The Hidden American State Reconsidered: Rethinking State Visibility

• In Event: 212 - Regular Session. Comparative Historical Sociology: Historical Perspectives on State Policy Innovation

Abstract

As awareness of its complexity has grown, scholars have increasingly begun to describe the American state as “hidden.” In this paper, we argue that conceiving of the state in terms of this metaphor obscures important cultural and political dynamics. Complex policy forms alone cannot account for the apparent hiddenness or visibility of the American state; instead, awareness of the state derives from political struggles to categorize a complex, multistable system of governmental practices. We identify two processes, attribution and desensitization, through which these struggles are waged, and demonstrate the utility of our approach through case studies of the “Healthy San Francisco” initiative from 2006-2013 and of the “You Didn’t Build That” controversy of the 2012 Presidential election. Our analysis suggests that scholars should pay greater attention to these classification struggles, and how they help produce the visibility or hiddenness of the American state.

Authors

• Damon Mayrl, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

• Sarah Quinn, University of Washington