The Meanings and Pathways of American Political Development

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization Symposium on Emily Zackin and Chloe Thurston, The Political Development of American Debt Relief (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Timothy P.R. Weaver

In this engaging and authoritative account of the politics of debt relief in the United States, Emily Zackin and Chloe Thurston make a major contribution to the burgeoning work on American political development (APD) that emphasizes political economy and that which views APD though a multi-scalar lens, thereby uncovering the different tempos and registers of political development at the local, state, and national levels.

In The Political Development of American Debt Relief Zackin and Thurston build upon their own influential work in these areas. While in Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places, Emily Zackin refined our understanding of positive rights in the American political tradition through a focus on state constitutions, Chloe Thuston located the politics of credit and homeownership in the political economy at the urban, state, and federal levels in At the Boundaries of Homeownership. Having combined forces, Zackin and Thurston offer a compelling account of a highly consequential but understudied area of APD. In so doing, they tell a story that not only casts its eye on multiple levels of government but also across the ideas, organized interests, and institutions that both created and were created by struggles over debt relief. While so much could be written about this wonderful book, here I will focus on three areas that particularly struck a chord with me: the meaning of development, the role of ideas, and the related shift in party ideology and policy in the late twentieth century.

With respect to “development,” the APD scholarship has been heavily influenced by two of the field’s leading lights, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, who memorably define political development as “durable shifts in governing authority,” which is revealed by the creation, expansion, or rearrangement of state institutions. By contrast, or perhaps by friendly amendment, Zackin and Thurston make several innovative moves. First, their emphasis on state capacity, alongside authority, leads them to detect political development where others might miss it: in the expansion of adminstrative capacity in the judicial branch with the expansion of bankruptcy courts, especially in the aftermath of the 1898 Bankruptcy Act. Second, by examining the shift in state-level bankruptcy laws during the nineteenth century, which became more favorable to debtors over time, Zackin and Thurston show that the key developments related to debt relief were found at the state level. Were the sole analytical focus on federal institutions his consequential trend might have been classified as a case of non-development, since the Supreme Court routinely struck down state-level laws and Congress frequently repealed federal legislation sympathetic to debtors. Third, for Zackin and Thurston, state-level politics were a critical means by which debtors could reshape “constitutional meanings.” This perspective opens up a further, more radical possibility: that political development itself might be registered as a “discursive shift,” a notion explored by Jospeh Lowndes and Victoria Hattam in their account of language, culture, and APD.

In a related example of intellectual innovation, Zackin and Thurston depart from the mainstream tendency in political science, and in some quarters of APD scholarship, by affording a central role to ideas. Following those such as Robert Lieberman, Rogers Smith, and Margaret Weir, Zackin and Thurston take ideas seriously and make a persuasive argument that the contestation over whether indebted people deserved the right to discharge their debts in voluntary bankruptcy was critical important to the ebb and flow of debtors’ protections. Ideas about desert, as so often in American political development, interacted with dominant ideas about which social groups were entitled to full social citizenship, with women and African Americans usually excluded from expanded protection afforded to farmers and other property owners. That said, Zackin and Thurston are quite clear about the role of organized interests, be they farmers who organized collectively and often won out during the nineteenth century or creditors who mobilized decisively in the 1980s and 1990s to strip debtors of the protections secured during the post-war period. Hence, their story is not purely ideational but one that charts the interaction among ideas, interests, and institutions.

Still, when it comes to reversal of bankruptcy protections for debtors in the late twentieth century, the relative causal significance of ideas, as opposed to interests and institutions, seems to fade a little, especially when compared with the account of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where ideas seemed central. It may be that in both periods that ideas were “epiphenomenal,” that is reflections of underlying interests that sought ideological buttress in support of policies that promoted their material well-being. In that scenario ideas are important only insofar as they offer political cover for material concerns. But given the billing given to ideas—in the preface, where Zackin and Thurston argue that “ideas about debt have…helped shape…economic and political structures” and in the introduction where they maintain that “[t]he law came to reflect…underlying ideas about who was entitled to material security and to the government’s protection”—the authors clearly imply that ideas themselves have motive force. Zackin and Thurston certainly show that “ideas mattered” in both instances; how much ideas mattered, and where they fit into the causal story, might be a fruitful avenue for future scholars to explore.

The question of the relative impact of ideology is of particular moment for the late twentieth century shift during which bankruptcy reform underwent a decisive turn to the benefit of creditors. In keeping with work on business mobilization and economic policy in the 1970s and 1980s, Zackin and Thurston demonstrate that creditors expanded their political capacity to push for change in Congress. But ideas in this stage of political development seem to matter less here. It may be that egalitarian ideas were in short supply by the 1980s as those institutions best placed to advance them, such as labor unions, were themselves on the back foot, programmatically and ideologically. But this raises a final question: where are the Democrats in Zackin and Thurston’s account of the late twentieth century politics of debt relief?

In the fascinating chapter on the erosion of debt relief, Zackin and Thurston connect only tenuously this critical development to the internal shift in the Democratic Party towards neoliberal economic and social policies. Unlike many APD scholars, they not allergic to the concept of neoliberalism, but like Hacker and Pierson’s work on the rise of economic inequality, most of the action happens on the Republican side of the aisle. But what of the Democrats? Zackin and Thurston mention in passing that the pro-creditor Bankruptcy Abuse Protection and Consumer Protection Act enjoyed “sizable support from Democrats,” which was opposed by those such as Elizabeth Warren before she became a Senator, but the book only gives a limited sense of the extent to which elected Democrats embraced pro-creditor positions. It may well be that that the Democrats sought to resist the pro-creditor turn, but it would have been interesting, for example, to know about the role of those such as the erstwhile Senator from Delaware, Joe Biden. Were he and other congressional Democrats close to the credit card industry supportive of their positions on bankruptcy reform? Did the neoliberal embrace by the Democratic Party extend to the realm of bankruptcy? Were there any or many holdouts? As with all great books, The Political Development of American Debt Relief, answers many questions and raises others; these are a few that came to mind as I read.

In The Political Development of American Debt, Zackin and Thurston make several key contributions: they locate political development in usual places, such as the judicial branch; they offer a captivating account of multi-level political development; and suggest that ideas are key drivers of American political development. It will be widely read, cited, and assigned.

Timothy P.R. Weaver is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom (2016) and coeditor of How Ideas Shape Urban Political Development (2020). He is coeditor of the Urban Affairs Review.