American Political Development Scholars Research Articles

Our Future at Risk: Toward an American Political Development Scholarship of Foresight

AbstractFor the first time since 1860, our collective future as an ideologically coherent and nominally democratic nation is at risk. In the short, medium, and long term, our nation faces several systemic and intertwined threats. Because these cascading crises threaten our fundamental political ideals and our lives, we recommend here a rapid and careful reorientation of at least some part of American political development (APD) toward a scholarship of foresight—that is, one based on the premise that anticipating and shaping the future is now as important as or more important than understanding the past. The article first considers some of the ways in which APD is tethered to the past and then discusses how several of the subfield's analytical approaches are compatible with a scholarship of foresight. Prognosis, prediction, and projection, we argue, are analytical tools that can inform prescription. We conclude with five sets of recommendations that can help APD scholars consider turning their attention toward the future.

American Political Development and the Recovery of a Human Science

AbstractRecent political developments point to the presence of grave problems with democratic governance in the United States. They suggest that scholarship in American political development (APD) could be better at studying the experiences and thinking of everyday Americans. APD scholars often study institutional changes, policy initiatives, and other shifts in governance without studying how these developments affect the lives of U.S. citizens and residents. And many developments of critical political importance are ignored or do not receive the scholarly attention they deserve. For our scholarship to do justice to the recent crises and better relate to the political world around us, as several recent past American Political Science Association (APSA) presidents have recommended, the article calls for APD scholarship to be better at focusing on people themselves: on their health and safety, their material standing, and their personal and social educations. By adding a fuller study of people to their research, APD scholars would be better equipped to identify important political developments that do not always capture the attention of Congress, the White House, and the media, but that are too important to ignore.

Aiding and abetting the unruly past: queer and critical disability approaches to American political development

ABSTRACT This article offers a strategy for applying queer and critical disability theory to American political development (APD). Queer and critical disability theorists deconstruct the use of biological categories to organize human life. Both theories argue that difference is not immanent to the body, but, rather, humans are racialized, gendered, disabled, and made different through social processes for the purpose of legitimating differential treatment. How can APD scholars use their expertise in constitutional law, social policy, and institutional development to address the historical politics of biological essentialism? Briefly drawing from my research on early twentieth-century eugenics policies in the state of California, I demonstrate a shift in methodology that interrogates the effects and stakes of biological categorization in US political history. Acting to “aid and abet” the historical resistance of deviant people, I offer an alternative queer and crip timeline that may help us to unlearn the present.

New Urbanism as Urban Political Development: Racial Geographies of ‘Intercurrence’ across Greater Seattle

While New Urbanism is now subject to a range of theorizations from different perspectives and disciplinary approaches, it is rarely framed as part of a society’s overall political development. This article explores New Urbanism through recently ‘cosmopolitanized’ and ‘urbanized’ theories of American Political Development (APD). For many years, APD scholars like Skowronek and Orren have emphasized the conceptual importance of ‘intercurrence,’ which refers to the simultaneous operation of multiple political orders in specific places and thus to the tensions and abrasions between these orders as explanations for change. Urban scholars have engaged with these ideas for some time, particularly in studies of urban politics and policy regimes, but APD’s influence on urban planning theory and practice remains underdeveloped. This article takes up this lacuna, applying select APD ideas, notably intercurrence, to understand how multi-scalar governments develop space though New Urbanist theories of place-making, with special attention paid to race. Examples from metropolitan Seattle are used to illustrate (if not fully elaborate) the article’s overall arguments and themes.

Applying regression discontinuity designs to American political development

Students of American political development (APD) have long been interested in questions related to the development of “state capacity” in the United States. The apparent macro-level nature of those questions may appear to discourage the pursuit of micro-level causal inferences. Yet attention to causal inference is not necessarily incompatible with inquiry into macro-level phenomena. This article explores the application of a specific causal inference strategy, namely regression discontinuity design (RDD), to three questions of interest to APD scholars of state capacity. First, the article illustrates the use of a geographic RDD to estimate the causal impacts of a Reconstruction-era federal civil rights statute during the period prior to the development of significant federal state capacity. Second, it explores the possible causes of the late 19th century decline in the use of monetary rewards to motivate civil servants by using a population-based RDD to estimate the causal impacts of financial incentives on law enforcement effort and civilian compliance. Third, it illustrates an opportunity to test claims about the impacts of the growth of the “carceral state” by applying a resource-constraint RDD to estimate the causal impacts of law enforcement effort on a variety of outcomes.

The Garbage Problem: Corruption, Innovation, and Capacity in Four American Cities, 1890–1940

While American political development scholars tend to focus on national or state-level politics, late nineteenth-century cities provided the lion's share of services: clean water, paved and lighted streets, and sanitation. How did cities innovate and build municipal capacity to do these things? We answer this question by looking at municipal responses to the garbage problem. As cities grew and trash piled up in the 1890s, cities explored ways to effectively collect the garbage. A government requires not just resources, but also the ability to marshal those resources. Corruption could provide such abilities. Looking at four corrupt cities—Pittsburgh, Charleston, New Orleans, and St. Louis—we consider whether corruption, and what type of corruption, fostered innovation and capacity. We compare these corrupt cities with a shadow study of the reformist government of Columbus. We found the following: (1) The logic of corruption is the most important factor to explain why municipal governments chose particular garbage strategies. Corrupt regimes chose garbage collection and disposal strategies that would benefit themselves—but these varied depending on what type of corruption dominated a city. (2) Corruption sometimes promoted innovation and capacity, but at other times, corruption hindered them. For better or worse, cities ruled by corruption gained the capacity that these informal regimes held.

American Political Development in the Era of Black Lives Matter

ABSTRACTThis Dialogues discussion explores the ways that the historical-institutional approaches of American Political Development can be useful for analyzing the ideological origins and contemporary politics of Black Lives Matter. By focusing on the evolution and impact of ideas and institutions, and the shifting relationship between the state, polity, and policy, American Political Development scholars have been crucial voices in political science working to demonstrate the intractable influence of race on the creation, maintenance, and evolution of political orders. American Political Development is, therefore, a useful lens through which to explore the era of Black Lives Matter, which is characterized by grassroots challenges to the proliferation of the American carceral state, the prison-industrial complex, the militarization of the police, and the ways that public goods are unequally distributed along racial lines. The papers presented in this Dialogues collection explore the impact of Black Lives Matter, particularly in terms of the historical processes and patterns of race politics that can contribute to our understandings of the intellectual history, contemporary politics, and future manifestations of Black Lives Matter.

Ideal Points and American Political Development: Beyond DW-NOMINATE

This article aims to persuade historically oriented political scientists that ideal point techniques such as DW-NOMINATE can illuminate much about politics and lawmaking and be very useful to better understanding some of the key questions put forward by American political development (APD) scholars. We believe that there are many lines of inquiry of interest to APD scholars where ideal point measure could be useful, but which have been effectively foreclosed because of the assumptions undergirding DW-NOMINATE. In particular, we focus on three issues as particularly important: (1) the assumption of linear change; (2) the collapsing of distinct policy issue areas into a single “ideology” score; and (3) an agnosticism toward policy development, institutional context, and historical periodization. We go over these issues in detail and propose that many of these concerns can be addressed by taking seriously the proposition that policy substance, historical and political context, and the temporal dimension of political processes be integrated into the core of our measures and analyses. We also discuss a set of techniques for addressing these issues in order to answer specific questions of broad interest to both APD scholars and other Americanists.

Ideas, Institutions, and the New Deal Constitutional Order

The intellectual schism between ideas and institutions has been nowhere more evident than in contemporary presidential studies. In sharp contrast to mainstream presidential studies, American political development scholars have viewed certain presidents as formative actors, who have redefined the social contract with rhetoric that has informed structural change. Examining the relationship between Franklin Roosevelt’s rhetoric and institutional reforms, this essay argues that FDR had a rather coherent understanding and program of reform that gave constitutional form to the progressive tradition born of the early twentieth century. The construction of the New Deal political order thus argues for the importance of probing the philosophical contours of institutional developments.

Institutions, Rulemaking, and the Politics of Judicial Retrenchment

This article examines the efforts of political and legal actors to scale back access to the courts and judicial authority in the decades since the rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the importance and consequences that such efforts have had for the judicial system and rights protections in the United States, public law and American Political Development (APD) scholars have only begun to study this phenomenon within existing theories of institutional change. Through an examination of efforts to reform procedural rules that govern courtroom access, adjudication, and potential remedies, this article presents evidence that both builds on and pushes this scholarship in new directions. In contrast to law and APD scholars who have promoted a ‘regime politics’ model of judicial authority that focuses on the interests of national elected officials and Supreme Court majorities, this article finds that actors pursuing retrenchment come from both within and outside the judiciary, evidencing a robust set of individuals and interests (far beyond judges and politicians) who might be considered “judicial” actors. Building on and complicating current understandings of the politics of retrenchment, moreover, I find that the groups involved in judicial retrenchment change significantly over time, are motivated by more than partisan backlash, and that the availability of malleable institutional “rules” enhances the likelihood of their success. Finally, I find that the processes of judicial retrenchment are distinctive but not static, unfolding in a series of methods for attempted change that are not only path dependent, but also path breaking.

Law and American Political Development

This essay reviews the recent volume edited by Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch, The Supreme Court and American Political Development(2006), as well as the broader literature by law scholars interested in American Political Development (APD). The Law and APD literature has advanced our knowledge about courts by placing attention on the importance of executive and legislative actors, and by providing political context to our understanding of judicial decision making. But this knowledge would be more powerful if it would embrace the broader APD field's orientation toward the importance of state and institutional autonomy for understanding politics and political change. Law and APD scholars could go further in examining the ways in which courts and judges act institutionally, and how the legal branch as an institution impacts American politics and state-building. In doing so, Law and APD scholars would contribute not only to our understanding of judicial decision making but also to our understanding of the place and importance of courts in American politics.

Mass opinion and American political development

Despite its origins in explorations of the political and institutional history that had become unfashionable in History departments, the Political Science subfield of American Political Development (APD) has drifted toward the “history‐from‐below” view against which it was originally a reaction. Perhaps this is a normal tendency in democratic cultures that ground their legitimacy on the will of the people. But it may also be due to a failure of APD scholars to appreciate that even in a (nominally) democratic country such as the United States, the state may acquire autonomy from the public will because of the vast scope of state activity, and the restricted ability of the people to monitor, understand, and control that activity. Philip E. Converse's signal contribution to the public‐opinion literature can thus be the starting point for a revision of American political history with an eye to the autonomy that political elites may gain from public ignorance of their actions.

Rethinking Periodization? APD and the Macro-History of the United States

Dividing American history into discrete periods dates to the first European colonists North America, several of whom variously declared their region or colony to represent a beginning,' a land of Canaan,' a New England, and so forth: in the New World is born a new history, as one early sermonizer had it.' Soon thereafter clerics and political leaders (often the same people) lamented their fellows' fall from grace; the dichotomy of golden age and descent into depravity, of Awakening and backsliding, been an American motif ever since. Eventually, the sweep of U.S. history was sorted on a chronological, rather than theological or eschatological, basis. For well over a century political historians have the main hewn to a familiar temporal script. The growing academic field of American Political Development (APD) holds as axiomatic that standard periodization schemes should be interrogated closely, if not abandoned wholesale. Nothing, write two leading APD scholars, has more effectively transformed the historical study of American politics than impatience with conventional demarcations of time.2 Yet most APD works generally follow an organizational pattern that was firmly established by the time of World War II, with the addition of the Sixties and variously denoted post1970s periods more recent years. Thus APD contributions to re(or de-) periodizing American history must take different form. This essay revisits the dominant periodization schemes the U.S. political past, then examines APD departures from the norm, both potential and realized.