Perhaps the most striking feature of the Senate's practice of advice and consent today is the deference accorded home state senators in reviewing presidential appointments to the federal bench. Although the Constitution calls for the advice and consent of the Senate body, informal norms of the Senate provide home state senators with a potential veto of nominations to fill federal judgeships within their states. One norm—senatorial courtesy—historically ensured that senators would defer to the views of the home state senator from the president's party. Another practice—the Senate “blue slip”—allocates special procedural rights to both home state senators regardless of political party. A single objection from a home state senator from either party has historically been considered sufficient to defeat confirmation of a nominee. The blue slip also allows home state senators to influence the course of nominations prospectively—encouraging presidents to heed the preferences of home state senators in selecting new federal judges.

How has representation changed over time in the United States? Has responsiveness to public opinion waxed or waned among elected officials? What are the causes of such trends as we observe? Scholars have pursued these crucial questions in different ways. Some explore earlier eras in search of the “electoral connection”, i.e. the extent to which voters held office-holders accountable for their actions and the degree to which electoral concerns motivated politicians' behavior. Others explore the effects of institutional changes such as the move to direct election of senators or the “reapportionment revolution.”

The transformation from nineteenth-century proprietary capitalism to twentieth-century corporate capitalism involved fundamental changes in the rights of business corporations as market actors. At the end of the Civil War, corporations were controlled by individuals and families. At the turn of the twentieth century, corporations were in the midst of a merger movement that resulted in firms with concentrated capital, large numbers of shareholders, and control residing in management. New legal rights needed to be put in place to support this more advanced level of capitalist development. Most scholarship on the transformation of business corporation rights has focused on changes in the courts and in Congress, principally in regard to antitrust regulation. In addition, however, there was another locale essential to transforming the shape of the business organization: state legislatures developed and allocated corporate rights. Nineteenth-century state laws sought not only to enable the corporation to exist, but also to regulate its place within the state economy. With the advent of corporate capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century, state capacity to regulate through statutory law waned.

Interest groups can seek legislative action through state and national legislatures, partnerships with presidents, governors, or mayors for direct executive action, litigation in the state and federal courts, or grassroots mobilization on popular referenda and ballot initiatives. These numerous institutional venues foster various advocacy strategies. How and why do interest groups target different venues to achieve their objectives? What factors affect an interest group's capacity to act within, and thus its subsequent targeting of, particular institutional venues to pursue social reform?

On the opening day of the 1972 Democratic convention, the women's caucus gave George McGovern a standing ovation. Its first meeting was packed, with 700 female delegates in attendance, exuberant over their numbers at the convention—triple the representation from four years earlier—and their new clout in presidential politics. Of all of the presidential candidates appearing, only Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to run for president, was greeted with enthusiasm comparable to the warm reception for McGovern. Most of the women at the meeting were fervently anti-war and respected McGovern for his early and courageous stance on Vietnam. However, the size of the gathering attested to another of McGovern's achievements: his chairing of the reform commission that had rewritten the Democratic Party's rules on delegate selection, leading to the huge leap in the representation of women. As Liz Carpenter, a former White House aide to LBJ, put it when introducing McGovern, “We know we wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for you.”

Although scholars of American political development (APD) have helped transform many aspects of the study of U.S. politics over the last quarter-century, they have barely begun to use the powerful analytical tools of this approach to elucidate the relationship between government and citizens. APD research has probed deeply into the processes of state-building and the creation and implementation of specific policies, yet has given little attention to how such development affects the lives of individuals and the ways in which they relate to government. Studies routinely illuminate how policies influence the political roles of elites and organized groups, but barely touch on how the state shapes the experiences and responses of ordinary individuals. As a result, we know little about how governance has influenced citizenship over time or how those changes have, in turn, affected politics.