“This is what living through a critical juncture feels like” is what one scholar of American political development (APD) tweeted in 2018.Footnote ¹ Numerous recent events suggest we might be at the cusp of fundamental changes in the American political system, including major challenges to some or many of the nation's longstanding democratic processes. Just in 2020 alone, the nation faced a deadly pandemic that shook its capacity and infrastructure. It also witnessed massive protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. The year ended with accusations from the sitting president of the United States that the presidential election was fraudulent and “stolen” and with orchestrated efforts to overturn the results. Then 2021 began with a violent uprising at the Capitol, followed by an unprecedented second impeachment of President Donald Trump. Since then, the nation has continued to struggle with economic inequality not seen for nearly a century, as well as a global climate emergency. The heightened politicization of institutions that had attempted to insulate themselves from partisan politics, from the Department of Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, has led to further challenges. The Supreme Court, now dominated by conservatives, has been aggressively challenging longstanding precedents, most notably Roe v. Wade. It has sought to take away seemingly entrenched fundamental rights with regard to gender and racial equality and notions of bodily autonomy and privacy.

These are matters that touch all of us directly as citizens on a daily basis. As political scientists, and scholars of APD, they also serve as catalysts for rethinking the modern American state and American democracy. They have brought to the fore issues that have long been central to the study of APD including institutional stability, resiliency, and decay; the origins, development, and durability of democratic norms and processes; and the nature and capacity of the American state. These concerns are now crucial for exploring the possible future trajectories of American politics.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, APD scholars are hardly of a single mind in processing this political moment. To some, the United States is facing threats that are unprecedented in American history and is at a potential critical juncture. Others see more continuity than disjuncture. They view the current moment as part of a series of longer institutional developments that have brought the country to this politically explosive moment. Still others see the moment as an illumination of patterns and practices that have long existed under the radar within our politics and within a conventional scholarship that valorizes “American exceptionalism” and the nation's democratic culture and institutions in a highly selective reading of the country's history. The events surrounding the killing of George Floyd and the explosion of protests for Black Lives Matter in 2020, for instance, forced many Americans—particularly white Americans—to examine for the first time the central place of race and racism in America's political past and ongoing development. These events also forced the academy to reckon with its shortcomings in assessing the role of racial factors in American politics.

As these new challenges to the American political system have unfolded across a background of increased political and social polarization, we decided to issue a call for short thought pieces that assess APD during this moment of extraordinary challenges. In doing so, we discovered that a collective consideration of where APD stands has not really taken place in Studies since the early 2000s. This discovery has made the conversation we hope to open up even more important as we assess where the field has been in the more recent past and where it should go in the future. In a moment when political science is dominated by causal inference tests of the behavioral politics of the moment and with analyzing politics via experiments, APD's emphasis on longer and deeper processes of institutional development, entrenchment and retrenchment, and the ways in which inequalities of race, ethnicity, income, gender, and sexuality are structured into the political system are all the more resonant and vital to provide explanations of our current crises and potential ways out of them.

In our open call for papers, we asked respondents to consider—but certainly not be limited to—the following questions: Can theories and approaches of APD largely developed within the penumbra of the postwar twentieth-century West European and American welfare state be transported across time and space? What does APD look like in light of the enormous political, social, and economic challenges facing the increasingly disunited and polarized American state and society? How should democratization, settler colonialism, and state-building be considered both separately and together as constitutive parts (or not) of APD? How should scholars directly incorporate new and varied understandings of race/racism, gender and sexuality, class and income inequality, ethnicity, and religion into our understandings of APD? Finally, what new theoretical and analytic approaches should be developed to position the field for the future?

The short essays we received for this special issue engage with everything from our understanding of democracy to our understanding of the core tenets of APD research and methodology. Of course, and not surprisingly, the range of pieces we have received were not close to comprehensive with regard to the topics that our field needs to address. A number of scholars reported that they were unable to submit essays at this time because of the additional teaching and personal demands that the pandemic has placed on them. Some colleagues inquired with suggestions for relevant longer pieces, which we hope to see in print at a later date. We see this specific collection of thought pieces as just the beginning of a longer conversation that will take place across several issues of Studies as fellow scholars contribute their assessments. We encourage other scholars to join this conversation and to consider submitting short essays on critical topics that are not covered in this special issue, including the climate crisis, policing and the carceral state in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, the pandemic, the forever wars and the political role of the U.S. military and veterans, the housing crisis, escalating economic inequality and structural changes in the U.S. political economy, and the rise of the white power movement, to name just a few.

The short essays for this special issue are organized somewhat thematically. Given the details and individuality of each piece, we organized them rather broadly. We begin with an understanding of democracy in our current moment. Both Graham Dodds and Kurt Weyland place American exceptionalism and our populist moment within a broader cross-national context, pushing APD scholars to return to their comparativist roots. Kumar Ramanathan argues that this moment ought to lead us to revisit W. E. B. Du Bois's masterpiece, Black Reconstruction. Paul Baumgardner and Calvin TerBeek argue that this moment forces a fundamental reexamination of a longstanding convention within the area of law and APD that seeks to understand the role of the Supreme Court within a politics of regime theory. We then turn to pieces that engage with APD methodology. Eric Patashnik addresses policy feedback. Daniel Galvin and Chloe Thurston consider the importance of APD as a problem-driven enterprise. Justin Peck emphasizes the importance of institutional conflict within political time. Daniel Kryder and Ryan LaRochelle argue that the current moment ought to push us to use our methods of process tracing and entrenchment to engage and understand the future more prominently. Bartholomew Sparrow argues for APD scholars to engage more directly with the tangible and material interests that people experience in their everyday lives.

The longer articles in this issue that precede these short essays also engage—serendipitously—in the fraught politics of the current moment. Theda Skocpol, Caroline Tervo, and Kirsten Walters examine the impact of social movement activism in turning the 2020 election to the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. Stephan Stohler, David Bateman, and Robinson Woodward-Burns's contribution analyzes the importance of courts and Article V of the Constitution to our understanding of the foundations and formations of democratic development. Richard Bensel considers the potential political conundrums and the difficulties of establishing democratic practices and responding to public preferences when attempting to enact a constitution. Finally, Michael Dichio, Logan Strother, and Ryan Williams focus on the construction of the U.S. Court of Claims in the 1800s. Like other excellent APD scholarship, their essay guides our understanding of current moments, particularly the ways in which major constitutional and political changes can occur in response to what appear to be mundane political and institutional issues.