The State Constitutions’ Influence on American Political Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. e85-e89
Author(s):  
Robinson Woodward-Burns
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The State ◽  
State Constitutions

American Political Development from Citizens' Perspective: Tracking Federal Government's Presence in Individual Lives over Time

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Mettler ◽  
Andrew Milstein
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Political Roles ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

Although scholars of American political development (APD) have helped transform many aspects of the study of U.S. politics over the last quarter-century, they have barely begun to use the powerful analytical tools of this approach to elucidate the relationship between government and citizens. APD research has probed deeply into the processes of state-building and the creation and implementation of specific policies, yet has given little attention to how such development affects the lives of individuals and the ways in which they relate to government. Studies routinely illuminate how policies influence the political roles of elites and organized groups, but barely touch on how the state shapes the experiences and responses of ordinary individuals. As a result, we know little about how governance has influenced citizenship over time or how those changes have, in turn, affected politics.

Neither Markets nor Administration: Brandeis and the Antitrust Reforms of 1914

1994 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Berk
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Old Order

The election of 1912 retains its hold on the imagination of students of American political development. Long interpreted as a conflict between tradition and modernity, Martin Sklar has recently argued that the old order had passed by 1912. In law and economy, competitive-proprietary capitalism had been eclipsed by administration. The political conflict was now overwhowould administer prices and investment, the corporation of the state?

The Color Line and the State

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberley S. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Minority Politics ◽  
Early American ◽  
Core Questions

This article examines the ways in which scholars of American political development (APD) have encountered the color line through their research, and the strides they have made in bringing race back into the field of political science in general and the study of the state in particular. Three core questions about race and APD are considered: How is race defined? When does race matter? In what direction does race matter? Two approaches relating to race and American politics are discussed: the race relations approach and the racial politics (or minority politics) approach. It then explores five challenges that must be addressed in order to overcome the persistent connections between APD and the discipline’s racial anomalism. It also analyzes the role of race in the establishment of the early American welfare state and concludes by reflecting on the persistence of racial inequality and prospects for APD in the twenty-first century.

On Categories and Configurations: Further Remarks on Rebuilding the American state

1995 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Katznelson ◽  
Bruce Pietrykowski
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Past Half ◽  
American State

“Rebuilding the American State” was written in the manner of a bozzetto: it is a sketch drawn to reshape interlocking analytical and historiographical conversations and to suggest pathways joining the era of Roosevelt to the qualities and conundrums of postwar Democratic party liberalism. We underscored the key role of what might be called the long 1940s, stretching from the economic and political crisis faced by the New Deal in 1937–38 to the election in 1952 of the first Republican president since Hoover. We claimed that institutional and policy decisions taken across a number of domains in this period coherently recast the state and, in so doing, the contours and possibilities of American politics. We argued as well that old and new institutionalist approaches to state capacity have shared an unfortunate propensity to inventory organizational resources without regard to the normative and practical policy visions that define the content of what it is the state actually is meant to accomplish. In this light, simple dichotomous distinctions between weak and strong states appear as too blunt to sharply etch our understanding of the past half-century of American political development.

scholarly journals Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State

2009 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 547-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond King ◽  
Robert C. Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Institutional Capacity ◽  
New Directions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
American State

This review of new directions in the American and comparative literatures on the state reveals important intellectual trends that parallel each other quite closely. Both comparativists and Americanists address similar questions about the sources of state authority, and both propose similar answers. Collectively, these scholars and others are retheorizing the state—developing a suppler, multidimensional picture of the state's origins, structure, and consequences—to shed light on the reasons for the state's stubborn refusal to cede the stage. The emerging understanding of the state that the authors describe provides a framework not only for revisiting the state in the international realm but also, in dialogue with recent Americanist studies, for revising and deepening the understanding of the state's paradoxical role in American political development and finally setting aside the assumption of the United States as stateless. In this emerging view, American state building, strength, and institutional capacity form through links with society, not necessarily through autonomy from society. But such distinctive patterns provide insights for comparative studies, too, for instance, in respect to the relationship between the state and welfare policy across nations.

State Autonomy and American Political Development: How Mass Democracy Promoted State Power

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel DeCanio
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The State ◽  
Institutional Constraints ◽  
State Autonomy ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
Electoral Outcomes ◽  
Primary Unit

In the 1980s, many scholars of both comparative and American politics argued that states often act autonomously from social demands. Rejecting reductionist assumptions regarding the primacy of social groups for public policy, both groups of scholars examine how government actors and preexisting institutional constraints influenced policy implementation. Since then, however, while the state has been retained as the primary unit of analysis for most studies of American political development, interest in the autonomy of the state has dwindled, and scholars have increasingly focused on how social groups and electoral outcomes explain state formation and public policy, especially in the nineteenth century. In some instances, scholars have even denied that state autonomy is a relevant concept for the study of American political development.

scholarly journals Gender and the American State

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen McDonagh ◽  
Carol Nackenoff
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
Political Citizenship ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
The Family ◽  
Independent Variable

The study of gender in American political development (APD) challenges the efficacy for advancing women’s political inclusion of a liberal tradition valorizing principles of individual equality and positing a separation of the family and the state. Masked are ways in which gender roles and the family are integral to governance and state-building. Gender is both a dependent and an independent variable in APD. Shaped by institutions and policies of the state, it also shapes institutions and policies that promote women’s political citizenship and expand the state’s capacity for social provision—by asserting not only liberal claims of women’s equality with men, but also by invoking maternalist claims based on women’s difference from men, thereby challenging and altering relationships between public and private spheres.

Managing the Periphery in the Gilded Age: Writing Constitutions for the Western States

2008 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Bridges
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Labor Law ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Building ◽  
State Governments ◽  
State Constitutions ◽  
Constitutional Conventions

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.

POSTRACIAL POLITICS?

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baodong Liu
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Racial Diversity ◽  
State Level ◽  
American Political Development ◽  
The State ◽  
New Era ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
Development Literature

AbstractThis paper examines the claim that the historical election of Barack Obama demonstrated a new era of postracial politics in America (Ceaser et al., 2009). Drawing on arguments in the recent American political development literature (King and Smith, 2005; Novkov 2008), this research proposes a racial tension theory to link Obama’s White voter support to the deep-seated racial tension at the state level. In doing so, a theoretic and empirical solution is offered to solve the problem of high correlations between the major contextual variables measuring Black density (Key 1949), racial diversity (Hero 1998), state political culture (Elazar 1984), and social capital (Putnam 2000). The converged findings based on multiple methods clearly show that the state-level White support for Obama in both 2008 and 2012 was directly related to the racial tension of a state. In contrast, racial tension did not affect the White vote for John Kerry, the Democratic nominee in the 2004 Presidential election.

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