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American Political Development in Dark Times
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 August 2022
Abstract
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.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
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.
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3 Orren and Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development, 4.
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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).
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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.