Why Did Jay Ashcroft Go to St Louis?

Josh Pacewicz, Brown University

Is Missouri’s electoral system headed towards more of the same or a constitutional crisis? This question confounds even Missouri’s political insiders, who offer competing and equally plausible interpretations. I illustrate the conundrum by examining Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s visit to St Louis. An advocate of restrictive voting laws on the national stage, Ashcroft nevertheless worked with area religious leaders to implement new voting legislation in ways that blunted its most draconian effects. The event is very much Missouri politics as usual, which is characterized by a process I term path-dependent decoupling. Republican office holders advocate for draconian voter laws, but this legislative push happens apart from administration of these laws, a field dominated by Democratic leaning groups like County Clerks associations, which issue interpretations that defang some of these laws’ destabilizing effects (sometimes with an assist from these laws’ very advocates). This presentation is based on a chapter from a new book manuscript, entitled Architects of the Divided States, which draws on ethnographic case studies to develop an institutional explanation of an underappreciated feature of American politics: in many red and blue states alike, policy implementation is more progressive than one would think based on the legislation process, a situation that stabilizes the status quo but also introduces potentials for crisis.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 29. Conceptualizing Institutional Stabilization