Formative Acts is offered as a corrective to American political development's (APD) tendency to focus on obstacles to change rather than change itself. Stephen Skowronek and Matthew Glassman have compiled fifteen substantive chapters written by accomplished authors in the field along with several new voices. In general, their contributions focus on political entrepreneurship and the conditions under which enduring change occurs. The subject matter is strikingly eclectic, and the compilation is a testament to the wide range of scholars who profitably employ APD's conceptual framework.

What stands out about Formative Acts is the large number of interesting narratives it contains. I cannot think of another political science title with more. Because of them the book will interest even those who are not well versed in APD. Many of the essays are sufficiently accessible for an upper division undergraduate seminar. This takes nothing away from their insight. Several arguments deserve to reach a discipline-wide audience.

For instance, Daniel P. Carpenter and Colin D. Moore have written a terrific piece on bureaucracy. They demonstrate that an agency, entirely independent of its formal leadership or legislative action, can succeed as an entrepreneur if conditions are right. They show that a cohort of like-minded individuals willing to exploit ambiguities in existing laws can develop a vital new mission. Their case in point is the Food and Drug Administration during the 1950s, whose freshly hired scientists started vetting prescription drugs for their medical effectiveness.

Nicole Mellow and Jeffrey K. Tulis make a solid case for overturning the enduring perception of Andrew Johnson as a failed president. Not only did Johnson presage the Jim Crow South, he actively enabled its existence by reintroducing a states' rights narrative that other Southerners adopted, dragging his feet in enforcing laws, encouraging Southern obstructionism, and engaging in unilateral actions that thwarted Congress. It was not a coincidence that for nearly a century the nation's settlement on race corresponded to his vision.

Richard M. Vallely examines the 1890 federal elections bill. Massachusetts Senator George Frisbie Hoar introduced the bill to protect African American voting rights as a means of reinvigorating the Republican Party in the South. The bill came very close to passing. It could have passed if its backers had been more skilled. Hoar's effort prompted the Democrats to adopt racially charged rhetoric in the 1892 elections. They proceeded to win additional seats in Congress and used their new majority to repeal all Reconstruction-era federal elections statutes. The policy window that had been open just two years before closed tightly, demonstrating how decades of racial injustice hinged on a knife's edge of contingency.

Many more of the essays deserve praise, including Richard Bensel's finely textured analysis of the 1896 Democratic convention, Daniel Kryder's meditation on policing in Washington, D.C., and Bruce Miroff's conceptual analysis of the distinction between entrepreneurship (more solitary and unilateral) and leadership (more embedded and reliant on followership). Others provide significant food for thought. Victoria Hattam and Joseph Lowndes, for example, challenge APD scholarship by asserting that durable changes in cultural understandings are the primary locus of formative change instead of political leaders' actions.

There are several essays here that seem to tackle more than can be accomplished in a brief space and that make broad assertions without much evidence, but my main concern is that the anthology does not offer much more than the sum of its parts. Sociologist Elisabeth Clemens gamely concludes the book by noting that its contents serve “as the opening for a rich conversation” (p. 363) and that it introduces “a set of middle-range propositions” (p. 364). These are valuable accomplishments, to be sure, but they also leave one wondering how much ground has been gained.

And there might be more. The most recurrent lesson is that “disruption and recombination must proceed along multiple dimensions simultaneously in order to overcome powerful feedbacks that contribute to the repair and restoration of dominant political relationships” (p. 375). Lyndon B. Johnson found that he was not rewarded for championing the civil rights movement (Sidney Milkis). Newt Gingrich failed to institutionalize his vision (Miroff). Presidents generally find it more advantageous to distance themselves from social movements than to embrace them (Elizabeth Sanders). And the numerous opportunities for entrepreneurism provided by a complex institutional structure have “led to a pronounced diffusion of authority and a blurring of institutional boundaries” that undermines collective action (Adam Sheingate, p. 27–28). Thus, the book seems to reinforce the very idea from which it was intended to depart.

Adam Sheingate's chapter 2 describes a rich irony that probably should have been used to tie most of the essays together: There is a great deal of space for entrepreneurial action in American politics, but because of this fact, there is little chance that any entrepreneur can successfully effect systemic change. A well-placed politician who would take Formative Acts seriously would be less likely to attempt a formative act, because the problems attendant in doing so seem so formidable. Thank goodness for their naivete, then, as it makes politics much more interesting. At the same time, a well-placed bureaucrat might come away emboldened. The United States may not be a more favorable venue for “middle level” entrepreneurship than other nations, but it would be interesting to find out—a line of inquiry that would broaden APD to PD.

David Brian Robertson's point of departure in The Constitution and America's Destiny parallels Sheingate's observation: Collective action in the United States occurs only with great difficulty. Robertson does not blame the founders for this. Rather, he blames the Philadelphia Convention. We have always known that the Constitution was a compromise document. And, at least since Woodrow Wilson was a lecturer, we have also realized that the United States possesses a cumbersome system of government. But until now, no one has put these two arguments together in such a stark fashion. Robertson argues that U. S. politics is cumbersome because those responsible for writing the Constitution had to make so many compromises about where to lodge power and about how to select those who wield power.

The Constitution and America's Destiny offers a fresh and readable account of the Philadelphia Convention by pointing out the interdependence of the various decisions made and by showing how the sequence of decisions helped to produce unexpected outcomes. Robertson first maps out the Constitution's complicated approach to agency, authority, and the policy process. Then he explains exactly how complications arose in each area. In the American Political Science Review (“Madison's Opponents and Constitutional Design,” 99 [May 2005]: 225–43) Robertson suggested that Connecticut's Roger Sherman was as responsible for the final shape of the Constitution as James Madison. The book makes clear that he did not intend for the title of “Father of the Constitution” to be transferred to Sherman. If anything deserves such a title, it is politics itself. Delegates went to Philadelphia with an array of differing interests. The compromises about governmental structure and agency this forced led delegates to become “less certain about the consequences of their choices,” which in turn “dictated that they should arm their favored agents with the will and ability to stop policies threatening to their vital interests.” The result was a system of government where “veto points would abound” (p. 232).

Robertson deserves praise for his careful understanding of history, his knowledge of the interests of the delegates, and his wide-ranging attention to scholarship from several different fields. The provocative argument that the founders' devotion to checks and balances has been massively overemphasized deserves serious consideration. He also articulates as well as anyone how the compromises at Philadelphia made the formation of coherent economic policy exceedingly difficult.

At the same time, Robertson errs in dismissing the theoretical arguments made by delegates as rationalizations favoring their own interests. Several works on the founding, including Calvin Jillson's Constitution Making (1988), Jack Rakove's Original Meanings (1996) and my own Ratifying the Republic (2002) deal more deftly with how interests and principles combined to produce the founding's settlement. Taking the delegate's theoretical commitments more seriously does not undermine Robertson's thesis. On the contrary, a dedication to the rule of law—and to constitutional law in particular—induced many to embrace a government that looked more than a bit odd to them. It is also questionable whether the Constitution itself yielded more obstacles to collective action than did the Bill of Rights, the unforeseen growth in the power of the presidency and the federal judiciary, and the massive array of interests that grew up well after the Philadelphia Convention completed its work.

Yet Robertson's analysis is significant, and made all the more impressive because it is a detour from his main concern–the obstacles that American political institutions “have placed in the way of American businesses, workers, and other economic interests” (xi). That Robertson took this detour is fortunate for us, because APD has had relatively little to say about the American founding. So little, in fact, that it hardly figures into the volume edited by Skowronek and Glassman, which is the ultimate irony for a book entitled Formative Acts. This is one good reason to read these two interesting volumes together.