How did Democrats running for federal office win in Georgia in 2020–21, but not in North Carolina, a state long regarded as more “flippable”? This article uses newly assembled organizational data to situate recent Democratic fortunes in the context of two long-running statewide campaigns for racial and economic justice—led by North Carolina's Reverend William Barber II and Georgia's Stacey Abrams. We track shifting political opportunity structures and the organizational and strategic evolution of both movements during the 2010s, with a special focus on outreach beyond major metropolitan areas. Our findings suggest that social justice campaigns aiming to increase government responsiveness to poor minority citizens do better if they engage in persistent, locally embedded voter outreach along partisan lines rather than heavily relying on morally framed, media-friendly protests. This research also demonstrates how data on organizational networks can be assembled and used to explore historical-institutional hypotheses about the development and impact of social movements.

Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes the formal amendment procedure, sets perhaps the highest bar to reform of any national constitution, discouraging amendment. But despite these challenges, members of Congress have proposed nearly twelve thousand constitutional amendments, with most introduced after the New Deal, raising questions about why members engage in such seemingly futile efforts. We argue that the rise of judicial power following the New Deal substantially decreased the importance of Article V as a tool for constitutional reform. But, by largely abandoning this purpose, members of Congress have repurposed Article V as a mechanism for constitutional position-taking, even though—indeed, perhaps precisely because—their efforts at formal constitutional revision have little chance for success. Through a mixed-methods approach, we first document the shifting purpose of Article V at an aggregate level by coding all 11,969 proposed constitutional amendments throughout American history. We then substantiate the shifting purpose of Article V through a series of in-depth case studies focused on polygamy, women's suffrage, Equal Rights Amendments, and Federal Marriage Amendments. Taken together, this evidence helps us understand Article V as a repurposed institution and suggests that textually static constitutional provisions nonetheless may be open to reinvention at the behavioral level in subtle but important ways.

Democratic states often claim that their authority rests upon the “will of the people” as expressed through representative institutions. However, there is an irresolvable conundrum that undermines that claim: the “opening dilemma” that invariably attends the founding of democratic states during which those representative institutions are created. While familiar to democratic theorists, the “opening dilemma” has many hitherto unexplored dimensions, among them its actual occurrence in democratic politics. Using the 1869 Illinois Constitutional Convention as a case study, the article demonstrates why individual preferences cannot effect a founding without the intervention of arbitrary and thus undemocratic authority. The conclusion suggests why the opening dilemma might become a serious threat to American democracy if the nation were to attempt to convene a new constitutional convention.

This article examines the institutional development of the U.S. Court of Claims (USCC), in order to shed new light on the nature of constitutional and institutional change in the early Republic. From the founding period through the mid-nineteenth century, members of Congress believed that empowering other institutions to award claimants monies from the Treasury would violate two core doctrines: separation of powers and sovereign immunity. However, as claims against the government ballooned over the first half of the nineteenth century, Congress fundamentally changed its interpretation of the Constitution's requirements in order to create the USCC and thus to alleviate its workload. This story of institutional development is an example of constitutional construction and creative syncretism in that the institutional development of the USCC came from continuous interactions among political actors, working iteratively to refashion institutions capable of solving practical problems of governance. This close study of the court's creation shows something important about American constitutional development: Certain fundamental ideas of the early Republic, including sovereign immunity and separation of powers, were altered or jettisoned not out of some grand rethinking of the nature of the American state, but out of the need to solve a mundane problem.

After the dramatic disruptions of Trump years, American political development might do well to consider whether American exceptionalism still holds or has changed, and that would require scholars to be more attentive to cross-national comparisons and perhaps also to change the countries with which the United States is compared.

Regarding the implications of the political developments of the last five years for the study of American political development (APD), this article argues that the unprecedented Trump phenomenon and its problematic repercussions for U.S. democracy have greatly enhanced the value of a comparative perspective, which can draw instructive lessons from the fate of attacks on liberal democracy by populist leaders in other countries. Comparativists examining the contemporary United States initially highlighted the risks of populist leadership (i.e., political agency), stressed the possibilities of democratic backsliding, and examined how popularly elected chief executives can undermine democracy from the inside—all of which fueled grave concerns. Yet for a more realistic assessment of populism's actual danger for U.S. democracy, one must analyze the probability of such a deleterious outcome. Therefore, researchers need to embed agency in contextual conditions and investigate what institutional, structural, cultural, and conjunctural factors empowered populist leaders to destroy democracy in some countries, whereas other constellations of these factors have impeded democratic backsliding in many other nations. With this move beyond a primary focus on agency, comparative analyses align with APD's longstanding attention to complex context factors. Interestingly, such a comparative perspective corroborates the distinctive institutional strengths and relative resilience of U.S. democracy.

Recent events have augured a renewed urgency among political scientists to address the instability of democracy and the structure of racism in the United States. In this article, I make the case for American political development (APD) scholars to engage more deeply with Black Reconstruction in America (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois's masterful study of political development during the Reconstruction Era. This rich text, which analyzes an often overlooked period in the APD literature, offers numerous contributions that can reinvigorate our analyses of democracy and racism in the United States.

Robert Dahl's “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker” has long enjoyed pride of place within American politics scholarship, especially among regime theorists. However, Dahl's views of the U.S. Supreme Court are no longer defensible. It is essential for our field to move beyond “Decision-Making in a Democracy” in order to better theorize and explain the modern Supreme Court.

The policy feedback literature developed in an era in which the level of polarization and the intensity of party competition were far lower than today. These background conditions narrowed the scope of many policy debates and facilitated the consolidation of programmatic expansions after their enactment. As a result, the feedback literature emphasized the ways that new policies build supportive constituencies and become entrenched. While the core insight that policies can generate major political repercussions remains solid, American political development (APD) scholars should pay greater attention to the role of negative feedback processes and backlash politics in an era of disunity. Based on a review of New York Times articles mentioning policy backlash between 1960 and 2019, I show that the 2010s was a period of heightened countermobilization. Backlash forces have diffused from civil rights into many other arenas—including health, trade, and immigration—due to partisan polarization, conflicts over cultural shifts, and the negative feedback from activist government itself.

We argue that American political development's (APD's) relentless preoccupation with the substantive problems that shape and animate American politics and how they emerge and develop over time has been a key source of the subfield's durability. We elaborate on three main payoffs to conceptualizing APD as a problem-driven enterprise: (1) it highlights APD's main comparative advantage within the American politics subfield, noting the tremendous agility APD's substantive breadth lends the enterprise; (2) it resolves the methodological debate, granting simply that the question chooses the method rather than the other way around; and (3) it reorients the critique: simply because a subfield considers itself to be problem-oriented does not mean that it is identifying the right problems to study.

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.

For the first time since 1860, our collective future as an ideologically coherent and nominally democratic nation is at risk. In the short, medium, and long term, our nation faces several systemic and intertwined threats. Because these cascading crises threaten our fundamental political ideals and our lives, we recommend here a rapid and careful reorientation of at least some part of American political development (APD) toward a scholarship of foresight—that is, one based on the premise that anticipating and shaping the future is now as important as or more important than understanding the past. The article first considers some of the ways in which APD is tethered to the past and then discusses how several of the subfield's analytical approaches are compatible with a scholarship of foresight. Prognosis, prediction, and projection, we argue, are analytical tools that can inform prescription. We conclude with five sets of recommendations that can help APD scholars consider turning their attention toward the future.

Recent political developments point to the presence of grave problems with democratic governance in the United States. They suggest that scholarship in American political development (APD) could be better at studying the experiences and thinking of everyday Americans. APD scholars often study institutional changes, policy initiatives, and other shifts in governance without studying how these developments affect the lives of U.S. citizens and residents. And many developments of critical political importance are ignored or do not receive the scholarly attention they deserve. For our scholarship to do justice to the recent crises and better relate to the political world around us, as several recent past American Political Science Association (APSA) presidents have recommended, the article calls for APD scholarship to be better at focusing on people themselves: on their health and safety, their material standing, and their personal and social educations. By adding a fuller study of people to their research, APD scholars would be better equipped to identify important political developments that do not always capture the attention of Congress, the White House, and the media, but that are too important to ignore.