Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis 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.

American political science has long struggled to deal adequately with issues of race. Many studies inaccurately treat their topics as unrelated to race. Many studies of racial issues lack clear theoretical accounts of the relationships of race and politics. Drawing on arguments in the American political development literature, this essay argues for analyzing race, and American politics more broadly, in terms of two evolving, competing "racial institutional orders": a "white supremacist" order and an "egalitarian transformative" order. This conceptual framework can synthesize and unify many arguments about race and politics that political scientists have advanced, and it can also serve to highlight the role of race in political developments that leading scholars have analyzed without attention to race. The argument here suggests that no analysis of American politics is likely to be adequate unless the impact of these racial orders is explicitly considered or their disregard explained.

Through a sustained historical analysis of three of the most important issues in American politics--Social Security, environmental regulation, and federal education policy--Conservatism and American Political Development explores how conservatives have helped shape U.S. domestic policy and how the growth of the American state has in turn shaped conservatism. Featuring leading scholars of American political development, the book traces the evolution of each issue over the course of three epochs: the New Deal, the Great Society era, and the Reagan era. Throughout, it emphasizes the ironic role of conservatism in the expansion of the American state. As conservatives increased their presence in the federal apparatus, they were frequently co-opted into maintaining or even expanding regulatory and public fiscal power. At times, conservatives also came to accept the existence of the liberal state, but attempted to use it to achieve conservative policy ends. Despite conservatives' power in U.S. politics and governance over the last quarter century, "big government" remains. As Conservatism and American Political Development shows, conservatism has not only helped shape the state, but has been shaped by it as well.

Race has been present at every critical moment in American political development, shaping political institutions, political discourse, public policy, and its denizens' political identities. But because of the nature of race-its evolving and dynamic status as a structure of inequality, a political organizing principle, an ideology, and a system of power-we must study the politics of race historically, institutionally, and discursively.Covering more than three hundred years of American political history from the founding to the contemporary moment, the contributors in this volume make this exten

This is an exploration of how the study of race can transform our understandings of political development and how studying political development can inform our understandings of race and racialisation.

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in southern distinctiveness within the United States and its ramifications for the nation. This review provides an analysis of recent works and the interpretive issues they raise. I argue that collectively they have broken with the long-established image of the South in political science, the study of which was long organized around the region's anticipated convergence to the patterns of the post–New Deal North. Recent texts have instead emphasized an enduring commitment to white supremacy and a determining influence for the region in shaping national politics and institutions. I identify two broad pathways of southern influence and discuss the debates over its sources. I then discuss recent works on southern regimes and the debates these have provoked. I conclude by suggesting that overcoming the limits of recent works will ultimately undermine some of our more sweeping interpretive claims and foundational premises.

The volume brings together some of the best of both the most established and the newest urban scholars in political science, sociology, and history, each of whom makes a new argument for rethinking the relationship between cities and the larger project of state-building