Finding Agency in All the Right Places

Political events are never fully determined by economic or social forces, nor are they a simple function of consent and free will. Political decisions are always encumbered in one way or another. Careful analysis inevitably raises a number of questions: Who participates in public decision-making? Who constructed the decision-making process—the procedural "rules of the game"? How were the available options selected—and what made these alternatives feasible and others unrealistic?

Historians and social scientists raise these kinds of questions to explore the space between deterministic and voluntaristic accounts of political stasis and change. But this is a delicate task, especially in the classroom. Impressionable students can be tempted to follow one of two troublesome paths: either to read agency and choice into a historical decision where the odds were stacked decisively in one direction or to impute a pre-determined telos into a moment that allowed for some flexibility.

David Moss's impressive volume offers educators a new solution to this age-old dilemma. Moss's Democracy: A Case Study features a set of policy case studies that place readers in a position to envision and debate the merits of alternative historical pathways. Indeed, the historical accounts of policy decision-making in this book are capacious enough to allow readers the space to imagine alternative "endings." Moss's volume reads historical contingency into American political history—thus breathing agency, possibility, and choice into critical political junctures. Students are encouraged to place themselves in the shoes of historical actors and to appreciate the strategic complexity of the decisions these actors confronted.

Democracy: A Case Study is neither a textbook nor a monograph. It is, instead, a compendium of nineteen case studies originally prepared as a companion for a popular course offered at Harvard Business School, open to undergraduates and business students. The volume is bookended with introductory and concluding essays highlighting key themes that emerge from the cases. These case studies range widely in historical and substantive scope. Among the many substantive areas of American policy and institutional history Moss addresses in the book, some are familiar, landmark episodes of American history and others are less well known and a bit "off the beaten path." Familiar cases include those addressing the powers and limits of federal authority under the Constitution, the secession crisis of 1860–1861, and the struggle for black voting rights. Lesser-known cases deal with the Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island, the adoption of the Australian ballot in California, as well as a number of cases addressing public regulation of the banking system from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries.

Each case is expansive in temporal scope, tracing the historical lineage of the policy question or institutional problem at hand. Case 11 addressing the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1900, for example, picks up in the late 1820s with the organization of the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations, what some historians take to be the first semblance of meaningful labor organization in the United States (p. 332).

Moss writes these case studies with a twist: each concludes with a "decision point" or a choice confronted by lawmakers and leaves the case momentarily unresolved (the volume includes an Appendix with brief summaries detailing how each story "ended"). The cases, in other words, frame a point of entry into the historical story and leave analytical space for students to weigh the feasible alternatives available to a key actor or set of actors. This pedagogical device challenges students to confront complex policy trade-offs and to do so while navigating the strategically fraught political landscapes that historical figures faced.

Moss skillfully crafts each case, not only to present the multidimensional nature of each policy problem he discusses, but also to build suspense as the policy story unfolds. What is especially impressive about his writing is that he manages to capture the political complexity of policy questions while at the same time recreating a feel for the uncertainty that...