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Anna Grzymala-Busse. 2007. Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition and State Exploitation in Post-Communist Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 296 pp.
Jacob S. Hacker. 2002. The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 464 pp.
Kimberley S. Johnson. 2007. Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877-1929. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 242 pp.
Daniel Ziblatt. 2006. Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 240 pp.
EVER since it was "brought back in" more than twenty years ago, the state has remained at the center of political studies ranging from comparative and international politics to political theory, spanning historical and contemporary periods, and embracing a range of methods and analytical approaches. Nowhere has the idea of the state been more central than in the field of American politics, particularly in the study of American political development, an endeavor that arose precisely to challenge the then-prevailing view that the United States was exceptional in its "statelessness." It is now well established that the apparent "statelessness" of the United States is an illusion. The American state is, in a variety of domains and through unexpected mechanisms, more potent as an authoritative rule maker, national standardizer, and manager of the nation's affairs than earlier accounts had generally concluded.1 Nevertheless, the literature on the American state often appears stuck in an older mode that relies on a rather flat and rigid analytical vocabulary to describe the state-weak versus strong, unitary versus fragmented, dominant versus subordinate-despite the empirical contributions of American political development scholars showing the limits of this vocabulary.
In this standard language, and especially when compared to the "strong" centralized states of Europe, the American state generally comes off looking weak and anemic. This juxtaposition-weak state and strong outcomes-creates a paradox and suggests that the time has come to rethink analytical approaches to the American state.2
This reconsideration, we suggest, has already begun. Recent empirical scholarship on the American state-exemplified here by the work of Jacob Hacker and Kimberley Johnson-offers more nuanced accounts of the American state's form and development, accounts that stretch the notion of the state beyond the national government's central administrative apparatus to...