Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction to Cities and Citizenship -- Notes -- Chapter 1: Urban Autonomy and Effective Citizenship -- The Urban State and Urban Autonomy -- Urban Autonomy and Effective Citizenship in the United States, 1830-1950 -- Urban Autonomy and Ineffective Citizenship in the United States, 1950-1990 -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Chapter 2. Putting the City Back into Citizenship: Civics Textbooks and Municipal Government in the Interwar American City -- Civics Textbooks as Sources

"Democratic Beginnings is a remarkable synthesis of 12 state conventions and a much larger number of political controversies into a highly revealing account of how the western states came to be. an important work that opens up many new lines of inquiry in the historical study of American state politics and constitutionalism."-Political Science Quarterly "Innovative and highly engaging. The explication of the [western] state constitutional convention delegates' diligence and statesmanship is of great importance to future studies of federalism and American political development. Highly recommended."-Choice.

In this essay I argue that in the Gilded Age (the last quarter of the nineteenth century), delegates to constitutional conventions in the western territories designed state governments to manage, as best they could, the development of their economies. They were, and understood themselves to be, citizens of the periphery of the United States. Delegates to the conventions hoped to shield their states from the worst possible outcomes of that peripheral relationship, and foster the best ones. My arguments contribute to our understanding of state constitutions and, more broadly, to central concerns of American political development—regionalism, labor law, and state building.

Comments on Paul Pierson's article(2000), "Not Just What, but When: Timing and Sequence in Political Processes," arguing that the adoption of path dependence from economics to political science does not realistically explain political events. Path dependence explains economic outcomes because of the central mechanism in economics, the market. Technologically inferior products have sometimes succeeded in the free market because of a brief market advantage that made the product more attractive & allowed it to become the popular choice. The market does not, however, have counterparts in the political sciences, & successful outcomes are not the result of individual choices or combined tastes, which would be similar to a market. Path dependence is used to explain countertheoretical outcomes in economics, but using it to describe permanence, stasis, or tenacity in politics may not capture the central dynamics of political change. Bridges considers timing, sequence, & temporal processes, pointing out that taken together, they are not really history. The author concludes that the most powerful theory for the social scientist would be a theory that provokes & informs research & aids in forming questions & organizing the results of the research. L. A. Hoffman

Most political scientists and historians find the home of reform government in the suburbs. The author shows that there was another style of reform government, big-city reform, in the big cities of the Southwest. The political system of big-city reform was distinguished by nonpartisan, city-manager government with citywide elections to the city council, low turnout and participation, and an electorate more Anglo and middle class than the metropolitan area as a whole. Big-city reform governments joined developer-dominated governing coalitions with Anglo middle—and upper-class communities in a growth community benefiting from good government.

Beginning in the late 1840s advocates of municipal reform in the United States campaigned to throw rascals out of public office, reconstruct the legal foundations of municipal government, and install regimes of at least modest virtue in place of local government's shameless vice. More profoundly, reformers hoped to replace municipal political cultures of partisanship and patronage with different values and expectations. In these efforts reformers met with the militant opposition of party leaders and their constituents; party leaders too had a vision of what local political life ought to be, and of their own central role in making it so.