The Dynamics Of American Politics

Approaches And Interpretations

Lawrence C Dodd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429976308
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a comprehensive assessment of the major theoretical approaches to the study of American politics. Written by leading scholars in the field, the book's essays focus particularly on the contributions that competing macro- and microanalytic approaches make to our understanding of political change in America.The essays include systematic overviews of the patterns of constancy and change that characterize American political history as well as comparative discussions of theoretical traditions in the study of American political change. The volume concludes with four provocative essays proposing new and integrated interpretations of American politics.This is a path-breaking book that all scholars concerned with American politics will want to read and that all serious students of American politics will need to study. The Dynamics of American Politics is appropriate for graduate core seminars on American politics, undergraduate capstone courses on American politics, courses on political theory and approaches to political analysis, and rigorous lower-division courses on American politics.

1
Conversations on the Study of American Politics: An Introduction

LAWRENCE C. DODD CALVIN JILLSON

The study of American politics resembles nothing perhaps more closely than the American political system itself. Students of American politics almost universally point to the fragmentation of American governmental processes, the inadequate dialogue among our political actors and institutions, and the incoherence of American public policy. And so it is with American politics as a field of academic study, wherein we find a vast assortment of differing schools of thought and scholarly approaches, scholars of differing traditions who seldom converse with one another or listen to competing interpretations, and an incoherent body of knowledge that often appears in fundamental contradiction. As Theodore Lowi (1992) has remarked so astutely, we do truly become what we study.

And yet, just as the political system is capable of change, so too is the study of American politics. Thus, in the past several decades scholars have embraced sophisticated methods for the measurement and modeling of political behavior. Today virtually every conceivable aspect of our politics is weighed and measured, sifted and culled—all with an eye to those statistical patterns and logical theorems that may give contemporary scholars a special insight into political processes denied their predecessors in a less technological age. Likewise, scholars have extended the scope of their inquiry, looking not only at contemporary politics but also increasingly at historical patterns, searching for dynamic regularities that may clarify contemporary politics and provide a broader understanding of political life. No longer are the founding era, antebellum politics, the progressive movement, or New Deal machinations solely the province of historians. Political scientists also see in earlier eras, and in patterns across eras, a unique opportunity for empirical discovery and theoretical learning.

As political scientists have looked back across history, teasing out the statistical regularities and analytical stories that an historical awareness unveils, they have discovered how dynamic American politics can be. Political patterns thought to be universal truths because of their predominance in the contemporary period—for example, the electoral security and low turnover of members of Congress—suddenly appear to be momentary truths at best, subject to change and transformation in response to new historical contexts (Polsby, 1968; Dodd, 1981). With this awareness has dawned the realization that our understanding of politics must be dynamic as well—that it must account for development and change in institutions, behavior, and policy processes across time, much as biologists must understand the evolution of species across time. And as political scientists seek to understand development and change, as Lowi reminds us in the Foreword, they must be careful to describe phenomena accurately, to distinguish between development and nondevelopment, between evolution and discontinuous mutation, so that they truly focus on the critical issues of political change.

The embrace of political history by political science has also led to a heightened sensitivity to the multiplicity of factors—the state, partisan realignments, cultural beliefs, institutional norms—that account for political behavior, thereby fueling a proliferation of approaches to political analysis not unlike the expanding hyperpluralism of group politics in American society. With this sensitivity has come a very special awareness of the distinctive interplay of two levels of analysis—macro context and micro behavior—that scholars who focus solely on contemporary politics often fail to acknowledge. It is increasingly recognized that just as individuals and groups shape society through their individual and collective choices, so too does society, in its cultural, geopolitical, economic, and institutional manifestations, shape individual and group choice. It is the interplay between individual and societal forces that gives rise to the distinctive politics of an age. Our understanding of politics depends on discerning the nature of this interplay between macro and micro phenomena (Eulau, 1969). Yet the search for understanding tends to become lost amidst the vast array of distinctive analytic approaches, the inherent difficulties of grasping the interactive role of macro and micro factors, and the absence of systematic dialogue among adherents of the different approaches and levels of analysis.

The study of American politics, then, is in a quandary. We realize more and more that explanations of political phenomena require a dynamic, diachronic perspective (Cooper and Brady, 1981; Lowi, 1969; Polsby, 1982; Harris and Milkis, 1989). As we focus on patterns of change, we also realize that the forces that produce them are complex. In seeking to understand this complexity, American political science has fragmented into separate schools or “sects” looking at distinct aspects of the dynamics of American politics. This specialization has generated a growing body of literature marshaling evidence to support the role of a wide range of causal factors. But we have specialized so extensively that we are in the process of losing our focus on the central issue facing our field of study—our collective ability to generate a theoretically coherent understanding of American politics (Almond, 1990).

In light of this state of affairs, the time has come for a fundamental rethinking of how we study American politics: The time has come for a self-conscious and integrative dialogue among scholars—a collective conversation—exploring the different explanatory approaches to politics and identifying the foundations for theoretical convergence. The purpose of this book is to help stimulate such a dialogue.

It is, of course, difficult to engender dialogue amidst the specialization and career pressures of modern academia. As Hugh Heclo notes in Chapter 16 of this volume, “Particular approaches often seem to be developed and maintained, not for the contribution they make to further understanding but as vehicles for career advancement, ideological proselytizing, intellectual one-upsmanship and other benighted purposes. Moreover, since publication résumés grow on dissension, academics often develop a vested interest in not agreeing or in dwelling on minor differences contained within the larger body of unspoken, non-career-enhancing agreement.” How can common ground be found amidst such pressures? How can movement toward theoretical coherence and collective inquiry be fostered amidst the divisions and disincentives of modern social science?

We believe that the movement toward dialogue must start, quite literally, with an organized conversation among scholars from differing approaches and schools of thought. To that end, we invited several dozen scholars to meet together in February 1992 in Boulder, Colorado, to discuss the study of American political change. We asked the participants—who are from contrasting intellectual orientations and do not normally meet and interact at disciplinary conferences—to prepare statements on their distinctive approaches to American politics and political change, to read all statements beforehand, to listen to and critique one another’s ideas during three days of meetings, and then to return home to prepare final essays in light of these discussions. From this process has come, we believe, a set of essays that are unique in the study of American politics. Together they provide a broad explication of the major analytic approaches to American politics and political change—one which considers both the major perspectives that stress macro context and those that emphasize micro dynamics in their explanations of development and change. Across the essays, we believe, a conscious effort is reflected among disparate scholars to engage in a sustained and genuine conversation about how best to conceptualize and understand political change in America.

We have organized these essays into five parts. The book opens with an overview in Part One of the patterns of change and development that characterize American political history and the patterns of inquiry that characterize the study of these changes. The purpose here is to establish the historical and intellectual context for the conversation among approaches that constitutes the core of the book. Parts Two and Three look, respectively, at the predominant macro and micro approaches used in the study of political change, with focus on key debates or conversations among these approaches. Part Four presents three efforts to develop broader interpretations of politics and political change—interpretations that can serve to bridge and integrate various approaches presented in Parts Two and Three. Finally, Part Five provides a reflective assessment of the overarching conversation that exists across the essays and points to emerging convergences that could provide broader common ground for political inquiry. This common ground emerges, it should be stressed, not as a result of preexisting analytic agreement among these scholars but through the commitment of a diverse group of scholars to engage in a collective conversation about their differing analytic strategies.

Part One: Patterns of Change and Inquiry

Our search for common understanding begins, in Part One, with Calvin Jillson’s historical overview of the patterns of change and continuity that have characterized American politics. Jillson’s task in Chapter 2, in a sense, is the reverse of Theodore Lowi’s effort in the Foreword: Lowi seeks to identify shifting patterns of nondevelopment that we often mistake for evolutionary sequence, thereby admonishing us to use precision in our descriptions of political change; Jillson seeks to identify reliable developmental patterns of American history amidst Lowi’s discontinuities and paths of nondevelopment. Looking across the sweep of American history, Jillson identifies three distinct developmental or constitutional eras: These include the era of democratization that produced the American Revolution and culminated in the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828; the era of partisan competition of the mid- to late nineteenth century that ended with the McKinley election in 1896; and the era of interest group liberalism of the twentieth century that began to fade with the elections of Jimmy Carter and then of Ronald Reagan in the late twentieth century. Within these broad historical eras, Jillson then identifies periods of stable partisan loyalties, systematic adjustments in party alignments, and recurring mood swings in voter attachments to parties and policies; such periodic shifts occur within all three historical eras, and do so with a broadly common temporal patterning. While various authors throughout the book emphasize somewhat different categorizations of dominant historical eras, Jillson’s comprehensive periodization illustrates the dynamic shifts that occur in American politics across time and thus highlights the need for students of politics to be attentive to the existence and explanation of political change.

In Chapter 3, Walter Dean Burnham asks whether the patterns that we see in political history have the stature of empirical phenomena that deserve our systematic attention. Is history “just one damn thing after another” or does it hold a scientifically valid meaning and significance? Building particularly on evolutionary biologists such as Stephen Jay Gould, Burnham argues that when we see many different types of phenomena converge to create the appearance of similitude during an historical era, we are observing a consilience of phenomena that together allow us to induce the empirical existence of an abstract patterning within history. Under such conditions, historical events such as “partisan realignments” are scientifically credible occurrences that we should seek to explain and from which we should seek to learn. In doing so, we must beware of the problem of presentism—of seeing the past solely in terms of the present and thereby missing the true character and meaning of historical phenomena. Likewise, we must avoid the problem of historical anachronism, of overlooking critical historical details in ways that distort our understanding of historical patterns and processes. Yet insofar as we can bring to our awareness of patterns a respect for the distinctiveness, richness, and integrity of historical experience, we can identify a meaningful historical periodicity.

The periodicity of history, Burnham argues, suggests that deep and long-lasting processes are at work in a society. Such processes, illustrated by partisan realignments, do not necessarily recur in identical ways across time; they may nevertheless generate analogous patterns of political change and development that we can identify through attentiveness to empirical consilience. Awareness of such periodic patterns may then sensitize us to a dynamic understanding of our own era and thereby help us to identify and interpret contemporary developments that we would otherwise overlook. To Burnham, then, history is more than “one damn thing after another”; it is a key to understanding the nature and meaning of contemporary politics.

Given that history is characterized by an appearance of periodicity, as Jillson demonstrates, and that such appearances can have both a scientifically valid standing and a contemporaneous relevance, as Burnham argues, how are we as a discipline to study and understand these historical processes? Will continued attentiveness to history only multiply interpretations and further obfuscate our understanding of politics? In Chapter 4, Elaine Swift and David Brady maintain that an attentiveness to history, while increasing the range of empirical phenomena we study, may actually provide the basis for some analytic common ground across the disparate perspectives on contemporary politics. As they argue, contemporaneous studies may focus on an unrepresentative or uncharacteristic slice of political life and magnify its importance, whereas an historical perspective can more nearly identify the range of variables, conditions, and outcomes that are truly representative of politics—and that all practitioners must address. Practitioners from different traditions may still accent distinctive factors, but they should do so with more concern for the interplay of such factors with other historical forces.

The common ground that Swift and Brady seek for scholars of political history is, actually, a common appreciation of the combined and interactive influence that various macro and micro factors may have on political development and change. They illustrate their arguments about the necessity and possibility of such common awareness by examining the intellectual developments in statist, organizational, and rational choice studies of political history. Parts Two and Three of this book seek to facilitate such awareness through extensive discussions of a range of macro and micro perspectives.

Part Two: Approaches to Macroanalysis

Part Two focuses on macrolevel approaches to the study of political development and change, particularly on two major conversations within the scholarly literature about macrolevel influences on American politics. The first conversation revolves around the issue of American exceptionalism: Is the distinctiveness of the American experience, as contrasted to European nations, for example, a result of our political institutions, or a result of a peculiar American culture, so that one or the other should be given special emphasis in explanations of American political development? This scholarly debate is addressed in Chapter 5 by Sven Steinmo and in Chapter 6 by Russell Hanson. The second conversation revolves around the issue of state autonomy: Does economic structure drive politics, or is there a distinctive truth to be derived from an understanding of the nation’s general political processes and governing institutions, separate from the influence of economics? This question is addressed in Chapter 7 by Edward Greenberg and in Chapter 8 by Theda Skocpol.

In Chapter 5, Steinmo argues forcefully against the predominant influence of culture in American politics, as found in the liberal exceptionalist arguments of Hartz (1955) and Huntington (1981), and emphasizes instead the influence of American political institutions. Steinmo’s argument is that institutional power in America is fragmented so extensively that, irrespective of the citizenry’s ideologies or values, the immobilism inherent in the American constitutional system would inhibit the public’s ability to achieve those policy goals and thereby teach people to doubt the efficiency of government. This fragmentation has created such weak parties, labor movements, and governments that the American welfare state is necessarily more limited than that of any other Western industrialized nation. These developments have occurred, moreover, despite American popular support for a welfare state akin to levels of public support found in European nations. Even worse, American institutional arrangements have also fostered a hyperpluralist system of interest groups, which reinforces institutional fragmentation by serving particularized interests rather than the common good, so that when government acts, it does so in response to particularized demands that overburden the fiscal resources of the state without providing for the general welfare of the citizens. Such policy results convince the citizenry that the government is not simply inefficient, but is counterproductive, and thus their belief in limited government is reinforced.

In contrast to Steinmo, Hanson asserts in Chapter 6 that culture does matter in quite significant ways, but that it does so in a different manner from the globalist and liberal exceptionalist arguments of Hartz and Huntington. Following Elazar (1970), Wildavsky (1990), and others, Hanson emphasizes the tripartite cultural diversity of American society, with the nation divided into regions dominated by individualist, moralist, and traditionalist values. Despite locally fragmented political systems, Hanson suggests, states with individualist or moralist values during the early to mid-twentieth century did develop social welfare programs that approximated the welfare commitments of European nations; it was the traditionalist states, concentrated in the South, that were most opposed to such programs. The refusal of the traditionalist states to enact expansive social welfare programs—and their ability to use their power within Congress to protect the rights of states to determine the specifics of local welfare programs—eventually threatened to make the moralist and individualist states into “welfare havens” for poor citizens from the South; this prospect thereby led moralist and individualist states to restrain the further development of their social welfare programs. The result was a limited American state. Without the local dominance of traditional values in the South, Hanson suggests, and regardless of our fragmented institutional arrangements, the nation probably would have developed a welfare state similar to (or at least more similar to) European nations. With the predominance of values in the South that opposed a welfare state, and with a fragmented institutional system that provided southern politicians with veto power that they could use to slow and decentralize the move to a welfare state, the nation was left with an exceptionally limited commitment to social welfare.

The conversation between Steinmo and Hanson generates an intriguing perspective on the American exceptionalism debate and on the relative role of institutions and culture. Both authors acknowledge an exceptional quality to American politics and public policy, both believe that this exceptionalism results from the macro context of American politics, and both acknowledge a role for institutions and for culture, but with different emphases. To Steinmo, the fragmented and thus inefficient institutional arrangements of American politics have forced citizens, irrespective of their initial values, to learn an antistatist value orientation across generations; this antistatist culture then reinforces the limited welfare state produced as a result of institutional fragmentation. Had the nation possessed a less fragmented institutional system, Steinmo implies, it would not have developed such a strong antistatist culture and would therefore be less exceptional. To Hanson, the key to American exceptionalism is the cultural diversity of the nation, particularly the existence of traditional cultural values in the South; it is the existence and peculiar regional patterning of cultural diversity that activates the obstructive potentialities of institutional fragmentation. Had the nation truly been homogeneous and liberal in its values, he suggests, institutional fragmentation would not have mattered as much and America would have been less exceptional; but with cultural diversity, institutional fragmentation then comes forcefully into play and together culture and institutions generate an exceptionally conservative social welfare policy. Interestingly, while differing in their stress on the precedence to be given to institutions or culture, both authors emphasize that some form of systemic heterogeneity—whether institutional or cultural—induced a learning process that produced American exceptionalism.

The second macrolevel conversation focuses on the contrasting roles of economics and political processes in shaping A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Conversations on the Study of American Politics: An Introduction
• PART ONE: PATTERNS OF POLITICAL CHANGE AND INQUIRY
• PART TWO: MACROANALYSIS
• PART THREE: MICROANALYSIS
• PART FOUR: LINKAGE PROCESSES
• PART FIVE: CONCLUSION
• References
• About the Book and Editors
• About the Contributors
• Index