Suchergebnisse

Steady political polarization since the late 1970s ranks among the most consequential transformations of American politics—one with far-reaching consequences for governance, congressional performance, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and citizen perceptions of the stakes of party conflict and elections. Our understanding of this polarization critically depends on measuring it. Its measurement in turn began with the invention of the NOMINATE algorithm and the widespread adoption of its estimates of the ideal points of members of Congress. Although the NOMINATE project has not been immune from technical and conceptual critique, its impact on how we think about contemporary politics and its discontents has been extraordinary and has helped to stimulate the creation of several similar scores. In order to deepen appreciation of this broadly important intellectual phenomenon, we offer an intuitively accessible treatment of the mathematics and conceptual assumptions of NOMINATE. We also stress that NOMINATE scores are a major resource for understanding other eras in American political development (APD) besides the current great polarization. To illustrate this point, we introduce readers to Voteview, which provides two-dimensional snapshots of congressional roll calls, among other data that it generates. We conclude by sketching how APD scholarship might contribute to the contemporary polarization discussion. Placing polarization and depolarization in historical perspective may powerfully illuminate whether, how, and why our current polarization might recede.

Introduction : an unsettled time / Philip Rocco and Zachary Callen -- The scrambled cycle : realignment, political time, and the Trump presidency / Julia R. Azari -- The limits of policy feedback as a party-building tool / Daniel J. Galvin and Chloe N. Thurston -- Presidential nominations, factional conflict, and prospects for Democratic Party reform / Travis M. Johnston -- "One people, under one God, saluting one American flag" : Trump, the Republican Party, and the construction of American nationalism / Gwendoline Alphonso -- Trumpism and the dual tracks of American polarization / Paul Nolette -- Black Lives matter from Wilson to Trump : social movements in APD / Megan Ming Francis -- Whose president? Donald Trump and the Reagan regime / William D. Adler -- The policy state and the post-truth presidency / Philip Rocco -- Finding stability and sustainability in the Trump era : Medicare and the Affordable Care Act in historical perspective / Andrew S. Kelly -- State-building as parlor trick : Trump, the executive branch, and the politics of deconstruction / Zachary Callen -- Donald Trump and the end of American politics / Adam Sheingate -- Trumpism and the future of American political development / Robert C. Lieberman.

Political scientists working in the area of American political development (APD) focus on America's political history with the goal of explaining why the nation's often peculiar collection of institutions and policies grew the way they did. Two primary approaches or schools of inquiry shape much APD scholarship, though a great deal of very fine work falls outside of them: historical institutionalists study actors pursuing interests through a political arena bounded by institutions; and ideational scholars, in contrast, seek to understand how norms, narratives, and outlooks influence the framing of debates and their outcomes. Although there are exceptions, especially at the margins, each school is marked by a general outlook. Previous discussions of the two schools have focused on the place of culture and ideas in relation to institutions. I argue here that the two schools split along more fundamental lines, and suggest that the crucial distinction between them centers on the nature of causation and on an often-unstated understanding of what political development is. By mapping out the theoretical underpinnings of each, APD's methods can be introduced to researchers outside the subfield. And the question of how the two schools might be drawn together for even more powerful inquiry can be posed.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. The field of American political development is distinguished by careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time.

Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics -- and thus they question stylized facts about America's political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time -- and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance?

The relationship between American political thought (APT ) and American politicaldevelopment (APD) as phenomena as well as subfields in American Politics has notbeen sufficiently theorized. This essay takes up what I call the Second Founding of1787–89 as the critical case for examining the close relationship between APT andAPD. The statesmen of that era were thinkers and developmentalists of the first order;they understood the inseparable link between political justification and politicalchange. This dynamic relationship between American political thought and development practiced in 1787–89 can be used as a blueprint for understanding the entwinedcycles of political justification and change in American politics.