been at serious risk of backsliding. When we place recent developments in a broader historical and comparative context, we discover that any of four known threats to democracy can weaken it and lead to backsliding. These include political polarization, conflict over who belongs in the political community, high and rising economic inequality, and executive aggrandizem…
Democratic Vulnerabilities and Pathways for Reform
democracy; backsliding; political development; institutions; reform
Democratic Resilience: Can the United States Withstand Rising Polarization
Politics in the United States has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. Both political elites and everyday citizens are divided into rival and mutually antagonistic partisan camps, with each camp questioning the political legitimacy and democratic commitments of the other side. Does this polarization pose threats to democracy itself? What can make some democratic institutions resilient in the face of such challenges? Democratic Resilie…
“The Latter-Day General Grant”: Forceful Federal Power and Civil Rights
Progress toward racial equality requires the engagement of the American state, centered in the presidency and the executive branch, and in fact is not possible without the state's direct and forceful intervention. The key to this transformation is what we call “Forceful Federalism,” a multidimensional understanding of the American state. Forceful Federalism has four essential dimensions: standard-setting, coercion, associationalism, and fiscal au…
Apsa Presidential Task Force Report on New Partnerships
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Response to Spotlight on Promotion Letters: First, Trust Our Own Judgement
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The Trump Presidency and American Democracy: A Historical and Comparative Analysis
To many observers across the political spectrum, American democracy appears under threat. What does the Trump presidency portend for American politics? How much confidence should we have in the capacity of American institutions to withstand this threat? We argue that understanding what is uniquely threatening to democracy requires looking beyond the particulars of Trump and his presidency. Instead, it demands a historical and comparative perspect…
The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development
Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics – and thus they question stylized facts about America’s political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with t…
Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Social Policy
The racial character of American society has shaped social policy-making in the United States and structured the American welfare state. At the same time, the structure of American social policy has affected the welfare state’s capacity to incorporate members of different racial and ethnic groups, shaping their access to social citizenship and their opportunities for full inclusion in (or isolation from) the American political economy. This dynam…
The Carceral State and American Political Development
Since mid-century, the capacity of the United States to punish and surveil its citizenry has undergone tremendous expansion. Yet this phenomenal transformation and its repercussions for citizens has engendered surprisingly little discussion among scholars of American political development (APD). Nor have criminal justice scholars been sufficiently attentive to the intersection between democratic development and the carceral state. In this essay, …
A Band of Noble Women: Racial Politics in the Women's Peace Movement
In this engaging and well-written study, Melinda Plastas forthrightly addresses the issue of race in the women's peace movement in the post–World War I era. Her specific focus is on the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (wilpf) through the early years of the Great Depression, though this is not clear from the title. The book highlights the contradictions within the wilpf, arguing that the organization contested racism on national…
Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix LIST OF TABLES xi PREFACE xiii CHAPTER ONE: Configurations of Race and State: The Politics of Racial Incorporation 1 CHAPTER TWO: Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism: Race and the Politics of Social Reform 27 CHAPTER THREE: The Roots of Incorporation 56 CHAPTER FOUR: Postwar Transformations of Race and State 75 CHAPTER FIVE: Encounters with the State: Social Security and Social Insurance 99 CHAPTER SIX: Encounters with th…
Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race by Thomas J. Sugrue
Journal Article Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race by Thomas J. Sugrue Get access Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Raceby Thomas J. Sugrue. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2010. 178pp. $24.95. Robert C. Lieberman Robert C. Lieberman Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 126, Issue 1, Spring 2011, Pages 136–137, https:…
L'État aux États-Unis: Nouvelles perspectives de politique comparée Pour en finir avec le mythe de l'État ' faible
Cet article vise à mettre en évidence les caractéristiques de l'État américain, classiquement considéré comme un État faible par les auteurs le comparant au modèle des États centralisés européens. Le détour par les travaux comparatistes permet d'avancer diverses hypothèses sur les enchaînements parfois paradoxaux des origines de l'État et de son développement. Ces travaux le considèrent non comme le contrepoids ou le concurrent de certaines relat…
Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State
This review of new directions in the American and comparative literatures on the state reveals important intellectual trends that parallel each other quite closely. Both comparativists and Americanists address similar questions about the sources of state authority, and both propose similar answers. Collectively, these scholars and others are retheorizing the state—developing a suppler, multidimensional picture of the state's origins, structure, a…
Rejoinder to Mearsheimer and Walt
In their reply, Professors Mearsheimer and Walt focus quite reasonably on my two main claims: that their research methods are flawed and that their evidence is weak. But they begin, tellingly, by citing a range of indirect evidence that appears to depict a powerful “Israel lobby.” Lots of knowledgeable Washington insiders, they say—policymakers, journalists, candidates for office, and the like—say and do things that seem to acknowledge the “lobby…
Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change
Institutional approaches to explaining political phenomena suffer from three common limitations: reductionism, reliance on exogenous factors, and excessive emphasis on order and structure. Ideational approaches to political explanation, while often more sensitive to change and agency, largely exhibit the same shortcomings. In particular, both perspectives share an emphasis on discerning and explaining patterns of ordered regularity in politics, m…
The Trump Presidency and American Democracy: A Historical and Comparative Analysis
To many observers across the political spectrum, American democracy appears under threat. What does the Trump presidency portend for American politics? How much confidence should we have in the capacity of American institutions to withstand this threat? We argue that understanding what is uniquely threatening to democracy requires looking beyond the particulars of Trump and his presidency. Instead, it demands a historical and comparative perspect…
Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State
Looking Inward, Looking Outward: The Politics of State Welfare Innovation under Devolution
Theories of federalism supporting the devolution of welfare policy to the states suggest that the removal of national policy controls will allow states to tailor-make welfare policy to fit local needs and preferences. These theories predict that state policymaking under devolution will respond mostly to state-specific factors. Alternative theories of federalism suggest that devolution will increasingly expose states to national and interstate pre…
Social Construction (Continued)
In thisReviewin June 1993 Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram argued that the social construction of target populations is an important political and policy phenomenon. Robert Lieberman criticizes Schneider and Ingram's "circular" conceptualization of public policy and social construction. He proposes a "historical-institutional" framework for understanding the role of group identities in political change. Lieberman analyzes the dual experience of Af…
American Federalism, Race and the Administration of Welfare
Recent studies of American federalism have emphasized the division of government functions between the national government and the states. But the effects of federalism depend not only on the balance of functional authority but also on the structure of federalist institutions. The institutional structure of Aid to Dependent Children, created by the Social Security Act of 1935, comprised a system of state operational control unhindered by federal …
The “Israel Lobby” and American Politics
In their recent book,The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argue that American support for Israel does not serve American interests. Nevertheless, they observe that American foreign policy regarding the Middle East, especially in recent years, has tilted strongly toward support for Israel, and they attribute this support to the influence of the “Israel lobby” in American domestic politics. Their book is princi…
The Storm Didn't Discriminate: Katrina and the Politics of Color Blindness
Hurricane Katrina exposed the politics of race, poverty, and inequality to broad public view for the first time in a generation. But the storm and its aftermath also constituted a metaphor for the deep tension between color-blind and race-conscious models of politics that has long been one of the central and defining themes of U.S. politics. In this essay, I explore Hurricane Katrina as a window onto this fundamental dualism in U.S. political cul…
Weak State, Strong Policy: Paradoxes of Race Policy in the United States, Great Britain, and France
Race, in particular the peculiarly American embrace of political race-consciousness, is often portrayed as an important source of limitations on American political development. Although the color line has undergirded some of the most notorious instances of state repression in American history—the pre-civil rights South most notably, but also race-based immigration and citizenship restrictions and the FBI's COINTELPRO operations of the cold war er…
Finding the American State: Transcending the “Statelessness” Account
A Tale of Two Countries: The Politics of Color Blindness in France and the United States
France and the United States are commonly portrayed as proceeding from diametrically opposed presumptions in their approaches to race policy.1 The United States, this line of argument goes, has pursued a race-conscious approach to attacking racial discrimination, developing policies such as affirmative action that offer compensatory advantages to members of historically or currently disadvantaged groups.2 The American approach involves directing …
Race, Institutions, and the Administration of Social Policy
Democratic Backsliding and Ethnic Politics: The Republican Party in the United States
Views diverge about whether ethnic politics undermines or reinforces democracy. While ethnic politics is typically understood as minority politics, we consider the case of political parties that represent majority rather than minority ethnic groups. Two contextual factors increase the likelihood that a party representing a majority ethnicity will engage in democratic backsliding behavior: population decline that threatens the group’s majority sta…
Democratic Vulnerabilities and Pathways for Reform
democracy; backsliding; political development; institutions; reform
A Band of Noble Women: Racial Politics in the Women's Peace Movement
In this engaging and well-written study, Melinda Plastas forthrightly addresses the issue of race in the women's peace movement in the post–World War I era. Her specific focus is on the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (wilpf) through the early years of the Great Depression, though this is not clear from the title. The book highlights the contradictions within the wilpf, arguing that the organization contested racism on national…
Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City
Claire Jean Kim's account of African American boycotts of Korean-owned stores in Brooklyn in 1990 upends the conventional story of black-Korean conflict in American cities, in which African Americans lash out irrationally at conveniently available “scapegoats,” Korean American merchants who have the misfortune to be caught in a conflict not of their own making. Meticulously and doggedly reconstructing the origins and development of the so-called …
Courts, the state, and democratization in the United States
The United States is facing an era of acute democratic fragility. The Supreme Court is often understood as a key countermajoritarian institution that often impedes democratization. But adopting an interbranch perspective, we show that the court has been a stronger champion of democratization in the United States than is typically recognized. National power has generally been necessary to overcome antidemocratic subnational policy, and national st…
Virtual Issue: Race in the United States in Social Science History
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Compared to what: Setting American political development in comparative context
The recent crisis of democracy in the United States and around the world has highlighted the value of both historical and comparative analysis and brought the subfields of American political development and comparative politics into frequent conversation with each other. In fact, these subfields emerged from common origins and draw on similar conceptual and methodological tools. This essay identifies the historical and intellectual connections be…
The Crisis of American Democracy in Historical Context
The present is not the only time in American history that American democracy has been at serious risk of backsliding. When we place recent developments in a broader historical and comparative context, we discover that any of four known threats to democracy can weaken it and lead to backsliding. These include political polarization, conflict over who belongs in the political community, high and rising economic inequality, and executive aggrandizem…
Apsa Presidential Task Force Report on New Partnerships
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
L'État aux États-Unis: Nouvelles perspectives de politique comparée Pour en finir avec le mythe de l'État ' faible
Cet article vise à mettre en évidence les caractéristiques de l'État américain, classiquement considéré comme un État faible par les auteurs le comparant au modèle des États centralisés européens. Le détour par les travaux comparatistes permet d'avancer diverses hypothèses sur les enchaînements parfois paradoxaux des origines de l'État et de son développement. Ces travaux le considèrent non comme le contrepoids ou le concurrent de certaines relat…
Rejoinder to Mearsheimer and Walt
In their reply, Professors Mearsheimer and Walt focus quite reasonably on my two main claims: that their research methods are flawed and that their evidence is weak. But they begin, tellingly, by citing a range of indirect evidence that appears to depict a powerful “Israel lobby.” Lots of knowledgeable Washington insiders, they say—policymakers, journalists, candidates for office, and the like—say and do things that seem to acknowledge the “lobby…
Case History
The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Politics of Institutional Structure
On New Year’s Day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in much of the South. Lincoln’s act transformed the Civil War from a sectional rebellion to a war of liberation. Although the proclamation’s immediate legal effect was minimal, since it touched only those areas still resisting Union authority, its political effect was far reaching and dramatic. With a single stroke of his pen, Lincoln ens…
The Freedmen's Bureau and the Politics of Institutional Structure
The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Politics of Institutional Structure
On New Year’s Day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in much of the South. Lincoln’s act transformed the Civil War from a sectional rebellion to a war of liberation. Although the proclamation’s immediate legal effect was minimal, since it touched only those areas still resisting Union authority, its political effect was far reaching and dramatic. With a single stroke of his pen, Lincoln ens…
Race and the Organization of Welfare Policy
Race, Institutions, and the Administration of Social Policy
Social Construction (Continued)
In thisReviewin June 1993 Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram argued that the social construction of target populations is an important political and policy phenomenon. Robert Lieberman criticizes Schneider and Ingram's "circular" conceptualization of public policy and social construction. He proposes a "historical-institutional" framework for understanding the role of group identities in political change. Lieberman analyzes the dual experience of Af…
Bureaucracy and Self-Government: Reconsidering the Role of Public Administration in American Politics
Journal Article Bureaucracy and Self-Government: Reconsidering the Role of Public Administration in American Politics Get access Bureaucracy and Self-Government: Reconsidering the Role of Public Administration in American Politics by Brian J. Cook. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 224 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $14.95. Robert C. Lieberman Robert C. Lieberman Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Acade…
Welfare in America: How Social Science Fails the Poor
Welfare in America is a scathing attack on the social scientists, policy makers, and politicians responsible for programs meant to help our nation's poorest citizens. William M. Epstein charges that most current social welfare programs are not held to credible standards in their design or their results. Rather than spending less on such research and programs, however, Epstein suggests we should spend much more, and do the job right. The American …
Looking Inward, Looking Outward: The Politics of State Welfare Innovation under Devolution
Looking Inward, Looking Outward: The Politics of State Welfare Innovation under Devolution
Theories of federalism supporting the devolution of welfare policy to the states suggest that the removal of national policy controls will allow states to tailor-make welfare policy to fit local needs and preferences. These theories predict that state policymaking under devolution will respond mostly to state-specific factors. Alternative theories of federalism suggest that devolution will increasingly expose states to national and interstate pre…
Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State
American Federalism, Race and the Administration of Welfare
Recent studies of American federalism have emphasized the division of government functions between the national government and the states. But the effects of federalism depend not only on the balance of functional authority but also on the structure of federalist institutions. The institutional structure of Aid to Dependent Children, created by the Social Security Act of 1935, comprised a system of state operational control unhindered by federal …
A Tale of Two Countries: The Politics of Color Blindness in France and the United States
France and the United States are commonly portrayed as proceeding from diametrically opposed presumptions in their approaches to race policy.1 The United States, this line of argument goes, has pursued a race-conscious approach to attacking racial discrimination, developing policies such as affirmative action that offer compensatory advantages to members of historically or currently disadvantaged groups.2 The American approach involves directing …
Political Institutions and the Politics of Race in the Development of the Modern Welfare State
Long one of the central features of American politics, racial inequality is increasingly an important feature of the European political landscape. Across Europe, countries traditionally considered racially and ethnically homogeneous are struggling with racial diversity to an unprecedented degree. This new diversity in Europe has spawned a grimly familiar litany of problems: racism, discrimination, inequality, isolation, political powerlessness, a…
Weak State, Strong Policy: Paradoxes of Race Policy in the United States, Great Britain, and France
Race, in particular the peculiarly American embrace of political race-consciousness, is often portrayed as an important source of limitations on American political development. Although the color line has undergirded some of the most notorious instances of state repression in American history—the pre-civil rights South most notably, but also race-based immigration and citizenship restrictions and the FBI's COINTELPRO operations of the cold war er…
The New Politics of the Welfare State
Journal Article The New Politics of the Welfare State Get access The New Politics of the Welfare State by Paul Pierson. New York, Oxford University Press, 2001. 528 pp. Cloth, $70.00; paper, $19.95. Robert C. Lieberman Robert C. Lieberman Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 117, Issue 3, Fall 2002, Pages 525–526, https://doi.org/10.2307/798289 Published: …
Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City
Claire Jean Kim's account of African American boycotts of Korean-owned stores in Brooklyn in 1990 upends the conventional story of black-Korean conflict in American cities, in which African Americans lash out irrationally at conveniently available “scapegoats,” Korean American merchants who have the misfortune to be caught in a conflict not of their own making. Meticulously and doggedly reconstructing the origins and development of the so-called …
Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change
Institutional approaches to explaining political phenomena suffer from three common limitations: reductionism, reliance on exogenous factors, and excessive emphasis on order and structure. Ideational approaches to political explanation, while often more sensitive to change and agency, largely exhibit the same shortcomings. In particular, both perspectives share an emphasis on discerning and explaining patterns of ordered regularity in politics, m…
Welfare Policymaking in the States: The Devil in Devolution
Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference
Ethnicity, Social Mobility, and Public Policy: Comparing the USA and UK
This major comparative study of the social mobility of ethnic minorities in the US and UK argues that social mobility must be understood as a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon, incorporating the wealth and income of groups, but also their political power and social recognition. Written by leading sociologists, economists, political scientists, geographers, and philosophers in both countries, the volume addresses issues as diverse as educat…
Goo-Goos in Paradise
The Storm Didn't Discriminate: Katrina and the Politics of Color Blindness
Hurricane Katrina exposed the politics of race, poverty, and inequality to broad public view for the first time in a generation. But the storm and its aftermath also constituted a metaphor for the deep tension between color-blind and race-conscious models of politics that has long been one of the central and defining themes of U.S. politics. In this essay, I explore Hurricane Katrina as a window onto this fundamental dualism in U.S. political cul…
Case History
Finding the American State: Transcending the “Statelessness” Account
Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State
This review of new directions in the American and comparative literatures on the state reveals important intellectual trends that parallel each other quite closely. Both comparativists and Americanists address similar questions about the sources of state authority, and both propose similar answers. Collectively, these scholars and others are retheorizing the state—developing a suppler, multidimensional picture of the state's origins, structure, a…
Political science (47 works) · Law (43 works) · Sociology (38 works) · Politics (36 works) · Law (26 works) · Political economy (23 works) · Public Administration (16 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (13 works) · Economics (12 works)