Research
I am currently involved in three ongoing research projects. Descriptions and publications from each line of inquiry can be found below.
The Great Society and American Political Development
LBJ Library and Museum, Austin, TX. November 2013.
This project places the domestic reform efforts of the 1960s in the broad arc of postwar American political development. I argue that we cannot make sense of contemporary American politics without understanding how Great Society initiatives like the War on Poverty, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and others sought to push the U.S. closer to a full, multi-ethnic democracy, which generated a conservative backlash. While the Great Society broke with old patterns and processes in American politics to dramatically expand the size and scope of the welfare state and promote racial justice and economic opportunities for historically marginalized groups, its successes were constrained by deeply entrenched illiberal forces. By compelling the American polity to directly grapple with its racist past, the Great Society opened new windows for conservatives to mobilize and craft an effective alternative to liberal hegemony.
Publications and works-in-progress from this project:
This article reconsiders the history of the Community Action Program (CAP). I argue that the CAP is best understood as a bold attempt at administrative experimentation and reform. Using original archival materials, I show that policymakers involved in the CAP’s design outlined three models of community action: coordination, collaboration, and mobilization. Drawing upon an original dataset of ninety-eight community action agencies (CAAs), this article provides a synthetic assessment of the CAP’s implementation. By looking beyond the dramatic clashes between CAAs and local governments and focusing on the multiple ways in which CAAs seized upon the CAP’s experimental nature, this article provides a more balanced and comprehensive assessment of the CAP’s historical legacy.
This article sheds new light on how conservatism has affected American state development by tracing the history of how block-granting transformed from a bipartisan tool to solve problems of public administration in the 1940s into a mechanism to roll back and decentralize the welfare state that had reached its zenith in the 1960s. By the early 1980s, conservative policymakers had coopted the previously bipartisan tool in their efforts to chip away at the increasingly centralized social welfare system that emerged out of the Great Society. Block-granting has become a perennial weapon in conservatives’ war on the welfare state.
This article traces the history of the Office of Economic Opportunity/Community Services Administration, focusing on Richard Nixon’s failed attempt to dismantle it in 1973 and Ronald Reagan’s successful effort in 1981. The key questions I explore are: Why was Reagan able to succeed where Nixon had failed? and What does the dismantling of the agency reveal about the development of American conservatism in the 1970s and 80s? Drawing upon original archival materials, I argue that the Reagan administration learned from Nixon’s failures and adopted a more professional, managerial stance when it dismantled the agency in 1981. In addition, recent work in history and political science has explored how the multiracial democratic vision articulated by LBJ’s Great Society helped fuel the modern conservative movement. By focusing on the long-term opposition against OEO/CSA, this article provides new insights into how conservatives articulated an alternative ideology to postwar liberalism.
Ryan LaRochelle, “The Great Society and American Political Development” (working paper—e-mail for latest draft). A version of this paper was awarded the Robert C. Donovan prize for the best paper presented by a faculty member at the 2019 New England Political Science Association Conference.
APD and the Future of American Politics (with Dan Kryder)
Motivated by ongoing crises of democratic legitimacy, state incapacity, and the retrenchment of constitutional protections for marginalized groups in American society, Dan Kryder and I have begun exploring how scholarship in the APD tradition can be reoriented and reconfigured to help scholars and citizens better anticipate and plan for future political developments.
Publications and works-in-progress from this project:
For the first time since 1860, our collective future as an ideologically coherent and nominally democratic nation is at risk. In the short, medium, and long term, our nation faces several systemic and intertwined threats. Because these cascading crises threaten our fundamental political ideals and our lives, we recommend here a rapid and careful reorientation of at least some part of APD toward a scholarship of foresight—that is, one based on the premise that anticipating and shaping the future is now as important as or more important than understanding the past. The article first considers some of the ways in which APD is tethered to the past and then discusses how several of the subfield’s analytical approaches are compatible with a scholarship of foresight. Prognosis, prediction, and projection, we argue, are analytical tools that can inform prescription. We conclude with five sets of recommendations that can help APD scholars consider turning their attention toward the future.
Ryan LaRochelle and Daniel Kryder, “Reading History Forward Through Process Projection: Obama’s Example,” Clio, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter 2022-2023): pp. 10-15.
In this essay, we draw upon a discussion that Barack Obama had with progressive journalists in the waning days of his presidency. During this lengthy conversation, which was not widely reported and the details of which only recently emerged through a FOIA request, Obama engaged in many of the analytical tools we lay out in our 2022 SAPD article, “Our Future at Risk:” prognosis, prediction, projection, and prescription. We explore how Obama drew upon his extensive knowledge of American political thought to—rather accurately—project the potential course of Trump’s presidency. Obama’s candid remarks serve in many ways as an exemplar of how historically-oriented political scientists might deploy their extensive historical knowledge toward a politics of foresight.
Getting to the Truth: William S. Cohen’s Life in Leadership
For several years I have taught an upper-level course on Secretary William S. Cohen’s career in public service, drawing upon his personal papers which are archived at the University of Maine’s Fogler Library. I have recently begun work on a biography of Cohen that explores his public service career from his time in local government in Bangor, Maine through his tenure as Secretary of Defense and afterward. The book would focus on critical episodes that highlight his bipartisanship, objective decision-making, commitment to the common good, and efforts to promote and secure democracy in the U.S. and abroad. Such episodes include his service as newly elected member of the House of Representatives, where he found himself sitting on the House Judiciary Committee in the midst of the Watergate crisis; his service on the Senate Select Committee during the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s; his nomination and appointment as Secretary of Defense by Democratic President Bill Clinton, and his recent outspoken criticism of former President Donald Trump. A Cohen biography would be timely and important in today’s hyper polarized political climate. Cohen’s public service career would serve as a useful lens to explore the recent history of American party politics and American political development, especially as they relate to present democratic crises and challenges. The biography will pay special attention to the decline of moderation across both parties, but particularly within the GOP since the 1960s and 1970s. Scholars in political science point to rising extremism within the GOP as a particularly pressing democratic threat. Much of this work explores these changes at the macro-level, and a Cohen biography would provide a much needed, in-depth inside perspective into these processes.