ABSTRACT Should voting rights be tied to citizenship? Over 20 million noncitizens pay taxes, own businesses and homes, send their children to schools, and make countless economic, social, and cultural contributions every day. Yet they cannot vote to select politicians who make policy that affects their daily lives. Today, noncitizens currently vote legally in local elections in 22 cities and towns in Maryland, Vermont, California, and Washington, DC. These practices have their roots in another little-known fact: noncitizens voted in 40 states at some point in time from the Founding until 1926. Noncitizens voted not only in local elections but also in state and federal elections, and they could hold office such as alderman. “Alien suffrage” was seen as a means to facilitate immigrant incorporation and citizenship, which it did in practice. This article examines the politics and practices of immigrant voting in the US, chronicling the rise and fall—and reemergence—of immigrant voting rights. It explores arguments for and against noncitizen voting, reviews evidence about its impact on policy and American political development, and considers its implications for immigration policy and democratic practice. Debate about immigrant voting rights can be viewed as a microcosm of broader debate about immigration, citizenship, and democracy reflected in scholarship and political conflict embroiling the nation, which holds valuable lessons for scholars and policy makers today. I argue, in a country where “no taxation without representation” was a rallying cry for revolution, such a proposition might not be so outlandish upon further scrutiny.

The Advantages of taking the Long View: American Political Development and Higher Education

Memes are becoming increasingly commonplace in social media and on the Internet. According to research, it can act as a form of entertainment and a way for individuals to communicate an interest, allude to a specific situation, or express their mood. Research documents the extensive use and popularity of memes in education, where instructors use them to explain complex concepts to students. These created memes, in turn, can foster a sense of community among students, making them feel connected and part of a larger educational environment. However, scant research exists within higher education on how college students make sense of their learning process with the use of memes. In this paper, we employ sensemaking as a lens to explore how students interpreted their learning through the creation of memes, as it relates to American political development. We found that students forged meaningful connections to the real-world, making their assignments relevant to them. Although this study did not conduct interviews to gauge their perceptions, it does show that memes can serve as a tool to facilitate learning. This study highlights the need for future research to explore the use of memes in tandem with online or printed textbook materials to enhance learning.

Abstract This paper documents how administrative geography functioned as a strategic political instrument during post–Civil War Reconstruction. I document sixty-seven counties established by Republican-controlled state legislatures across the South that concentrated Republican and African American voters. Historical boundary data and election returns show that Republicans created new counties in areas where they held strong support, added legislative seats that strengthened their majorities, and expanded opportunities for African American political representation at the state and local level. This partisan model of administrative unit proliferation advances our understanding of institutional design during contested democratization. The findings contribute to research on American political development, democratization, redistricting, and administrative design politics—showing that county creation functioned not merely as administrative policy but as a tool in partisan competition with lasting consequences for American political geography.

The National Road was an early, but failed, attempt by the United States Congress to build an interstate highway. The Road, which extended through the newly formed western states, led to fierce debate over two interconnected issues. First, should Congress authorize additional routes that would expand the Road beyond its original western route? Second, should the Road remain under federal control or should it be given to the states through which it ran? I find that partisanship was the most consistent predictor of a legislator’s position on these questions. In addition to partisanship, legislators from districts with a larger slave population were also more likely to oppose the Road. Distributive politics also informed representative’s behavior ad those whose districts were more proximate to the Road were more of these projects. In sum, an examination of the politics of the National Road helps to shed light on the interconnection of partisanship, slavery, and distributive politics in early America and its implications for early American political development.

Scholarly work in American politics has yet to confront one of the nation’s starkest inequalities: lethal violence. The risk falls disproportionately on Black Americans, but much like poverty and inequality, lethal violence is a broadly American problem that African Americans are disproportionately likely to experience. The lack of attention to life-threatening violence has limited our understanding of race, criminal justice, and the nature of the American state. We draw on work in American political development and racial politics to extend a racialized state failure framework for understanding the United States as a high-violence society. Life-threatening violence declined dramatically in the nineteenth century in countries where state building involved the integrated consolidation of centralized violence monopolization and universal male suffrage. Such efforts faltered in the US, however, and violence thrived. We argue that this racialized state failure is the result of two reinforcing features of American politics: anti-transformative racial orders and institutional fragmentation. Fragmentation has long provided opportunities for anti-transformative racial orders to limit national intervention in violence control and enfranchisement, even during critical junctures when institutions are less determinate, and actions by decision makers are more likely to generate change. We illustrate the disruption of state building by racial orders, which minimized the state’s capacity to delegitimize violent self-help during two critical junctures in the US: Reconstruction and the crime wave of the mid- to late twentieth century. The resulting institutional configuration, which we refer to as forced localism, reinforces the jurisdictional authority of highly constrained state and local institutions in violence attenuation. The consequence is exceptionally high rates of serious violence and a harsh and exclusionary criminal justice system, with Black Americans exceptionally vulnerable to both.

Much theorizing about patterns of urban governance portrays urban governing arrangements as unified political orders of some kind, be they progressive, neoliberal, or defined by power structures such as urban regimes or growth machines. In this study of racial governance in postwar Chicago, I borrow from literature on American political development to advance a multiple orders perspective in which racial governance is conceptualized as combinations of overlapping elements, at times in conflict with one another. Examining three distinct periods during the postwar era, I show how intersections among multiple political orders resulted in change at certain times and stability, or the appearance of stability, in others. Against arguments that portray urban political development as long periods of equilibrium punctuated at times by brief episodes of change, I find seemingly stable arrangements to be more precarious than they appear, as multiple orders impinge on one another and create frictions that can be key sources of change.

Abstract The American state was a republic of patrons and clients throughout the Long Nineteenth Century. Unequal ties of hierarchy and reciprocity went far beyond the partisan administration and electioneering that we associate with the spoils system. As a form of “belated feudalism,” clientelism proved resilient because it was a familial property relation embedded within a diverse and changing society. Officeholding politics subsumed a host of racialized and gendered dependents—White men of lower status, women, children, and the enslaved—into the penumbra of the state, which itself was governed via the extended party household. What elements of patron–client relations endured or changed from the colonial inheritance until the New Deal? This article reinterprets the republic’s classical age, first, by exploring the origins of party patrimonialism, and then, by examining the dynamics of officeholding political economy and the rise of markets for patronage. Political rule before the New Deal had a different orientation. Clientelism fused older lineages of dependence with the kind of profit-seeking exchanges typical of the burgeoning capitalist economy. It was this mixed state, at once patrimonial and capitalist, that proved so difficult to reform at the turn of the twentieth century.

As student engagement has been down because of increased phone use, finding a way to increase student engagement is paramount to teaching the next generation of students. One way to do engage students is through gamification or introducing games into classes to teach students. While gamification has been used successfully in the past, there has not been a study examining the effect of a fantasy-sports model on student engagement. This study aimed to close that gap by introducing a fantasy-sports draft to teach students US presidents. Surveys, teacher interviews, and classroom observations were used to conduct this study and determine the effect of a fantasy-sports draft on student engagement. Results of this study show that a fantasy sports model does increase student engagement for both students who have not been exposed to a fantasy sport before and for students who regularly play fantasy sports. Implications include adding to the literature of learner-centric as opposed to teacher-centric classrooms and filling a gap in the literature.

Structural questions about the undergraduate political science major have spurred debates in the field for more than thirty years. Today, resurgent growth of unusually sharp threats to American democracy fuel familiar curricular questions with new urgency. However, the combined effects of inertia, bureaucratic hurdles, and resource constraints often limit the ability of departments to respond with meaningful programmatic changes. In this article, we describe our experience creating a “loosely sequenced” core curriculum within one subfield – implemented without making any changes in official major requirements and with the support of only two faculty members – and provide a model for how interested faculty might design a cohesive curriculum that leverages extant local expertise and disciplinary specializations to offer students rigorous, timely tools for interpreting the contemporary political world. We explore the benefits and limitations of this approach through a case study highlighting our core curriculum in the subfield of American Political Development.

This article illuminates an underappreciated political dimension of capitalism by elaborating media policy as a site for the dynamic interaction of corporate power and the state. Synthesizing Marxian analyses of monopoly capital, American political development (APD) perspectives on public policymaking, and communication studies conceptions of media systems as fields of democratic struggle, I trace the institutional mechanisms that enable corporate media interests to reinforce systemic imperatives and maintain political-economic dominance. I illustrate my argument with examples from the Telecommunications Act of 1996. My analysis sharpens APD’s critical edge by defining path dependency, policy feedback, and policy drift as processes through which capital leverages structural power to fend off political challenges under changing economic, social, and technological conditions. State-sanctioned ownership and control of news outlets, communication platforms, and information networks furnish a unique mechanism for influencing the structural terms of public discourse on all issues, including media policy. This implicates corporate media power in the ongoing US political communication crisis and as a central force in the entrenchment of inegalitarian and undemocratic social relations. Lending greater theoretical coherence and empirical grounding to these material and ideological dynamics historicizes public communication and highlights contingent political openings for radical engagement with media policy.

Scholars debate whether the Reconstruction Amendments constituted a Second Founding, a revolutionary break with the original Constitution, or a fulfillment of it. Most conservatives contend that it is Progressives and liberals in the 20th century who truly broke with the U.S. Constitution. This article contends first, that a focus on citizenship, the fundamental political identity of members of a republic, shows that Reconstruction was more a Second Founding than a fulfillment of the First Founding. Second, the Reconstruction amendments and statutes implanted the views of those who saw the Constitution as a means for realizing the goals of the Declaration of Independence more firmly into the Constitution. Third, while Reconstruction was the largest turning point in American political development in U.S. history, its reforms also provide a bridge between the goals and principles of the First Founding and the 20th century’s constitutional reformers. Finally, the article concludes that this history makes the quest to secure equal citizenship, with respect for the rights of all, central to the American constitutional enterprise.

Abstract The recent crisis of democracy in the United States and around the world has highlighted the value of both historical and comparative analysis and brought the subfields of American political development and comparative politics into frequent conversation with each other. In fact, these subfields emerged from common origins and draw on similar conceptual and methodological tools. This essay identifies the historical and intellectual connections between the two fields and suggests the emerging possibilities of bringing the cross-national study of political development onto a common platform. It then draws out some themes that emerge from this pathway and considers how these themes might point the way toward a more systematic enterprise that can help illuminate some of the most pressing challenges of a turbulent political era.

It is one of few statements upon which Americans left, right, and center agree: The nation faces a civic crisis. Polarization, rage, and militancy vie with cynicism, disengagement, and despair in the much-vaunted battle for America’s political soul—all while trampling grace, deliberation, and cooperation underfoot. What can and should our institutions of higher education do to address this situation? Such a question demands at least as many responses as there are distinctive functions of higher education. This article explains one effort to answer it with reference to the sector’s most visible—and arguably most essential—field of endeavor: undergraduate teaching and learning. The Third Way Civics initiative (3WC) unites institutions across the country in an experimental approach to civic learning in college, centered on a one-semester, credit-bearing course on American political and social development across time. Orchestrated by the Minnesota Humanities Center (MHC) and funded by MHC, the Teagle Foundation, and Lumina Foundation, 3WC directly fosters the embrace and development of several core commitments and building blocks identified by MJCSL guest editors as essential to healthy civic identity, including commitments to liberal democracy, personal integrity, and public-minded self-reflection, and building-block capacities for engaging constructively across differences and for active, collaborative acquisition of democratic knowledge, habits, and skills. In these ways, 3WC responds not only to pundits’ predictions of a civic apocalypse, but to what surveys reveal to be a growing (and far more hopeful) desire among students for a practically democratic education: one that positions them for economic success but also prepares them for lives of public purpose and productive citizenship.

Movements and Parties: Critical Connections in American Political Development

Public diplomacy remains one of the most dynamic and important areas of the modern US foreign policy. As such, the US public diplomacy, — its institutional structure, principles of functioning, key priorities, etc. — attracts increasing attention within both Russian and foreign academic literature. However, for a more complete understanding of the contemporary US public diplomacy specifics and prospects, it seems appropriate to try to fit it into a broader context of the evolution of the US political system in general. The first section of the paper identifies the major domestic political factors that determined the development of the US foreign policy mechanism, as well as the key stages of its evolution. The author argues that one of the key trends in the almost 250-year history of the American political system development was its gradual democratization, aimed to promote inclusion of a larger section of population in political processes. The second section examines the role of public diplomacy within the framework of the contemporary US foreign policy. The author notes that the latest developments in information and communication technologies have turned publicity and PR-campaigns into the most important factors of domestic political competition in the United States in the 21st century. The Internet and social networks have opened up virtually unlimited opportunities for political campaigning both inside and outside the state, giving a new impetus to the development of the US public diplomacy. At the same time, digital technologies have also generated new challenges, raising the problem of ensuring information security in the face of expansion of social networks. In this regard, the third section touches upon the issues of evaluating the effectiveness of the US public diplomacy. The author concludes that in terms of possible directions for further research the interactions between the United States and the EU countries which share common values are of particular importance. This may allow for a better understanding of the possibilities and limits of the US public diplomacy tools based on the institutions of a developed civil society.

Abstract This article engages with scholars working on the history of capitalism and with scholars of American political development to form a historical materialist perspective on the creation of the American federal government. First, it returns to the debate about the state in capitalist society to develop an approach for theorizing the relations between class, capitalism, and states. Next, it addresses the position of American capitalism in the 1780s, arguing that it was still in a long transition phase. After this, it reinterprets the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in the context of the long and uneven history of American capitalist development. I argue that the U.S. Constitution created the foundations of a state that would serve capitalist interests, including capitalist slave owners, but, at the same time, provided some space for social relations of production not yet fully subordinated to the power of capitalism to coexist.

Abstract U.S. national policies toward Native Americans followed a zig-zag path of change from 1889 to 1970. How do we explain policymakers’ unsteady attraction to the rights of Native Nations? I argue that in precarious circumstances, Native Americans forged interest-based political coalitions with non-Native American western rural interests. At times, this cross-racial, interest-based coalition successfully challenged the power of non-Native American eastern ideologues. These findings advance our understanding of the interplay of race and federalism. Also, these findings illustrate the unique importance of Native Nations for American political development. This article presents quantitative and qualitative analyses of a new dataset on federal Indian policy. It also reviews existing historical scholarship.

Taking Account

Reviewed by: The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920 by Ballard C. Campbell William D. Adler (bio) Keywords State-building, Early national state, Role of Government The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920. By Ballard C. Campbell. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. 392. Paper, $34.95.) Scholars of the early U.S. have long been interested in how state-building occurred, but a massive revival of attention to the subject in the past twenty years has produced a wave of important research. The Paradox of Power enters this conversation with an impressive contribution to our understanding of the early national state through a synthetic analysis of how [End Page 340] government grew, not only nationally but at the local and state levels as well. Ballard Campbell argues in this book that American state-building has been characterized by a paradox between theory and action: a strong commitment to anti-statist values on the one hand, with a practical necessity for enhanced state action on the other. Those immediate needs, such as physical infrastructure, security, education, and others, led over time to increased state capacity as an administrative apparatus was built to handle these various functions, he argues. The anti-statist values continued apace in our culture but ultimately could not arrest the growth of government. Campbell traces these shifts from the colonial period all the way through the early twentieth century, covering well-trodden soil on how government expanded at the local, state, and national levels. The book contains a wealth of information on what government did and how it did it, including an original collection of state-level actions (contained in the Appendix) that will be of much use to scholars. The greatest contribution of this work will be for those looking for a general treatment of the subject material, as it covers a wide range of time and a similarly wide range of governmental activities. Students in advanced undergraduate courses or graduate students who need an overview of state-building throughout early American history will benefit from reading this work. As for its contributions to the scholarly literature, since it is a work of synthesis, scholars will most benefit from the above mentioned dataset on state actions as well as wrestling with its argument about the "paradox" of American state-building, although even this is familiar to students of these questions. For example, in his work Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ, 2015), Gary Gerstle makes a similar contention about the tension in the Constitution between personal liberties and limited government on the one hand, versus the notion of "the public good" that was more prevalent at the state level. In the field of American political development, political scientists have long debated these questions as well; most recently, in Stephen Skrowronek's Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive (Oxford, UK, 2021), the authors home in on the noteworthy friction between the "unity" in executive strength within the constitutional framework as compared to the large administrative apparatus that undermines that theoretical unity. No doubt, Campbell's thesis must be situated alongside these others and is one scholars must contend with. [End Page 341] Campbell has produced an important work that should be read by scholars of the early republic who are interested in continuing to explore these fundamental debates. In particular, Chapters 3–6 will be worthwhile for readers of this journal as Campbell moves from the founding of the republic through to the cusp of the Civil War. We will likely continue debating the nature of state-building in early America for many years to come. William D. Adler William D. Adler is associate professor of political science at Northeastern Illinois University. He is the author of Engineering Expansion: The U.S. Army and Economic Development, 1787–1860 (Philadelphia, 2021) as well as articles on the early United States, the American presidency, and American political development. Copyright © 2023 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic