Between 1850 and 1868, the United States struggled through a long and bloody Civil War, attempted to reconfigure southern class and economic relations, settled much of the western prairie, and began the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. During these two decades, Americans went to the polls, whether located in hamlets swarming with Union soldiers, rural churches set in the midst of the southern cotton belt, wooden cabins so isolated that even the nearest neighbors had difficulty finding them, or saloons in the most densely populated sections of great cities. Their votes have come down to us as election returns reporting tens of millions of officially sanctioned exercises in democratic participation. Neatly collated and arrayed in columns by office, candidate, and party, these returns are routinely interpreted as more or less accurate reflections of the popular preferences of the individuals within the communities in which they were made out. Seen this way, the returns themselves appear to constitute unambiguous and overwhelming evidence of the existence of a robust popular democratic system and ethos during the mid-nineteenth century. The purpose of this article is to suggest some important caveats that must attend this conclusion.

The study of constitutionalism, and in particular of constitutional development, represents a significant recent turn in the field of public law. Constitutional development occurs, of course, through formal adoption and amendment. And the study of courts has established that judicial declarations contribute to this process. A growing body of scholarship also shows that the overtly political actors of society – legislatures, executive officers, political partisans, and even the people – continually engage in the informal creation, maintenance, and transformation of constitutional meaning.The growth in the study of constitutionalism and consti- tutional development in the last decade is reflected in a recent collection, Sotirios A. Barber and Robert P. George, ed., Constitutional Politics: Essays on Constitution Making, Maintenance, and Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), as well as the following notable works: Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Transformations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Stephen M. Griffin, American Constitutionalism: From Theory to Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Wayne D. Moore, Constitutional Rights and Powers of the People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Keith E. Whittington, Constitutional Construction: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1999). While recent work illuminates instances of this latter type of constitutional development, there remain questions about the processes by which development occurs. Political actors create, maintain, and transform constitutional meaning, but the recent studies suggest that institutional contexts play an important role in shaping the consequent constitutional development. The very constitution that is subject to the forces of political actors, for example, also establishes an important, if not necessarily determinative, context that shapes the path of its continued development – consider that a government of separated powers, with its competing legislative, executive, and judicial branches, will facilitate conflicting efforts both to maintain existing and to construct new constitutional meaning.Ackerman, We the People; Whittington, Constitutional Construction. The works by Ackerman and Whittington demonstrate as well that the same effects follow from other features of constitutional design, such as Congress's bicameralism and the vertical separation of powers between national and state governments. Other institutions affect constitutional development as well. For example, social institutions exist alongside of and interact with political institutions. Through interactions, the former can enhance or undermine the stability of the latter. In this article, I argue that the study of constitutionalism must consider the full range of political and social institutions that shape constitutional development.

“The American Ballot Box” is a most interesting exploration into the deep past of American electoral politics. Well-researched and argued, it provides examples of sometimes very funny interview sessions with nineteenth-century American voters. The basic data method here rests upon using congressional-election contest hearings as sources of information. The author does well, however, to remind us that by definition, election contests may have reflected “the dark side of the force,” so to speak, but also necessarily raised claims of fraud and other abuse by the losers. Naturally, the overwhelming majority of U.S. House elections in the nineteenth century were not contested. The strength of the method lies in the fact of contest itself, which permitted relatively searching inquiry into the conduct of elections, and thus revealed much about their organizational pattern that would be taken for granted (and hence not discussed or brought to light otherwise). But bias may be implicit in the method.

Although the concept of the “modern” presidency is not precisely defined in presidential studies, most scholars agree that a plebiscitary approach to executive leadership has dominated the American political landscape for much of the past century. The characteristics of this “plebiscitary presidency” include aggressive assertions of executive independence, direct appeals to the people, active manipulation of public opinion, and, binding all these together, a new emphasis on rhetorical prowess.Samuel Kernell, Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1997); Jeffrey Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Theodore Lowi, The Personal President (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Richard Rose, The Post-Modern President (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1988); Ryan J. Barilleaux, The Post-Modern Presidency: The Office After Reagan (New York: Praeger, 1988). These characteristics are associated with enhanced resources for the exercise of leadership, but they stimulate, and sit in an uncertain balance with, a vast expansion of expectations for leadership.

The precipitous decline in collective bargaining between employees and employers during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century in the United States should tell us something useful about American political development. The decline of collective bargaining is about more than waning union influence or competitive conditions in the labor market because collective bargaining was the primary expression of the regime established by the New Deal Democratic Party electoral coalition. For a generation, labor-management bargaining epitomized empowered liberal democracy which, acting through the legislative branch, established a new legal regime of industrial order. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA) shaped a pluralist industrial order by creating new rules that curbed the authority of managers and compelled business firms to participate with unions in a process of rational bargaining based on the assumption of competing employee and employer interests.I do not mean to suggest that the place of collective bargaining was uncontested. Scholars, however, launched major efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to understand how “industrial relations” fit into the emerging conception of pluralism. This was an important effort because union-management relations were central to the New Deal Democracy. For example, John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1956); Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom, Politics, Economics and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes (New York: Harper and Row, 1953); Clark Kerr, Labor Markets and Wage Determination: The Balkanization of Labor Markets and Others Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick Harbison, and Charles A. Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1966); J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1969). By the mid-1960s, industrial relations was a rare topic for political science investigation; aside from Greenstone, political science conceived “labor” and “work” to be “private interests” and not a matter of political significance. Yet collective bargaining is no longer the focal point for industrial relations, and industrial relations no longer occupies the center of governing attention. The various reasons for this trend have attracted significant scholarly attention; however, the issue is confounded by arguments that union decline is a wrongly conceived topic to investigate.

One key problem concerning meaningful explanation of the activities of the United States Supreme Court is: how do the Justices make decisions in the cases before them? From the behavioralist perspective, attitudinalism remains the dominant model for explaining decision-making on the United States Supreme Court. A series of works uses statistical analysis, based on large datasets, to show clearly that the behavior of Justices, at least as far as their making of decisions in civil liberties cases goes, is highly predictable given a relatively small amount of information about the Justices' perceived views before their appointment to the Court.The availability and development of a major dataset – Harold J. Spaeth, United States Supreme Court Judicial Database, 1953–2001 Terms Computer File (East Lansing, MI: Program for Law and Judicial Politics, Dept. of Political Science, Michigan State University: continuously updated; downloadable from http://polisci. msu.edu//pljp) – has led to a series of increasingly comprehensive analyses of attitudinalism. See Jeffrey A. Segal and Albert D. Cover, “Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices,” American Political Science Review 83 (1989): 557–65; Jeffrey A. Segal and Harold J. Spaeth, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jeffrey A. Segal et al., “Ideological Values and the Votes of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Revisited,” Journal of Politics 57 (1995): 812–23; Jeffrey A. Segal and Harold J. Spaeth, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Institutions are instruments of stability. Twenty years of research in the “new institutionalism” has produced voluminous studies into how structures constitute or constrain the behavior of actors in political, social, and economic contexts. Agenda controls order and limit the alternatives actors choose from, logics of appropriateness dictate appropriate “scripts” agents follow in structural contexts, learning effects and high initial fixed costs reinforce past choices in ways that restrict future alternatives.Kenneth A. Shepsle, “Institutional Arrangements and Equilibrium in Multidimensional Voting Models,” American Journal of Political Science 23 (1979): 27–59; Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “Introduction” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991); Paul Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,” American Political Science Review 94 (2000): 251–67. In other words, institutions produce stability through “regulative, normative, or cognitive mechanisms” that limit, constitute, or constrain the range of alternatives actors confront.Elisabeth S. Clemens and James M. Cook, “Politics and Institutionalism: Explaining Durability and Change,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 441–66.

While attracting ardent interest from social scientists on a number of fronts, the Progressive Era is insufficiently examined within presidential studies. Scholars have, instead, portrayed Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as prefiguring a later, modern presidency. For example, Sidney Milkis writes that the emergence of the modern presidency began in the Progressive Era, “especially as shaped by the statesmanship of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.”Sidney Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 8. William Leuchtenburg observes that Franklin Roosevelt contributed to the modern presidency by giving the office “an importance which went well beyond what even Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had done.”William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 327. However, scholarship has not explained fully why these two Progressive Era presidents were precociously “modern.”

Although in existence for only a few decades, the field of American political development (APD) has been an agent of many changes within the discipline of political science. It has been a leading force in the rediscovery of institutions; it has bolstered a comparative approach to American politics; it has helped to draw attention to previously neglected issues such as race, class, and gender; and it deserves primary responsibility for bringing the temporal dimension of politics into consideration.

Adam Sheingate has made an important contribution to the literature on political entrepreneurship. He takes a concept that has been widely but casually employed by political scientists studying institutions and policies and sets out to supply that concept with clarity and content. Appropriating the concept for historical institutionalism, he connects the role of the political entrepreneur to the processes of institutional change, posing a powerful challenge to the familiar view of institutions in equilibrium. Especially important for readers of this journal, he expands upon previous uses of the concept by arguing that it offers a new vantage point on American political development, with political entrepreneurs posited to be critical sources of endogenous change.

John Gerring's methodological critique of American political development can be viewed from at least three perspectives. First and most generally, Gerring proposes procedural and analytical standards that should apply to all the social and natural sciences. As a methodological virtue, for instance, conceptual clarity strengthens the underpinnings of knowledge, regardless of the substantive focus. Rigorous specification of causal relations is equally universal. From a second perspective, Gerring invites his readers to at least entertain the possibility that methodological rigor might vary over the lifespan of a research field. From this angle, seminal work often involves more relaxed methodological styles because initial exploration of a topic or area, almost by definition, must be unguided by research conventions and norms. Such conventions and norms only emerge if and when that exploration attracts a self-sustaining community of scholars.

In his methodological critique of APD research, John Gerring steers clear of the issues that have bogged down debates about methodology in recent years. He does not argue that historically-oriented students of American politics should adopt some allegedly superior method current in other sectors of political science, nor does he demand clarification of an alternative method that might be more pertinent given some allegedly distinctive qualities of the APD project. Instead, he scores the project for its failure to measure up on universal standards of good research design—clear concepts, clear propositions, clear logic. The resulting critique is, on its face, singularly disarming. What self-respecting scholar wants to be unclear?

John Gerring's call for greater methodological self-consciousness and rigor in APD scholarship is valuable in several ways. Although some APD scholars deploy formal models and statistical analyses of large n data sets, many do not. Today, those choices inevitably raise questions of the rigor of such work. Gerring's essay usefully pushes us to provide answers. I also generally agree with his sense of what appropriate methods involve. The fact that his recommendations are fairly standard and noncontroversial then poses the further issue Steve Skowronek stresses: whether there is any distinctive method or substance that defines APD scholarship as a field.