In this article we defend the importance of the concept of ‘stateness’ in scholarly understanding of political democratization. We argue that because processes of political democratization in different spatio-temporal settings often share important similarities they are therefore comparable. We investigate this proposition by comparing the process of American political democratization with those of other liberal democracies, old and new. We review extant accounts of the historical process of American democratization – including those addressing American exceptionalism, class structures, multiple traditions, social movements, and international pressures – before presenting an alternative comparative account based on the idea of stateness. Attention to stateness problems defined along legal, bureaucratic and ideological dimensions and derived from both the classic Weberian perspective on the state and the more recent ‘third wave’ of democratization theory help to place the long American experience of democratization in comparative perspective. This finding illuminates some of the common political challenges in the construction of liberal democracies, old and new.