American Political Development (original) (raw)

American Political Development and Political History

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2014

This essay traces the long and productive relationship between two genres of historical writing: American political development (or APD) and American political history. It is written primarily for political scientists; a secondary audience is historians who wish to become more familiar with APD. Its focus is on the period before the adoption of the federal Constitution in 1788 and the end of the Second World War in 1945, an epoch that has long been recognized as not only formative, but also distinct from the epoch that it followed and preceded. It is, in addition, an epoch that has spawned a dialogue between APD and political history that had proved to be particularly fruitful.

Ideal Points and the Study of American Political Development

This article aims to persuade historically oriented political scientists that ideal point techniques such as DW-NOMINATE can illuminate much about politics and lawmaking and be very useful to better understanding some of the key questions put forward by American political development (APD) scholars. We believe that there are many lines of inquiry of interest to APD scholars where ideal point measure could be useful, but which have been effectively foreclosed because of the assumptions undergirding DW-NOMINATE. In particular, we focus on three issues as particularly important: (1) the assumption of linear change; (2) the collapsing of distinct policy issue areas into a single “ideology” score; and (3) an agnosticism toward policy development, institutional context, and historical periodization. We go over these issues in detail and propose that many of these concerns can be addressed by taking seriously the proposition that policy substance, historical and political context, and the temporal dimension of political processes be integrated into the core of our measures and analyses. We also discuss a set of techniques for addressing these issues in order to answer specific questions of broad interest to both APD scholars and other Americanists.

The Federalist Papers and Institutional Power in American Political Development

This book argues that The Federalist Papers contain a previously unrecognized theory of institutional power centered on the relationships between and among powers (constitutional authority and duties), organization (structure, size, procedures, and internal resources), and constituency (external social support). The distribution of power among the branches is a function of the relative nature of each institution's powers, organization, and constituency. This theory extends and refines the contribution of the papers to political theory and, particularly, to the study of American political development, which rarely draws upon The Federalist Papers in more than a pro forma fashion. Wirls explicates this model of institutional power and shows how it brings greater coherence to the papers. He relates the Federalist perspective to contemporary institutional analysis and then applies the theory to two periods in American political history.