The Presidents Politics Made

Abstract

At one time, political science greatly influenced the writing of American history. Pioneers of “the new political history” brought critical elections theory, roll-call analysis, the idea of party systems, and a model of ethno-cultural voting to bear on the Jacksonian era, the problem of the coming of the Civil War, Gilded Age politics, and Progressivism in ways that permanently altered interpretation. The influence of political science is not very great now. Political history itself shriveled before the New Social History. Massive energies were applied to writing the history of people who could not vote during most or all of the nineteenth century. The old political models soon had a nonbehaviorist rival, born and bred within the discipline of history itself, the idea of a persistent and transforming “republican ideology,” first and most powerfully described by Bernard Bailyn in 1967. Even within political history, the old models of voting behavior borrowed from political science left an implausible and unsatisfying gulf between voting and platform, political behavior and belief, practice and ideology. The disciplines turned inward again.