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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 August 2022
This short article assesses the current “state of the field” in light of recent political events. I argue that the focus of American political development (APD) on both time and institutional conflict makes it a valuable approach for theorizing about the trajectory of American politics.
1 APD, like most “historical institutionalist studies focus[es] on the interplay of specific structuring institutions—quite variously defined—and the actions of specific political agents over substantial periods of time.” Smith, Rogers, “Substance and Methods in APD Research,” Studies in American Political Development 17 (Spring 2003): 111–15; 111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 For more on this point, see Orren, Karen and Skowronek, Stephen, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 113–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lieberman, Robert C., “Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change,” American Political Science Review 96 (December 2002): 697–712CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Suzanne Mettler and Richard M. Vallely, “Introduction: The Distinctiveness and Necessity of American Political Development,” in Richard M. Vallely, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert C. Lieberman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 13.
3 Orren and Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development, 4.
4 Lieberman, Robert C., Mettler, Suzanne, Pepinsky, Thomas B., Roberts, Kenneth M., and Vallely, Richard, “The Trump Presidency and American Democracy: A Historical and Comparative Analysis,” Perspectives on Politics 17 (June 2019), 470–79; 471CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Waldner, David and Lust, Ellen, “Unwelcome Change: Coming to Terms with Democratic Backsliding,” Annual Review of Political Science 21 (May 2018): 93–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gero Erdmann, “Decline of Democracy: Loss of Quality, Hybridisation, and the Breakdown of Democracy,” in Gero Erdmann and Marianne Kneuer, eds., Regression of Democracy? (Wiesbaden, Germany: VS Verlag, 2011); Nancy Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” Journal of Democracy 27 (January 2016): 5–19; Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018).
6 Robert Mickey, Steven Levitsky, and Lucan Ahmad Way. “Is America Still Safe for Democracy?” Foreign Affairs, April 2017, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-04-17/america-still-safe-democracy.
7 Masur, Kate, Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement From the Revolution to Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021)Google Scholar.
8 The literature examining civil rights politics through the Civil War and Reconstruction periods is enormous. My thinking here is most directly informed by, W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1992); Gillette, William, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1989)Google Scholar; David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski, Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Jeffery A. Jenkins and Justin Peck, Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861–1918 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
9 Gibson, Edward L., Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Mickey, Robert M., Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944–1972 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
10 Johnson, Kimberly, Reforming Jim Crow: Southern Politics and State in the Age Before Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Francis, Megan Ming, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1990, 2nd ed. (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1991); Richard M. Vallely, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
12 For more on this point, see Kim Stanley Robinson, “A Climate Plan for a World in Flames,” Financial Times, August 20, 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/ff94df96-b702-4e01-addd-f4253d0eecf6.
13 The Paris Agreement is available here: https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/english_paris_agreement.pdf.
14 Ira Katznelson, “The Possibilities of Analytical Political History,” in Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, Julian E. Zelizer, eds., The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 388.
15 Orren and Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development, 113.
16 Orren and Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development, 14.