Theory Building, Administrative Reform Movements,and the Perdurability of Herbert HooverNotwithstanding the significant insight into administrative reform movements that prior research has offered, we still lack a theory of administrative reform movements that explains the causal mechanisms involved, accounts for the continuities and discontinuities witnessed in the patterns or trajectory of reform noted, and explains the persistent allure and expansion of market-based prescriptions to administrative reform. This interpretive essay's arguments are fourfold. First, recent conceptual developments in historical institutionalist scholarship on American political development (APD) related to causal mechanisms are not only applicable and methodologically suited to the broad study of administrative reform in the United States, but they also hike to a more theoretical level processes still at a metaphoric stage in the public administration literature. In the process, APD scholarship helps explain persistent calls for BBPs, nongovernmental, and quasigovernmental reforms at both the micro- and macro-level. Second, and relatedly, incorporating APD insights suggests how competing "tidal" (Light, 1997, 1999, 2006) and "tectonic" (Koppell, 2003, 2006) perspectives on the evolution and consequences of administrative reform in the U.S. might be reconciled to offer an integrated "tidetonic" framework for understanding the evolution of administrative reform movements.

Third, by applying APD thinking to an assessment of the evolution of administrative reform movements in the U.S., the government-centered model of the administrative state is seen as the real aberration in American governance, not the more recent turn to market-based nongovernmental and quasigovernmental administrative solutions to social problems (also see Brands, 2001). In the process, it also reveals how America's philosophical tension between classic economic liberalism and civic republicanism offers market-oriented reformers a decided advantage—sometimes for good reasons and other times not—in administrative reform debates and the implementation of reforms. Fourth, and relatedly, applying APD insights reveals how Herbert Hoover's vision of an "associational state" (, 1975) melded both these American impulses as an important "third-way" alternative to laissez-faire and collectivist reform prescriptions in the 1920s. In doing so, it also shows how Hoover's associationalist thinking has endured among reformers—consciously or unconsciously, by intent or happenstance, and for better or worse—to affect the evolution of the administrative state ever since.