Implications for Theory and Practice
A
fter September 11, 2001, many analysts presumed that the need to safeguard the U.S.
homeland against further attack would lead inevitably to expanded powers and a larger
role for the American state. Indeed, as we have discussed, several proposals were made
and some initiatives were actually undertaken to accomplish just that end. What is most
striking about U.S. homeland security policy since 9/11, however, is that the anti-Statist
mechanisms designed into America’s domestic institutions have proven remarkably
robust, even in a situation of constant danger.
Three features of the Madisonian design have triggered more or less automatic resistance
to a significant expansion or further concentration of state power: the separation of
powers at the federal level among three co-equal branches, the openness of the
policymaking system to interest group pressure, and the intensity with which executive
branch bureaucracies guard their organizational turf.
Congress and the judiciary have reflexively asserted their institutional prerogatives
against declarations of unilateral presidential authority. In our case study of prisoner
detention, the executive branch took the early initiative to increase its powers to fight the
War on Terror, but the federal judiciary has steadily and successfully fought to limit the
executive’s ability to detain enemy combatants.
Private interests have also successfully resisted government proposals, preserving instead
a degree of freedom for industry self-regulation. In our study of cyber security, we saw
that information technology industry organizations used their access to the policymaking
process to reject government proposals that sought to undermine private independence in
cyber security.
Bureaucratic politics prevented the creation of new executive branch bureaucracies that
compete with existing organizational actors. In our case study on the proposed creation of
a domestic CIA, we demonstrate that an initiative to create a new intelligence
bureaucracy was thwarted by actors with a preexisting stake in the intelligence game.
These actors leveraged their insider position to effectively guard their organizational turf.
These findings have important implications for both theory and practice. Theoretical
approaches to war and state building can usefully incorporate domestic political structure
as a key intervening variable. International crisis do empower states to seek greater
authority, but power seeking states also engender domestic resistance and the institutional
arena in which the domestic political struggle plays out varies cross-nationally. In the
United States, a liberal institutional structure tilted in society’s favor curtailed most of the
state’s efforts at self-empowerment.
In states with less well developed domestic institutional barriers to state expansion, we
should expect war-induced state building to face less resistance. For example, after the
Chechen terrorist attack on the Belsan schoolhouse in September 2004, Russian President
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