American Political Development Research Articles

The inferential opportunity of specificity: theory and empirical causality in American Political Development

The context-specificity of the research field of American Political Development (APD) can make it an especially fertile ground for empirical assessment of causal explanations of politics using observational data. Despite an ongoing—though diminishing—quantitative–qualitative divide in political science scholarship, notable agreement has emerged across that divide on the imperative for “rich theories” with multiple implications in the assessment of causal arguments when experimentation is impossible. Drawing on the underlying logic of that agreement, I consider how and why APD can both benefit from and add value to the use of design-based quantitative approaches developed within the potential-outcomes framework for causal inference. Among the central considerations are the possible limits on direct assessment of historical macro-level causal hypotheses and the imperative for multi-level and context-specific theorizing to enable empirical analyses. Also considered is the value of rigorous qualitative work to justify assumptions and measurement strategies in quantitative causal inference analyses. Illustrations of the advocated multiple-implication, multiple-method approach are drawn from my previous work on the development of woman suffrage in the United States. That integrative approach suggests the benefit of continued development of broader toolkits for explanation of complex, contingent, and endogenous political processes.

Polarized Families, Polarized Parties: Contesting Values and Economics in American Politics

In Polarized Families, Polarized Parties, the Fairfield University political scientist Gwendoline M. Alphonso examines the politics of family values in the United States across the twentieth century, focusing on three key periods: the Progressive Era, the post–World War II years, and the span from 1970 to the present. Her goal is to study American political party development through charting ideational shifts in how parties discuss family. Alphonso uses qualitative discourse analysis of congressional committee hearings in which legislators discuss specific family cases to discover “patterns in the content of how legislators talk about, illustrate, and justify their policy responses” (p. 6). Alphonso's focus on which family examples legislators drew on during policy discussions is innovative and illuminating; for example, she finds that in the post-1970 period, legislators from both political parties disproportionately drew black family examples “from those on welfare with an extramarital family structure,” with 32 percent of black family cases including welfare compared to just 5 percent of white family cases (p. 149). She also examines congressional bills addressing family sexuality, family structure, parenting, family property and wealth, and public assistance.

American political development and new challenges of causal inference

Members of the subfield of American Political Development (APD), like other political scientists, are confronting the identification revolution in the social sciences. They are exploring whether and how evolving standards of causal inference can shape the research the subfield performs. Almost by definition, APD research involves analyzing observational data, where variation in the data is provided by ‘nature’, and thus faces the formidable challenges that follow from the inability of the researcher to manipulate the assignment of units of interest to treatment and control conditions. Fortunately, the very scope of historical analysis can create opportunities to take advantage of natural experiments and exogenous inputs that alter the course of events to produce more convincing causal analyses. Yet, historical investigation presents unique challenges to standard methodological approaches, certainly no less the case when causal identification is prioritized. Understanding and confronting these challenges is essential to taking advantage of inferential opportunities presented by historical data, as our consideration of scholarship on economic development demonstrates.

Comparing America: Reflections on Democracy across Subfields

Is America in a period of democratic decline? I argue that there is an urgent need to consider the United States in comparative perspective, and that doing so is necessary to contextualize and understand the quality of American democracy. I describe two approaches to comparing the United States: the first shows how the United States stacks up to other countries, while the second uses the theories and tools of comparative politics to examine relationships between institutions, actors, and democratic outcomes. I then draw on research in three literatures—clientelism and corruption, capitalism and redistribution, and race and ethnic politics and American Political Development—to lay out a research agenda for closing the gap between the subfields of American and comparative politics. In doing so, I also argue for richer engagement between academics and the public sphere, as opportunities for scholars to provide commentary and analysis about contemporary politics continue to expand.

Game theory and the study of American political development

Game theoretic analyses of American institutions and American political development largely are disconnected enterprises, yet they share many points of contact and thus opportunities for fruitful exchange. In this essay I discuss the value and limits of formalization for the enterprise of institutional analysis that those fields have in common. I conceptualize two broad approaches that formal modelers have taken to study institutions—institutions as game forms, and institutions as equilibria—that have been relatively successful for understanding institutional choice and stability. At the same time, formal modelers have been less successful in addressing institutional change and development, topics about which APD has much to offer. Overall, I contend that crosstalk between the two fields can benefit them both.

Let’s not conflate APD with political history, and other reflections on “Causal Inference and American Political Development”

American political development (APD) is a distinctive field of research that should not be conflated with, or flattened into a caricature of, historical research that uses historical data to make flawed causal inferences. It is a problem-driven inquiry into the dynamics of American politics, a substantive and theoretical exploration of how American politics has changed over time. APD research uses diverse types of data from a wide range of sources and employs multiple methodologies and analytical approaches, as appropriate. Because APD is a substantive and theoretical inquiry and not a method per se, there is no a priori reason to think that design-based causal inference cannot play a valuable role in studies of America’s political development, just as advanced quantitative methods have. However, while APD research does often seek to explain outcomes and establish causal relationships, that is not its only goal, and its orientation toward causality, causes, and theory tends to differ from much of the work in the causal inference tradition. This essay endeavors to clear up some of the confusion by offering the author’s perspective on what APD does well and how it does it. It also suggests how experimental research and APD research might be brought into more fruitful intellectual exchange and concludes with some thoughts on the value of methodological and intellectual pluralism.

Causal inference and American political development: common challenges and opportunities

The causal inference (CI) movement has forced political scientists to think far more seriously about what can be learned from a particular research design and to be more attentive to making design choices that allow for credible causal inferences. At the same time, the rise of CI has given rise to the concern that political scientists have been better at making particular contributions isolating the effect of a single independent variable than at developing and testing theories that help us understand how these diverse findings fit together. For all of American political development’s (APD’s) distance from the causal inference revolution, a parallel can be drawn between the state of APD today and some of the concerns expressed about the broader state of political science in the wake of the rise of CI. This essay considers ways in which APD and CI can each be enriched through greater mutual engagement, suggesting that one should not dichotomize research into mutually exclusive categories of “well-identified research that makes credible causal claims” and “purely descriptive” APD studies.

Causal inference and American political development: contrasts and complementarities

Causal inference and American political development (APD) are widely separated and (to some) fundamentally incompatible tendencies within political science. In this paper, we explore points of connection between those two perspectives, while also highlighting differences that are not so easily bridged. We stress that both causal inference and APD are centrally interested in questions of causation, but they approach causation with very different ontological and epistemological commitments. We emphasize how the sort of detailed, contextualized, and often qualitative knowledge privileged by APD can promote credible causal (and descriptive) inferences, but also that scholars of causal inference can benefit from alternate conceptions of causality embraced by APD work. We illustrate with two empirical examples from our own research: devising weights for quota-sampled opinion polls and estimating the political effects of the Tennessee Valley Authority. We conclude that bringing APD and causal inference together on more equal terms may require a broader perspective on causation than is typical of scholarship in the causal-inference tradition.

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.

Bad Role Models? American Influence on Israeli Criminal Justice Policy

In this Article I rely on the public concept of policy transfer to examine the impact of American legislation, litigation, and politics on the Israeli criminal justice landscape. The Article identifies four eras: 1. The Great Light from the West - the ascent of American criminal justice as British influence fades; 2. The Decade of Rights - a misperception of America as a paragon of criminal justice rights and protections that results in influences on Israeli jurisprudence; 3. The Fad Period - a time at which Israeli scholars and policymakers import punitive trends from the U.S., particularly in the area of innovation in policing and victims; rights; and 4. The Era of Contention - a time at which Israeli scholars and policymakers bring with them critical perspectives on the U.S. and Israeli begins to question, and deviate from, its American counterpart. I conclude that changing patterns of elite networking can explain why Israel, initially in thrall to what it perceived as a paragon of civil rights, eventually parted ways with the U.S. as a source of influence: the emergence of a class of academics, public defenders, and policymakers educated in the U.S. and conversant in American criminological literature critical of the punitive turn and mass incarceration brought about informed critiques of the American model and led to a sobering up of the Israeli policymaking world. The Article proceeds to explain the relationship between the two countries through the framework of American Political Development. Following Malcolm Feeley's analysis, the Article finds that both countries – self-defining as developed – actually exhibit features of developing countries in the context of criminal justice: high levels of interpersonal violence and intolerance, a constant problem of police overreach, a legacy of racism and exclusion, high availability of weapons, and political corruption. This might explain Israel's fascination with American criminal justice not as an inspiration, but as cultural recognition of the similarities between the countries.

Zachary Callen, Railroads and American Political Development: Infrastructure, Federalism, and State Building

Zachary Callen, <i>Railroads and American Political Development: Infrastructure, Federalism, and State Building</i>

Staying Tuned: LGBTQIA Politics in the Trump Era

Since Donald Trump took office in 2017, the White House has issued several clear anti-LGBTQIA signals and initiatives. Reflecting on Trump's election as U.S. president, many political scientists have analyzed his rise in the context of the literature on American political development (e.g., Skowronek 2017) and comparative governments (e.g., Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Some of this work has received significant media attention and attained a popular readership. The American political development analyses have often focused on the lens of political time and potential party realignment, exploring the possibility of a “disjunctive presidency,” which foretells the demise of the coalition that has enabled the Republican Party to dominate U.S. politics since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Comparative work in the discipline argues that Trump initiatives are threatening to democratic principles, portending a turn toward authoritarianism that parallels the rise of right-wing authoritarian leaders across the globe.

The Trump Presidency and American Democracy: A Historical and Comparative Analysis

To many observers across the political spectrum, American democracy appears under threat. What does the Trump presidency portend for American politics? How much confidence should we have in the capacity of American institutions to withstand this threat? We argue that understanding what is uniquely threatening to democracy requires looking beyond the particulars of Trump and his presidency. Instead, it demands a historical and comparative perspective on American politics. Drawing on insights from the fields of comparative politics and American political development, we argue that Trump’s election represents the intersection of three streams in American politics: polarized two-party presidentialism; a polity fundamentally divided over membership and status in the political community, in ways structured by race and economic inequality; and the erosion of democratic norms. The current political circumstance threatens the American democratic order because of the interactive effects of institutions, identity, and norm-breaking.

Suffrage Petitioning as Formative Practice: American Women Presage and Prepare for the Vote, 1840–1940

The American woman suffrage movement remade the U.S. Constitution and effected the broadest expansion of voting eligibility in the nation's history. Yet it did more than change laws and citizenship. It also plausibly shaped participatory patterns before and after the winning of voting rights for women. Drawing upon the idea of formative practice and reporting on a range of historical materials—including an original data set of 2,157 petitions sent to the U.S. Congress from 1874 to 1920 concerning women's voting rights—we focus on woman suffrage petitioning as both presaging the practice of voting and, in a sense, preparing tens of thousands of women for that activity. Our analyses reveal that, before 1920, suffrage petitioning activity was heightened in general and midterm election years (especially among Republican-leaning constituencies), suffrage petitioning both enabled and reflected organization in critical western states, and that post-suffrage women's turnout was immediately and significantly higher in states with greater pre-suffrage petitioning (controlling for a range of political, organizational, and demographic variables). In its claims, symbolism, habits, and temporality, suffrage petitioning differed from other petitioning in American political development and marked a formative practice for women on their way to voting.

How the West Was Won: Competition, Mobilization, and Women’s Enfranchisement in the United States

A long-standing puzzle in American political development is why western states extended voting rights to women before states in the East. Building on theories of democratization and women’s suffrage, I argue that politicians have incentives to seek out new voters in competitive political environments. A strong suffrage movement reinforces these incentives by providing information and infrastructure that parties can capitalize on in future elections. If politicians believe they can mobilize the latent female vote, then large movements and competitive political environments should produce franchise expansion. Using data on legislative decisions pertaining to suffrage in 45 states from 1893 to 1920, I show that political competition and movement strength are robust predictors of support for women’s suffrage in state legislatures. In the West, fluid partisan politics and relatively strong mobilization produced early reform. Since states determine who voted for national, state, and local offices, these decisions mattered for advancing political equality.

The ABCs of Political Development: Notes Toward an ABCD Manifesto

The study of American political development (APD) is inherently comparative. APD has its roots in a set of observations and questions about a set of comparatively distinctive characteristics of American politics. The subfields of APD and comparative politics share common origins in the late-twentieth century reaction to behavioralism and modernization theory. Although they subsequently diverged, they are increasingly being brought together in works that treat the United States as a case in comparative studies. In particular, comparisons of American, British, and Canadian political development offer a fruitful path toward connecting these fields and deriving new insights from the comparative study of political development.

Railroads and American Political Development: Infrastructure, Federalism, and State Building

Railroads and American Political Development: Infrastructure, Federalism, and State Building

Railroads and American Political Development: Infrastructure, Federalism, and State Building

Railroads and American Political Development: Infrastructure, Federalism, and State Building

The American Frontier as State of Nature

John Locke claims that “in the beginning, all the world was America.” If this were, in fact, the case, then the early American frontier ought to resemble the state of nature that Locke describes. Louis Hartz finds in early American settlement a sort of instinctive Lockeanism, while Frederick Jackson Turner sees in the frontier the primary determining factor in American development. Combining the two suggests that American society may well have developed along Lockean lines, but only if the frontier was in fact at least an approximation of Locke’s state of nature. The frontier does resemble such a state in certain respects, though Locke’s concepts of natural law and justice are conspicuously absent, or at least very weak. This helps to explain why the Americanized version of Locke described by Hartz, rather than a more accurate and complete reading, became the dominant ideological force in early American political development.