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The Growth of American Political Development: The View from the Classroom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2005

Rogan Kersh
Rogan Kersh
Affiliation:
Syracuse University's Maxwell School (rtkersh@maxwell.syr.edu)
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Extract

American Political Development (APD) is among the fastest-growing areas in political science. Barely two decades ago, the “field” consisted of a handful of works by a few scholars. Since then political scientists have been joined under the APD banner by researchers from other disciplines in issuing dozens of books and hundreds of articles, organizing a biennial APD conference, and teaching numerous graduate and undergraduate courses. The flagship APD journal, Studies in American Political Development, in print since 1986, is ranked among the top political science journals; also well regarded is the Journal of Policy History, begun three years later. The Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association, likewise founded recently, has the eighth largest membership of the discipline's 35 subgroupings. Newly minted PhDs list APD as a specific research and teaching interest, and political science departments are matching that surging interest with job postings. And overviews of recent scholarship on the American polity separately highlight APD approaches. Perhaps inevitably, however, the rapid emergence of APD as a full-fledged disciplinary concentration has been accompanied by developmental problems.Rogan Kersh is associate professor of political science and public administration at Syracuse University's Maxwell School (rtkersh@maxwell.syr.edu). He is the author of Dreams of a More Perfect Union, as well as articles on APD in numerous journals. For helpful advice and commentary, the author thanks Brian Balogh, Dan Galvin, Jennifer Hochschild, Shelley Hurt, David Mayhew, Suzanne Mettler, Sid Milkis, Jim Morone, three anonymous Perspectives reviewers, and audience members at the APD workshop at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.

Information

Type
REVIEW ESSAY
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , June 2005 , pp. 335 - 345
Copyright
© 2005 American Political Science Association

American Political Development (APD) is among the fastest-growing areas in political science. Barely two decades ago, the “field” consisted of a handful of works by a few scholars. Since then political scientists have been joined under the APD banner by researchers from other disciplines in issuing dozens of books and hundreds of articles, organizing a biennial APD conference, and teaching numerous graduate and undergraduate courses. The flagship APD journal, Studies in American Political Development, in print since 1986, is ranked among the top political science journals; also well regarded is the Journal of Policy History, begun three years later. The Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association, likewise founded recently, has the eighth largest membership of the discipline's 35 subgroupings.1

Journal rankings in Garand and Giles 2003, 298 (political scientists' mean evaluations of social science journals; Studies ranked 14th, three spots ahead of the American Political Science Review); Politics and History section membership at www.apsanet. org. Another institutional APD home is the book series Princeton Studies in American Politics.

Newly minted PhDs list APD as a specific research and teaching interest, and political science departments are matching that surging interest with job postings. And overviews of recent scholarship on the American polity separately highlight APD approaches.2

See, for example, Polsby and Schickler's review of “landmarks in the study of Congress” since 1945, featuring a section on APD analyses of congressional history (2004, 184–85).

Perhaps inevitably, however, the rapid emergence of APD as a full-fledged disciplinary concentration has been accompanied by developmental problems.

After reviewing the subfield's basic outlines, I evaluate current trends in teaching APD, basing my observations on a sample of syllabi in 12 graduate and 11 undergraduate courses offered in the past three years. Classes and scholarship in this subfield investigate a remarkable range of topics, including some that seem to have fallen from favor prematurely in other disciplines and in political science as a whole. In terms of attracting new researchers, winning a place in university curricula, and contributing innovative approaches to the study of American politics, the state of APD is strong. With respect to internal coherence and future direction, the record is more mixed.

APD: An Overview

General overviews of APD as a distinctive mode of scholarly inquiry have been unavailable until recently.3

Nor does a synthetic study of American political development as an empirical subject yet exist.4

Compare the countless textbooks and other works that canvass international relations or political theory—or, for that matter, the sweep of U.S. history. Landy and Milkis's introductory American politics textbook (2004) includes a greater emphasis on political history than most such books; still unavailable, however, is an APD survey text for undergraduate classes.

This relative inattention is largely attributable to the field's relative youth; taxonomy takes time.

Put briefly, APD focuses on the causes, nature, and consequences of key transformative periods and central patterns in American political history. More than other political scientists, APD scholars look to historical processes to analyze governing structures and policy outcomes, and to build theories about political change. More than most historians, APD analysts draw on evidence from the past to illuminate broad questions about today's U.S. polity and its idiosyncratic institutional features. APD researchers may also be distinguished from most historians by their willingness to advance comprehensive theories about American institutions, particularly the national state, and about governance.5

Wood (2004) laments that historians of the United States eschew generalizations. On other salient features of contemporary U.S. historical scholarship, viewed in the context of APD, see Balogh 2003.

APD investigations of institutional reproduction and change have been fruitfully combined with various theoretical approaches, from European social theory to historical-institutional variants of rational choice, to reinvigorate the study of America's distinctive political regime.

As APD-style analysis spreads across the discipline—as political scientists perform more nuanced investigations of history, attentive to context, contingency, and patterns of constancy and change in prevailing institutional arrangements—some senior APD scholars fear that the subfield may be losing its common core. In Stephen Skowronek's words, “Absent more careful consideration of what the APD project is … it stands simply to dissolve away or become absorbed into everything else.”6

Two factors underlie such concerns. First, little coherence is evident among the sprawl of APD scholarly works. The subfield lacks a shared vocabulary, and few boundaries define the nature of APD investigations into the American polity. Second, redundancy threatens the subfield, which may have done its work too well, as comparativists, Congressional scholars, critical theorists, and many others embrace the value of historical research and institutional analysis. As the rest of the discipline—and other disciplines—adopt APD-style practices, its singular contributions are lost.

Is “American Political Development” merely a loose label under which disparate forms proliferate? I think not. APD courses, and the works they feature, display common traits, some uniform research emphases, and at least a loosely shared overarching purpose. If overlap, tension, and rapid change are apparent within the subfield, this is only fitting, for illuminating multiple layers of development is perhaps APD's principal contribution to American politics research.

Three features are common to virtually all APD works and syllabi. One, of course, is a focus on the American “case.” Although APD studies occasionally contrast the United States and other polities, a cross-national focus is rarely prominent and scarcely appears in the two dozen syllabi I examined.7

Daniel Rodgers's Atlantic Crossings (1998), which locates Progressive and New Deal policies squarely in a trans-Atlantic context, was recommended (not required) on two of the graduate syllabi I examined; David Mayhew's short study of Progressive-style policy making (1994) occurring simultaneously in the United States, Japan, Australia, and western Europe appeared on none. A few works more prevalent on APD syllabi do feature at least implicit comparisons, usually to the United Kingdom and/or Canada (Hacker 2002; Gottschalk 2000; Amenta 1998, esp. 142–44, 231–49; Skocpol 1992). Tellingly, these are all studies of social policy, an area in which the United States is often seen as laggard compared, especially, to European and Commonwealth counterparts.

Second, all APD scholars use historical methods of analysis, along specific lines described below. Third, APD scholars are strongly committed to interdisciplinary study: historians, economists, legal scholars, and sociologists all appear on APD syllabi, as do political scientists from across the discipline's subfields.

Beyond these affinities, a set of shared scholarly emphases are evident in APD research and teaching, including:

  • Use (not abuse) of history. Prior to the advent of APD studies, political scientists tended to deploy historical evidence much less systematically, or even selectively.8

    See, for example, Riker 1982, as critiqued in Mackie 2001.

    History usually appeared as an explanatory backdrop for current policies from Medicare to military actions.9 But among APD scholars, history is a subject of intensive investigation, not merely a source of confirmatory data. Consider two salutary recent examples: the re-envisioning of much of the U.S. political past as morally inspired struggles with sin, vividly depicted in James Morone's Hellfire Nation; and the carefully specified account of evolving congressional-executive relations, including counterfactual historical paths, in Carpenter and Whittington's article-length study.10
  • Still bringing in the state. At the heart of most APD studies is attention to how political institutions are reproduced and altered over time. These institutional analyses focus principally on the American national state, viewed as both a result of and a significant influence on the course of political development. Emergent frontiers in APD accounts of the state include increasingly precise specification of state-society relationships, especially the “selective entitlements”11

    Smith 2003, 111.

    characteristic of the U.S. regime; the place of race, class, and gender in state building; and the shifting collections of institutional officers, rules, and practices that make up successive state orders in U.S. political history. While versions of a “new institutionalism” are also central to other political science subfields, APD innovatively depicts the state and other institutional orders as the products of complex, multilayered developmental processes, rather than as solely or primarily engendered by contractual bargaining (as in rational-choice studies), or coercion (as in much comparative politics scholarship).12

    On this point see Luong and Weinthal 2004, 139–40, 149–50.

  • Multiple approaches to order and time. APD is acutely sensitive to transitions, disruptions, and other temporal disorders marking the dynamic development of American politics, as opposed to the static snapshots or attempts to discover timeless equilibria favored by many political science methodologies. The result of such accounts has been, almost paradoxically, a richer understanding of the established orders that do exist, often simultaneously, in the polity. Not coincidentally, the notion of path dependence has been most fully explored in APD studies, with scholars such as Theda Skocpol (1992) and Robert Lieberman (1998) tracing political outcomes to long-established institutional features and public policies. Depicting simultaneous transitions and persistent features—such as the Constitution itself—in a given political regime has resulted in nuanced descriptions of “intercurrent” orders in the American past. Elizabeth Sanders's comprehensive portrait of farmers' political activism over the four decades after Reconstruction, for example, chronicles interactions between the regulatory state, agricultural populists, finance capitalists, and the labor movement in “core,” “periphery,” and “diverse” economic orders across the United States, ultimately demonstrating farmers' surprisingly central role in shaping the modern American state.13

    Sanders 1999. Orren and Skowronek (2004, esp. 108–18) treat intercurrent orders in detail.

    Through such studies APD researchers have recovered the multiple, overlapping, and often incongruous sources of authority constituting U.S. political orders during particular time periods.

Working on these three fronts, APD scholars have enriched our understanding of why and how politics develops. How are these often complex insights presented in the classroom? For a better understanding of both APD's principal subjects and methods, let us turn to the graduate and undergraduate courses that reflect the current state of the subfield.

Teaching APD

Some standardization is evident in graduate and undergraduate APD syllabi.14

The syllabi reviewed here (a full list appears below) are a subset of a larger sample. With the aid of Perspectives on Politics staff, I collected 45 APD syllabi. Of those I selected about half, 12 graduate and 11 undergraduate courses; the decision favored recent syllabi (all but two are from 2002 or 2003) and those that approach the subject from a survey or otherwise broad perspective. I also sought a balance of classes taught at public and private universities.

Instructors tend to assign similar sets of recently published works and organize their courses around the same defining periods in U.S. history. A wide swath of the American political system is explored, and many themes and features in APD courses are familiar from classes on U.S. government or national institutions. But the list also encompasses topics more likely to arise in history, sociology, political economy, or even geography courses. Similarly varied are the concepts and theories encountered in classes. Perhaps owing to the unsettled nature of the APD field, central elements—such as the meaning of “development” itself—remain inadequately addressed.

Most undergraduate syllabi—and a third of the graduate courses—are organized chronologically, tracing national development from colonial British America to the present, usually with primary attention to four “moments” in U.S history: the founding, Civil War/Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and Populist/Progressive periods, and the rise and decline of the New Deal. The last three especially reflect APD researchers' principal foci to date; intervening periods, such as the early/antebellum republic or the 1920s, will likely receive more attention as the subfield moves in new research directions.

Most undergraduate courses conclude with a survey of contemporary American politics, presumably featuring in-class discussions of the political system's future development as well. A third of the undergraduate classes take up major American national institutions—Congress, the presidency, bureaucracy, party system, et cetera—sequentially, as might an introductory U.S. government class, though the APD courses focus on those institutions' origins and development. Reading material for undergraduates differs only in volume from PhD seminars; a similar set of books and articles appears on the undergraduate and graduate course lists.15

Books most often required in graduate and undergraduate APD courses include, alphabetically by author: Bensel 1990; Carpenter 2001; Gerring 1998; Hacker 2002; Hartz 1955; Lowi 1979; Mettler 1998; Morone 1990; Orren 1991; Sanders 1999; Schickler 2001; Skocpol 1992; Skowronek 1982; Skowronek 1993; Smith 1997.

Although most graduate seminars mingle analytic and chronological approaches, they tend to be organized thematically. Some courses favor substantive topics (welfare-state development and issues of gender, race, and class dominate), while others address methodological areas of APD inquiry, such as periodization and multiple orders. Reflecting the diversity of APD research, a great array of compelling issues are judged important enough to merit at least a week's discussion on one or more graduate syllabi. Several of these originally arose in other disciplines or political science subfields and have been revived or given new direction by APD scholars. Examples include the relative influence of culture and institutions in political development, long a mainstay of comparative politics scholars; and the origins and nature of the U.S. party system, thanks to V. O. Key and Walter Dean Burnham once a central topic in political science, have been revisited provocatively in works by Sidney Milkis, John Gerring, and David Mayhew, among others.16

A sampling of other prominent themes on APD syllabi includes: the influence of ideas and ideologies in American politics, particularly liberalism and republicanism; American exceptionalism, principally concerning welfare state development; the nature of representation, especially via interest groups; electoral patterns; political culture; past and present economic regulation; cycles of institution building and popular responses; congressional and executive branch development; political parties and partisan regimes; and federalism. And as the subfield moves into its adolescence, narrowly focused graduate seminars are increasingly on offer: “Race in American Political Development,” “Political Development of the Post–Civil War South,” and the like.

Students in APD courses will gain above all a sensitivity to context, especially the multiple influences and traditions that shape American politics, and an awareness of the potent possibilities of political engagement. They will also recognize that an animating force of political development is politics, thanks to APD scholars' detailed studies of legislative battles, citizen movements, and the like. These lessons in turn can foster a heightened understanding of the duties and opportunities of citizenship.

The subfield's wide-ranging areas of interest distinguish it from most other political science subfields. If this suggests incoherence, it may also constitute a strength, as inquiry flourishes more or less unfettered. Whether or not APD's kaleidoscopic diversity threatens to overwhelm the enterprise is addressed below. First, a closer examination of APD curricula is in order.

Missing pieces

Despite the great topical variety, several significant influences on U.S. national development are overlooked in these syllabi. Religion, for example, receives no attention as a constituent of U.S. political development in any syllabus I examined.17

The inclusion of James Morone's Hellfire Nation on APD syllabi will do much to fill this gap. Also noteworthy is the fact that Karen Orren has taught an entire course on religion and APD.

Only one course (Keith Poole's) analyzes the judiciary separately from (or alongside) Congress and the executive, and none explicitly treats political development through the prism of legal or constitutional change, despite the centrality of constitutional debates in shaping the U.S. polity.18

This is not to say that APD scholars overlook the importance of constitutional debates or legal authorities, but that the judiciary as such is not a featured topic in APD courses, in contrast to such national institutions as Congress, the presidency, interest groups, political parties, and the bureaucracy.

APD scholars' focus on political structures and institutions may contribute to a relative lack of attention to agency as a meaningful causal factor in political development. Perhaps agency-structure debates come up in classroom discussions of works like Stephen Skowronek's Politics Presidents Make or Daniel Carpenter's study of bureaucratic autonomy,19 but no course investigates political leadership or other aspects of personal agency—or even that familiar American shibboleth, individualism—as a separate topic. Notable in this regard is the fact that only a single political biography appears among the hundreds of required books and articles on these syllabi.20

Julian Zelizer's study of tax policy (1998), told in substantial part through the career of Wilbur Mills, is on Mettler's syllabus.

Furthermore, the domestic, peacetime American polity is overwhelmingly the ground of APD inquiry. Only Marie Gottschalk's syllabus has a separate section on foreign policy, and only David Robertson's (graduate) and Andrew Grossman's (undergraduate) courses examine war as a principal force shaping the course of American development. The Civil War appears as a transitional landmark on most syllabi that are organized chronologically, and just three courses—Gottschalk's, Robertson's, and Sanders's—include a section on the Cold War. A student new to the subject might imagine that American political development was little affected by war or indeed by significant engagement with the rest of the world.21

Promising to rectify this inattention to war's influence on American political development are selected essays in Katznelson and Shefter 2002 and a forthcoming study by Mayhew (2005).

Farmer, constitutional framer, laborer, slave (and freedman), bureaucrat, mother, capitalist, president, party member, movement activist, pensioner, solo bowler—these, not the soldier at arms (or congregant, diplomat, judge, or evangelist), are the emblematic figures of APD as presently taught.

The tendency of APD courses to concentrate chronologically on the period from Reconstruction through the New Deal, with an introductory burst of attention to the founding, points to another lacuna in the subfield. Paul Pierson has recently drawn attention to a “Faustian bargain” among scholars of American politics, wherein APD researchers have largely avoided study of the post–World War II U.S. polity in implicit exchange for a prominent place in the discipline.22

Pierson's exhortation to mine the recent past for evidence of continued developmental trends echoes a call by Richard John for more attention to the early American republic.23 Scholars are heeding such entreaties; to date, however, the subfield's courses follow mainstream APD scholarship in concentrating closely on a handful of historical periods.

Also absent from most syllabi—and, to a lesser extent, much APD research—are two features whose absence is striking, given the subfield's extensive focus on American state building. APD scholars and teachers have devoted great attention to the origins of and patterns within state development; much rarer are investigations of the consequences of that development—for citizens or for democratic institutions and practices. Several researchers have taken up, in rich detail, the variegated influences shaping policy outcomes24

See, for example, Polsky 1991.

—but explanations of why a particular policy turned out as it did rarely extend to assessing policies' actual impacts in practice.25

Two promising recent counterexamples: Carpenter 2001 (see his characterization of much APD literature as “leav[ing] the most important political outcomes—the impact of policies on citizens—unstudied,” at 11); and Suzanne Mettler's forthcoming study of the GI Bill. Additionally, a forthcoming “Transformation of American Politics” (Skocpol and Pierson, n.d.) edited volume features several essays applying APD analysis to a range of contemporary U.S. political issues.

Similarly, the actors marching through the pages of APD studies (and, less often, across course syllabi) are typically social and political elites rather than the groups and private individuals mainly affected by state policies.

In short, religion, war, individual agency, and policy consequences, along with several out-of-favor historical periods, are missing from APD syllabi. To be sure, only so much space is available in any course. And given the subfield's relative youth, APD courses more than those in long-established disciplinary areas might be expected to reflect current scholarly trends: until very recently, topics like religion, war, and policy consequences were not much written about. But to speak persuasively to current political concerns—a general aspiration of APD research and teaching—these key factors of American political development ought to be included.

Finally, the syllabi I examined suggest that most APD courses fail to engage directly the notion of “political development.” This reflects APD scholarship's apparent reluctance to wrestle with its conceptual foundation. Such pathbreaking works as, for example, Richard Bensel's Sectionalism in American Political Development include no discussion or definition of this titular concept.26

Bensel 1984; the author has recently acknowledged this “oversight” (Bensel 2003, 104).

I consider this issue further below; for now, note that while undergraduate and graduate students in APD courses explore thorny concepts like path dependence, regimes, political time, and many others, rarely (judging from syllabi, at least) do they take up in detail the nature of political development itself.

APD methods

APD graduate study features less attention to methods than is typical of other subfields. Methodological readings, if included at all, are confined to a single class, usually as part of an initial overview of the subfield. Typically assigned are brief treatments of various analytic approaches, most often including Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek's specifications of “order and change,” Skocpol's overview of historical institutionalism, and Pierson's account of path dependence.27

The use of counterfactuals as a window into the past sometimes also appears in this context, as does the effort to interpret contemporary American political/social development in the light of historical events.

It is impossible to infer from syllabi whether instructors stress methodological themes during subsequent classroom discussions of APD works. One clue, however, comes in the admirably detailed questions posed before each weekly seminar meeting on three syllabi: Bensel's (graduate), Robertson's (graduate/undergraduate), and Kimberly Johnson's (undergraduate). All three confine methods-related queries to the first or second week of the course. In sum, no APD syllabus I reviewed explores how scholars investigate the past, understand “development,” or otherwise approach their work. To gain in-depth training in archival research and other methods employed by most APD researchers, students presumably must enroll in history courses or learn on the job.

The relative inattention to methodology as such may also be reflected in APD scholarship, as John Gerring has recently argued: “APD has not [been] a locus of methodological reflection … little consideration has been given to methodological issues as they affect the study of American political history.” Some of the subfield's leading lights disagree with the claim that APD avoids methodological concerns. Skowronek calls it “utterly fantastic,” and cites in response a number of articles that address new institutionalism and other aspects of APD analysis.28

Gerring 2003, 82; Skowronek 2003, 107 (notably, only one of the works Skowronek cites appears on more than one syllabus among the group I examined).

Yet I suspect I am not alone in finding it difficult to point graduate students to systematic accounts of how to do APD research.

True, a synthetic account of APD methodology would be a daunting task, given the vast range of methods scholars use. This catholicity is largely due to the complex combination of intellectual sources that inform APD research, ranging from political historians' outpouring of works in the 1960s and 1970s to the Continental comparative-historical tradition exemplified by (among many others) Reinhard Bendix and Barrington Moore. APD arose in part as a reaction to the methods-driven formalism that came to characterize much political science—especially the study of American politics—during the late 1970s. Indeed, the discipline's perceived overemphasis on methodological precision could help explain APDers' inclination to concentrate their energies on ambitious topics that are difficult to pursue via normal methods (for example, origins of the American administrative state).29

On political science's “methodological turn,” see Shapiro 2002; Little 1991. On APD's origins, see Gerring 2003, 82–85; Orren and Skowronek 2004, 1–3.

Moreover, as APD scholars continue to push into new realms of the American past or inventively revive old questions, the research conventions employed in such pathbreaking work await fuller exposition—probably by others.

All that said, more forthright and elaborate discussions of methodologies would be a vital addition to APD graduate curricula—especially those methods or emphases that are unique to the subfield, for APD scholarship indeed uses approaches that distinguish it from traditional American political history. The differences are most evident when comparing how APD scholars and historians analyze a given event or period. Both are engaged in close, careful study of the past, often using archival materials in similar ways. Yet historians' customary emphasis on the specific—how and why particular moments happened as they did—is less important in APD than discovering broader commonalities and disjunctions—how particular moments influenced subsequent political arrangements, how they resemble and differ from other moments in American development, and what patterns across the sweep of U.S. history they help illuminate. To the historian's invocation of Heraclitus (“one cannot step twice into the same river”), an APDer might respond in the spirit of Huckleberry Finn: yes, but one can revisit the same fishing holes, year after year, while noting subtle changes in currents and water depth.30

Thanks to an anonymous Perspectives reviewer for inspiring that contrast. Heraclitus quoted in Kahn 1979, 73.

This basic divergence between APD's and historians' approaches to the past inevitably influences the means of exploration. Rather than bringing a wide array of sources to bear on a single event in order to explain it, APD researchers employ comparative techniques to display temporal sequences and discontinuities. Compared to most political history, APD scholarship is “characteristically more aggressive in its manipulation of patterns and more radical in its departure from a chronological view of history…. APD research indicates political movement through time rather than a polity bounded in time and highlights connections between politics in the past and politics in the present rather than the separateness and foreignness of past politics.”31

Orren and Skowronek 2004, 8–9. For more on the distinctions between APD approaches to the past and those of historians and other political scientists, see also Smith 2003; Gerring 2003; Smith 1996.

Such an orientation leads to heightened focus on the principal constituents of the polity's overlapping, layered orders: political institutions and enduring collections of political ideas. Take, for example, the puzzle of why U.S. constitutional change has been relatively consensual over time, a question that historians treat on a case-by-case basis. A recent book-length APD account by Charles Kromkowski offers an intriguing general explanation, turning on the little-noted institution of national apportionment rules.32 Similarly, the motivating force provided by clashes among constellations of ideas at different points in time has been an APD insight from the subfield's early days, given greatest voice in Rogers Smith's exegesis of America's “multiple traditions.”33 Institutions and ideas are in the foreground of other disciplinary approaches to U.S. history as well, but APD researchers investigate these in tandem, and in innovative ways.

These distinctions suggest less a novel methodological toolkit than differences in emphasis and purpose. Such lessons already may be communicated in classes; perhaps the best way to learn how to do APD is by reading outstanding works in the subfield. Nevertheless, students would be well served by classroom debates about the ways in which American political development is and can be apprehended.

Readings

While courses vary considerably in the themes, principal scholarly debates, and methods of inquiry they cover, assigned readings are more consistent. Recent secondary works are strongly preferred. Few graduate or undergraduate APD syllabi feature many primary sources at all, unlike a typical U.S. history or American political thought survey. Hardly any foundational American political texts appear more than once on the syllabi I reviewed: the list of those that do includes the Constitution, selected Federalist papers (and, less often, Anti-Federalist selections), brief excerpts from Tocqueville, and two or three prominent Supreme Court decisions. Otherwise, assigned works are overwhelmingly from the period of APD's own development as a field. To take one metric, more than 100 articles or book chapters appear as required readings on the 12 graduate syllabi I examined. Of these, fully 95 percent were published after 1980, and over three-quarters since 1990. A survey of assigned books yields a similar results. Only two works published before 1990 appear on more than two graduate syllabi: Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) and Stephen Skowronek's Building a New American State (1982). (The latter is often hailed as an APD founding manifesto.) But virtually none of the vast writing on American politics and history stretching back over 200 years appears on APD syllabi.34

Exceptions among the syllabi I examined: Poole includes a range of political science and historical scholarship from across the twentieth century, and Robertson assigns several seminal readings (Bryan's “Cross of Gold” speech, e.g.) besides the Federalist and Tocqueville. On Skowronek's 1982 work as APD's “founding manifesto” see, for example, the 2003 roundtable in Social Science History 27 (3).

Orren and Skowronek's newly published overview of the subfield traces a history of APD-style interpretations in political science, beginning with late-nineteenth-century writers like John Burgess, the discipline's modern founder; Woodrow Wilson; and the lamentably forgotten thinker Henry Jones Ford.35

None of these founding figures are assigned on a single syllabus, and rarely are the ideas of any (or others among their list of original APD authors) treated as anything more than a footnote in the subfield's courses—or, for that matter, in its most important recent works. Hartz's The Liberal Tradition is the sole exception, found on a quarter of the graduate syllabi and a couple of undergraduate reading lists. And Hartz is read mainly as a foil; the usual counterpoint is Smith's influential reframing of America's political development as a struggle among contending ideologies.36

Either Smith 1993 or Smith 1997 appears on all but one of the graduate syllabi collected for this overview.

There is a certain irony in the lack of older classics on APD syllabi, given practitioners' insistence on fine-grained historical study: do as we write, not as we teach.37

Compare Kurzer's observation about the study of comparative politics: “instructors seem to have a distinct preference for assigning older texts rather than delving into recent publications. It is not farfetched to state that somebody who attended graduate school 15 years ago would recognize many of the readings in present-day field seminars.” Kurzer 2003, 375.

Is this tendency a significant problem for teaching APD? Perhaps not; the works assigned, though written recently, all examine previous periods and episodes in U.S. history. And the variety of subjects taken up in the past twenty years of APD scholarship provides ample material for a full semester's investigation. Still, three types of “classic” readings will appear on my future APD syllabi. First, I will include representative examples from the Orren/Skowronek list of APD ancestors—probably Burgess, Ford, Charles Beard, and Hartz.38

More specifically: selections from Burgess's Civil War and the Constitution (1901); Jones's Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898); Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) or his excellent 1934 APSR essay “The Historical Approach to the New Deal”; and Hartz's The Liberal Tradition (1955).

Absorbing these past efforts to wrestle with the polity as it developed provides a useful contrast to contemporary APD scholarship. What presentist tendencies, students will be encouraged to ask, might be exhibited by current APD writing as the subfield changes? Second, theoretical treatments of political development from other subfields and disciplines deserve inclusion, since these will enable students to engage more fully the conceptual heart of APD. Third, I will include a wider range of primary sources—including cultural artifacts such as Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Birth of a Nation, and documents consulted by the modern authors assigned for the same week—to stimulate discussions of how APD scholars can work with historical texts.

“Development” in APD

The preponderance of recent publications on both graduate and undergraduate syllabi testifies to the liveliness of the APD enterprise. It also may contribute to the subfield's difficulty in addressing its subject, political development. That concept's study has a rich history in other subfields, especially comparative politics: budding APD scholars would benefit from exposure to debates about comparative development, dating back at least three decades and advanced by scholars such as Gabriel Almond, Arendt Lijphart, Karl Deutsch, Clifford Geertz, Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph, and Alfred Stepan.

This observation points to another irony, noted in Orren and Skowronek's survey of classic APD works. Successive interpretations of American political development invariably try to overturn their predecessors—as Charles Beard, for example, dismissed Burgess's idealism, only to have his own realist account of interest-based institutional development overturned by Edmund and Helen Morgan, Forrest McDonald, and others.39

A detailed review appears in Greene 1968.

Thus one principal result of a century of APD-style research has been to seriously question the very idea of development. Perhaps due in part to this inclination toward scholarly parricide, rarely have the subfield's luminaries attempted detailed accounts “development” within American politics. The result is an “awkward silence surrounding the concept that names this field,” with “no operating definition of political development agreed on—or even debated—by any identifiable group of APD researchers.”40

Instead, scholars describe and dissect developmental patterns, engaging in longitudinal studies of state capacity, bureaucratic autonomy, citizenship laws, southern populism, welfare provision, “realigning” and other elections, sectionalism, presidents as agents of political change, civic decline and renewal, business' role in state formation, and so on. This is not to suggest that the subfield is theory-poor: exceptional APD studies include some of the most compelling theoretical statements in recent political science scholarship. But few of these inquire into the empirical center of APD—development.

We may infer several constitutive elements of political development from surveying the APD literature. They include transformative moments or sequences; prominent “paths” that decisively shape subsequent political actions or outcomes; distinctive institutional configurations that make up political regimes; specific patterns of interest aggregation and civic participation; and landmark policy battles in such areas as the welfare state, race and/or gender, and citizenship. The variety suggested by this partial list, along with the tension among these developmental types (for example, periods of upheaval vs. sustained “paths” or “regimes”), further testifies that little consensus exists about the nature of development in APD studies—or whether and how American politics may be said to “develop” at all.

Orren and Skowronek's recently published overview of APD will surely spark more focused debate around this concept; the fourth chapter is titled “Political Development: The Definition.” That discussion stresses meaningful differences between political development and political change, as well as between political and other types of development—economic, cultural, and social. The authors' definition—political development as “a durable shift in governing authority”—offers a general perspective on the nature of political development in America, helping to “bring into a common frame much of what the APD literature is investigating topic by topic.”41

This leads us back to my opening question, concerning whether such a common frame is attainable—or desirable—within APD.

Future Developments

Over the past two decades, APD scholarship has enhanced our comprehension of the American polity in all its vast complexity, as state actors jostle with private forces for control of government authority in arenas shaped by existing institutional practices. Even as the subfield's contributions gain recognition, however, some of its leading adherents warn that its future is dim. These alarms signal APD's maturity: only after a club is well-established do members become worried about its continued viability. Foremost among the warnings is Skowronek's caution that APD lacks a coherent research agenda. He also notes that the subfield's contributions to social science are becoming less and less distinctive. Articulating similar concerns, John Gerring has issued a call for rationalization and disciplinary boundary-setting, warning that the enterprise's insufficient attention to its methodological precepts has left it in a “problematic place within the discipline of political science.” A contrary view comes from another APD stalwart, Richard Bensel, who argues strenuously against APD's becoming a “self-conscious, credentialing community” and in favor of maintaining “the idiosyncratic fires of what was and still is an intellectual insurgency. As an insurgency, our goal should be to destroy disciplinary boundaries, to sabotage reifying conventions…. I am afraid of becoming a tribe.”42

Surveying the rising tide of APD works on topics from all over the American political landscape, a certain incoherence does seem prevalent. But viewing the sub-rosa community of APD teachers via a range of syllabi, the scene of chaos gives way to one of relatively bounded organization. APD courses exhibit a shared core of readings and structure (and, for that matter, implicitly agreed-upon omissions). And even if methods are not stressed in graduate courses, students can identify a common set of approaches that continue to distinguish APD work from that of historians or other political scientists. And the emergence, in coming months and years, of books on APD as a research program will provide a touchstone for arguments in and outside the classroom on how the subfield ought to develop. Many disputes will remain, centered, for example, around a basic split between ideational and institutional treatments of APD.43

This divergence is expertly dissected by Glenn (2004).

But the conversations themselves both attract attention to and help invigorate the scholarly enterprise.

With this infrastructure in place, concerns that the subfield will melt away seem less urgent. APD scholars, with their keen sense of order and change, seem strikingly well positioned to register and respond to ongoing changes in their own regime—to build on their insights about institutional development by sustaining and expanding a basic organizational purpose, in this case structured scholarly inquiries into U.S. political history; communicating those inquiries consistently, as APD teachers do by presenting a core set of books and articles in roughly similar ways; and remaining sensitive to issues of adaptation and flexibility, an APD hallmark inasmuch as its initiates are encouraged to continue a “frontier style” of investigation into questions about American politics across time.

More pressing, to my mind, than worries about either APD's friability or calcified “tribalism” are questions about its relevance to present-day politics—a concern that affects the discipline as a whole. Scholars might address the issue of relevance by systematically extending APD's insights to modern politics. They could use APD findings to help rationally organize and judiciously reconstruct public administration. The possibility of such a contribution animates at least some canonical APD works, potentially constituting an overarching purpose for the subfield. How much better to draw on evidence about the consequences of how each presidency is situated in political time than to struggle anew to learn this lesson every four years.44

See, for example, Skowronek 1993.

As political science inches toward more practical engagement with real-world problems,45

For one well-documented claim in this regard, see Smith 2004.

APD work holds out special promise, given its researchers' demonstrated tendency to combine broad questions about politics and policy making with de tailed empirical studies about how those questions were answered in the past, and how the answers shaped subsequent developments. To turn these insights into genuinely practical programs will require, however, analysis of an even wider range of topics. The relative paucity of attention to foreign policy or religion may limit the ability of APD scholars to shed much light on, for example, the events of September 11 and its aftermath—surely a tectonic shock in contemporary American political development.

Such efforts to apply APD-style lessons about the importance of political time, contingency, and recurrent patterns to current policy making also could have salutary effects in the classroom. In my undergraduate APD classes, for example, students stage organized debates every other week, applying historical evidence about immigration or national security in disputing current policies in that area. Reading through dozens of APD syllabi, it is evident that similar efforts to illuminate the present via extensive study of the past are widely undertaken. Given this decisive return of political history to a durable place in the study of American politics, is it too much to hope that APD lessons could find a niche in governance as well?

Appendix: Syllabi Reviewed for this Essay

Graduate

Bensel, Richard. Cornell University: Fall 2002. Political Economy of American Development, 1860–1900.

Coleman, John. University of Wisconsin: Spring 2002. American Political Development.

Gottschalk, Marie. University of Pennsylvania: Fall 2000. American Political Development.

James, Scott. University of California–Los Angeles: Winter 2002. American Political Development.

Martin, Cathie Jo. Boston University: Fall 2003. American Politics Field Seminar.

Mettler, Suzanne. Maxwell School, Syracuse University: Spring 2003. The Development of the American Administrative State.

Milkis, Sidney. University of Virginia: Fall 2002. American Political Development.

Pierson, Paul, and Theda Skocpol. Harvard University: Fall 2002. American Political Development and Contemporary Politics.

Polsky, Andrew. Hunter College: Spring 2002. American Political Development.

Poole, Keith. University of Houston: Spring 2002. American Political Development.

Skowronek, Stephen. Yale University: Spring 2003. American Political Development.

Teles, Steven. Brandeis University: Spring 2003. American Political Development.

Undergraduate

Bridges, Amy. University of California-San Diego: Spring 2000. American Political Development.

Carpenter, Daniel. Harvard University: Spring 2003. The Early Development of American Political Institutions and Organizations.

Grossman, Andrew. Albion College: Spring 2003. American Political Development.

Johnson, Kimberly. Barnard College: Spring 2003. American Political Development.

Josefson, Jim. Bridgewater College: Fall 2003. Foundations of American Political Development.

Kromkowski, Charles. University of Virginia: Spring 2003. Democracy in America.

McCarty, Nolan. Princeton University: Spring 2002. Development of American Political Institutions.

Robertson, David. University of Missouri-St. Louis: Fall 2002. American Political Development [also open to graduate students].

Rosenson, Beth. University of Florida: Spring 2001. American Political Development.

Sanders, Elizabeth. Cornell University: Spring 2002. American Political Development in the Twentieth Century.

Strahan, Randall. Emory University: Spring 2003. American Political Development [also open to graduate students].

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