The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century

Event Details

Television Broadcast:  Virginia, Sept. 27, 2015 / Nationally, Sept. 30, 2015

Brian Balogh serves as Compton Professor and chair of the National Fellowship Program at the Miller Center, and as professor of history at the University of Virginia. The author of A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America, Balogh cohosts the public radio show Backstory with the American History Guys. His new book, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century, provides a fresh perspective on the role that the private sector, trade associations, and professional organizations have played in implementing public policies from the late-19^th through 21^st centuries. Balogh examines key historical periods through the lens of political development, paying particular attention to the ways government, social movements, and intermediary institutions have organized support and resources to achieve public ends. The Associational State contends that a wide gap exists between the ideological rhetoric that both parties deploy today and their far less ideologically driven behavior over the past century and a half, and offers one solution to the partisan gridlock that currently grips the nation.