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This book is about governmental change in America. It examines the reconstruction of institutional power relationships that had to be negotiated among the courts, the parties, the president, the Congress and the states in order to accommodate the expansion of national administrative capacities around the turn of the twentieth century. Stephen Skowronek argues that new institutional forms and procedures do not arise reflexively or automatically in response to environmental demands on government, but must be extorted through political and institutional struggles that are rooted in and mediated by pre-established governing arrangements. As the first full-scale historical treatment of the development of American national administration, this book will provide a useful textbook for public administration courses

Notwithstanding Terry Moe's claim, rational choice scholarship has been pursuing the least "revolutionary" of the possible lines of advance in presidential studies. This scholarship asks the same basic question that Richard Neustadt asked nearly a half century ago: how much can a president get done? It follows Neustadt as well in its strategic approach to presidential action and in thinking about the problem of presidential strategy systemically. The new rational choice scholarship has many real strengths. It has helped clarify system parameters and specify how they affect an incumbent's opportunities, incentives risks, and constraints. But this is a "rigor revolution" that does more to perpetuate the traditional preoccupations of presidential studies than to overthrow them. The real revolution will come when we start asking questions about the presidency that no one in 1960 would have thought to ask.

Racist and liberal ideals are said to anchor competing political traditions in America, but a juxtaposition of ideals obscures key processes of change in the cultural lexicon and misses much about how a political tradition comes to bear on the development of a polity. Attention to the reassociation of ideas and purposes over time points to a more intimate relationship between racism and liberalism in American political culture, to the conceptual interpenetration of these antithetical ends. Cuing off issues that have long surrounded the reassociation of John C. Calhoun's rule of the concurrent majority with pluralist democracy, this article examines another southerner, Woodrow Wilson, who, in the course of defending racial hierarchy, developed ideas that became formative of modern American liberalism. Analysis of the movement of ideas across purposes shifts the discussion of political traditions from set categories of thought to revealed qualities of thought, bringing to the fore aspects of this polity that are essentially and irreducibly "American."

A comment on John Gerring's article, "APD from a Methodological Point of View," contends that Gerring "puts the cart before the horse" by letting problems of method take precedence over considerations of the theoretical direction of the study of politics. Although Gerring avoids sticky methodological debates to focus on the development of clear concepts, propositions, & logic, the works he cites do not appear as unclear as he claims. It is argued that the greatest difficulty currently facing American Political Development (APD) is not a lack of clarity but uncertainty about what the APD project is & should be. Gerring fails to offer adequate evidence to support his charge of field indifference or to back up his critiques of books by Richard Bensel, Stephen Skowronek, & Rogers M. Smith. Further, Gerring's easy remedy of better research design ignores APD's real deficiencies. It is concluded that historically oriented political scientists are producing better work than ever before but the field of APD has become less coherent & distinct. The potential for APD to retain a distinctive voice is discussed. J. Lindroth