American Political Development Research Articles

Media Policy, Structural Power, and Political Development at the US State-Corporate Interface

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.

Compared to what?: Setting American political development in comparative context

AbstractThe 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.

Educating Undergraduates for American Democracy: The Third Way Civics Approach

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

Movements and Parties: Critical Connections in American Political Development

Evolution of US public diplomacy: Domestic political determinants, priorities and new challenges

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.

Capitalism and the Creation of the U.S. Constitution

AbstractThis 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.

The Strange Career of Federal Indian Policy: Rural Politics, Native Nations, and the Path Away from Assimilation

AbstractU.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

Taking Account

The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920 by Ballard C. Campbell (review)

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

Monitoring American Federalism: The History of State Legislative Resistance, by Christian G. Fritz

The U.S. Constitution outlined a federal system of government but it neither drew a clear boundary between state and federal powers nor indicated clearly how disputes over that boundary would be authoritatively resolved. As a result, episodes contesting those two areas have been regular and central features of American political development since its founding. State governments have used various means to push back against perceived federal encroachments on their powers, and various entities have asserted the right to offer authoritative interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. In Monitoring American Federalism, Christian G. Fritz reminds readers of a misunderstood—and indeed nearly forgotten—mechanism by which state legislatures added their voices to national debates over constitutional federalism: interposition. During the ratification debates of 1787–1788, Anti-Federalists warned forcefully about the lack of a clear state–federal boundary and the apparent lack of mechanisms to enforce it. To tamp down those fears, the Constitution’s defenders needed to explain how American federalism would work and how states would avoid consolidation over time into a single national government. Fritz notes that, although the term interposition was not initially used by Alexander Hamilton or James Madison, eight of The Federalist essays they authored contain the details of its theory and practice. If the federal government attempted to exercise powers not granted to it by the Constitution, they argued, state officials would be sure to notice and would sound the alarm and communicate with other state governments and their representatives in Congress to spread awareness of the encroachment and to encourage them to enact countermeasures such as repealing the offending laws or even sponsoring amendments to add clarifying text to the Constitution.

Can Social Movements Save American Democracy? A Review Article

Abstract Recent scholarship on the fragility of American democracy has generally focused on political elites rather than the mass public. Sidney Tarrow's Movements and Parties offers an essential corrective to this view. Tarrow shows how that social movements have been central to historical patterns of democratization and democratic backsliding in American history and how movements have systematically interacted with political parties in ways that have profoundly shaped the American democratic experiment. Tarrow's historical survey reveals a recurring pattern of movements that often make tactical alliances with political parties and then provoke countermovements, and he elucidates the underappreciated importance of this pattern for American political development and the path of democratization and de-democratization in the United States.

Structural Racism, the USPS, and Voting by Mail On- and Off-Reservation in Arizona

AbstractDuring the 2020 election, voting by mail greatly expanded due to concerns with COVID-19. While voting by mail is relatively easy for most individuals, who have United States Postal Service (USPS) residential mail service, it is much more difficult for those with nonstandard mail service. In this article, we examine how decisions made by the USPS in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have resulted in deeply entrenched structural inequities in the access to mail services on the Navajo Nation in Arizona when compared to rural nonreservation communities. Most (89 percent) of current Post Offices were established during the settler colonial period, during which sites were chosen primarily to advance military objectives and serve the interests of Anglo-American settlers. The resulting inequitable pattern of postal access remains, resulting in inferior mail service on the Navajo Nation and adversely impacting many aspects of life. Post Offices are fewer and farther from each other on reservation communities; there are fewer service hours; and we show in a mail experiment that letters posted on reservations are slower and less likely to arrive. This research fits within the growing body of American political development research on path-dependent processes and “spatial racism” within geography.

Creating the executive budget process: What was Congress thinking?

AbstractThe recent centennial of the 1921 Budget and Accounting Act presents an opportunity to reconsider the importance of the federal executive budget to American political development. Of particular interest is the apparent shift in political authority from Congress to the president that is sometimes attributed to the Act. The 1921 Act generally marks the rise of the modern presidency, where the president received a durable grant of authority. We examine the congressional hearings and debates regarding the budget process from 1919 to 1921 to assess Congress's expectations of the new budget system it was creating. We show that Congress expected to benefit from the executive budget process and did not view it as a threat to its budget authority. Congress recognized that the executive branch had influence in the budget process, but it preferred presidential influence to department heads’ influence. The 1921 Act, at least initially, enhanced the budgeting capacities of both the president and Congress in mutually beneficial ways.

One Accident, One Mistake: Evangelicals, Religious Establishment, and American Political Development

It is widely conceded that the Supreme Court has struggled to create a coherent, consistent set of principles on which to base its decisions about the relationship between Church and State. This paper argues that what would help bring conceptual clarity to this contentious set of issues is a historically informed theory that can be labeled developmental, or structural. It presents such a theory by examining two sets of facts: First, a fact that most constitutional scholars have overlooked–that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were drafted and ratified during a period of relative religious calm in between periods of great evangelical fervor, namely the First and Second Great Awakenings (the “accident”). Second, as is well known, that the framers did not foresee the development of stable political parties (the “mistake”). This essay first briefly summarizes the state of the law in this area, and then examines the ways in which the Second Great Awakening combined this accident and this mistake to transform American culture and politics, including electoral politics, and the implications of that transformation.

The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754-1920 by Ballard C. Campbell

How has the power and authority of the American state changed over time? Ballard Campbell’s The Paradox of Power offers an essential addition to this rich debate in American political development scholarship. Campbell asks how a country with a significant antistatist tradition grew to have a more powerful state by the early twentieth century. In this sweeping history, Campbell addresses federal, state, and local government power, pointing to five factors that he views as integral to American state development: geography, war, economic development and crises, identity and citizenship, and political capacity. One major strength of the book is its holistic examination of the activities of all levels of government from 1754 through 1920. After recounting how the colonies effectively became “little republics” (31) with significant powers of their own, Campbell describes the evolution of state government activity, such as exercising “police powers” and promoting economic development in the first half of the nineteenth century; contributing to the Union cause during the Civil War (including outfitting regiments and caring for wounded veterans or the families of those killed); promoting education, public health, and regulation in the Gilded Age; and imposing direct taxation and turning to executive leadership during the Progressive Era. Focusing on cities, Campbell explains how they provided an expanding array of services over time, such as infrastructure development and maintenance, education, policing, fire protection, water systems, garbage collection, and parks.

Selling Selective Anti-Statism: The Conservative Persuasion Campaign and the Transformation of American Politics since the 1920s

Beginning in the 1920s, a network of conservatives who sought to limit the federal government's domestic responsibilities mobilized modern persuasion techniques to belittle the government's efforts to address domestic economic and social problems. Over several decades, the conservative persuasion campaign delivered billions of messages disparaging domestic programs. To assess the campaign's impact, this article proposes a new method for evaluating efforts to shape public opinion that focuses on the impact of message repetition at scale. Applying this approach, the article argues that by the late 1940s the conservative persuasion campaign had primed many Americans to embrace a strand of selective anti-statism pairing support for a robust military and foreign policy establishment with disdain for domestic economic security programs. The derisive rhetoric the conservative persuasion campaign fostered and the selective anti-statism it fueled became defining features of American politics and shaped American political development for decades.

The South in American Political Development

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in southern distinctiveness within the United States and its ramifications for the nation. This review provides an analysis of recent works and the interpretive issues they raise. I argue that collectively they have broken with the long-established image of the South in political science, the study of which was long organized around the region's anticipated convergence to the patterns of the post–New Deal North. Recent texts have instead emphasized an enduring commitment to white supremacy and a determining influence for the region in shaping national politics and institutions. I identify two broad pathways of southern influence and discuss the debates over its sources. I then discuss recent works on southern regimes and the debates these have provoked. I conclude by suggesting that overcoming the limits of recent works will ultimately undermine some of our more sweeping interpretive claims and foundational premises.

Manufacturing a Protestant Consensus: Religion and Regime Entrenchment in the Eisenhower Era

AbstractThe party regime concept is central to the study of American political development. Yet many questions about the processes through which party regimes are created, maintained, and dismantled remain unanswered. This article argues that religious bodies have historically played an important role in these processes. Specifically, I demonstrate that “mainline” Protestant groups made three distinct contributions to the entrenchment of the post–New Deal Democratic regime. First, the National Council of Churches (NCC) credibly reframed Democratic policy commitments as embodying universal values (as opposed to the preferences of favored interest groups). Second, the NCC's economic policy arm, which included representatives from business, labor, and the clergy, successfully created the impression of an overwhelming elite consensus in favor of center-left economic policies. Third, the NCC used its moral authority to empower the moderate Republican opposition while simultaneously marginalizing the party's well-funded and potentially influential right wing. The NCC was one of many civil society groups that opposed the GOP right's attempts to roll back the New Deal. But the professional diversity of its membership, its ability to frame its pronouncements in religious terms, and its links to the Protestant grassroots made it arguably the most effective.

The Saints and the State: The Mormon Troubles in Illinois

The Saints and the State: The Mormon Troubles in Illinois

WALTER DEAN BURNHAM: In Memory and Appreciation

Dean Burnham, who died in San Antonio in October at the age of ninety-two, was an active and enthusiastic supporter of this journal from its inception. His loss deprives editors and managing editors of his energetic and assiduous counsel, especially regarding any writings or commentaries devoted to political parties, elections, political realignments, political polling, and the deep literature on the evolution of American democracy from originalist founding days to the rise of reactionary recent presidents.Because this journal was originally housed at MIT, it was both convenient and illuminating to stroll into Burnham’s office and ask his opinion about a submission or about an idea for a special issue, or to request advice about some aspect of American or European political development. Burnham would always answer the precise questions and then, unprompted, provide context and a compendium of intellectual discourse related to the inquiry. He was integral to the growth of the JIH from its formative years, and ever since.A student of Harvard University’s V.O. Key, Burnham in 1965 published a defining article on declining voter turnout, “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe,” in the American Political Science Review. Among his many seminal books were Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (1970), Democracy in the Making: American Government and Politics (1986), and Voting in American Elections: The Shaping of the American Political Universe Since 1788 (2009). In 2014, he co-wrote—with Thomas Ferguson, a former student—“Americans Are Sick to Death of Both Parties: Why Our Politics Are in Worse Shape Than We Thought,” a study of the 2014 American elections. He also commented in print on the 2016 “change election” that brought Donald Trump to the presidency. As the New York Times’ obituary indicated, Burnham was “one of the most influential political scientists of his generation.” Among Burnham’s many intellectual contributions to this journal was his path-breaking article, “Those High Nineteenth-Century American Voting Turnouts: Fact or Fiction?” XVI (1986), 613–644.Before joining the MIT political science department in 1971, Burnham had taught at Boston University, Kenyon College, Haverford College, and Washington University. In 1988, he departed MIT for the University of Texas, Austin. His students there were as devoted to his breadth of learning and his clever wit as those at MIT had been.Burnham was profoundly interdisciplinary in his interests, his discourse, and his approach to political and social history. He extolled the craft of translating compelling theories and concepts into accessible articles and books, thus contributing mightily to the fashioning and qualitative uplifting of this journal for decades. The JIH’s readers and editors will sadly miss his profound insights and unparalleled wisdom.