Suchergebnisse

In lobbying for the job discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964, liberal civil rights advocates wanted an administrative job discrimination enforcement regime modeled on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), with no private lawsuits. Pivotal conservative Republicans, empowered by a divided Democratic Party and the filibuster in the Senate, defeated an administrative framework and provided instead for private lawsuits with incentives for enforcement, including attorney's fees for winning plaintiffs. They were motivated by native suspicion toward bureaucratic regulation of business in general, as well as fear that they would not be able to control an NLRB-style civil rights agency in the hands of their ideological adversaries. In the political environment of 1963–64, some meaningful enforcement provisions were necessary, and to conservative Republicans private litigation was preferable to public bureaucracy.This choice had important self-reinforcing policy feedback effects. Civil rights advocates were initially optimistic about agency implementation and skeptical about the efficacy of private litigation to enforce Title VII, even with attorney's fees for winning plaintiffs. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, civil rights advocates observed an agency lacking the material resources and political will and commitment to carry out its mission. At the same time, they observed levels of private enforcement that far exceeded their expectations, as well as courts inclined toward broadly proplaintiff interpretations of Title VII. The CRA of 1964's attorney's fees provisions also had the effect of contributing funds to civil rights groups that prosecuted lawsuits and of conjuring into being a private, for-profit bar to litigate civil rights claims in general, and job discrimination claims in particular. These developments drove a transformation in the enforcement preferences of civil rights groups toward private litigation, weakening their historic support for administrative implementation. Working together with the burgeoning for-profit civil rights bar, they mobilized to expand the fee-shifting provisions of the CRA of 1964 across the entire field of civil rights, which they accomplished by successfully lobbying for enactment of the Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Awards Act of 1976. Thus was created the modern civil rights enforcement framework.

This article investigates causes of the legislative choice to mobilize private litigants to enforce statutes. It specifies the statutory mechanism, grounded in economic incentives, that Congress uses to do so, and presents a theoretical framework for understanding how certain characteristics of separation of powers structures, particularly conflict between Congress and the president over control of the bureaucracy, drive legislative production of this mechanism. Using new and original historical data, the article presents the first empirical model of the legislative choice to mobilize private litigants, covering the years 1887 to 2004. The findings provide robust support for the proposition that interbranch conflict between Congress and the president is a powerful cause of congressional enactment of incentives to mobilize private litigants. Higher risk of electoral losses by the majority party, Democratic control of Congress, and demand by issue‐oriented interest groups are also significant predictors of congressional enactment of such incentives.

We investigate institutional explanations for Congress's choice to fragment statutory frameworks for policy implementation. We argue that divided party government, which fuels legislative‐executive conflict over control of the bureaucracy, motivates Congress to fragment implementation power as a strategy to enhance its control over implementation. We develop a novel measure of fragmentation in policy implementation, collect data on it over the period 1947–2008, and test hypotheses linking separation‐of‐powers structures to legislative design of fragmented implementation power. We find that divided party government is powerfully associated with fragmentation in policy implementation, and that this association contributed to the long‐run growth of fragmentation in the postwar United States. We further find that legislative coalitions are more likely to fragment implementation power in the face of greater uncertainty about remaining in the majority.

In this article, we will probe two distinct historical questions. First, we explore why congressional representatives from the South, who had generally supported the Democratic Party on labor issues during the 1930s, joined with Republicans to oppose the party's pro-labor orientation in the 1940s. We also examine why the class-based union movement that mobilized so assertively after the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 became so cramped and pragmatic by the early 1950s. These puzzles, we believe, are closely related. Our explanation for why labor's horizons, topography, and prospects constricted to workplace issues, to some segments of the working population, and to limited geographic areas by the end of the Truman years points to how southern Democrats shaped the main institutions produced by New Deal and Fair Deal labor legislation.