One of the most difficult problems facing economic policymakers during the antebellum period was the threat of instability in the banking sector. Banks constituted not only critical sources of credit for both firms and individuals, but also the primary suppliers of money within the economy. Particularly because bank instability tended to be contagious, it was viewed as an especially vicious problem, and one that required a government solution. The challenge was to craft a policy that would be sufficiently stringent to assure a safe banking system and a secure money supply without being so stringent as to suffocate the economy, depriving it of vital credit and liquidity. Even today, this remains a formidable challenge in many developing countries.

Steady political polarization since the late 1970s ranks among the most consequential transformations of American politics—one with far-reaching consequences for governance, congressional performance, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, and citizen perceptions of the stakes of party conflict and elections. Our understanding of this polarization critically depends on measuring it. Its measurement in turn began with the invention of the NOMINATE algorithm and the widespread adoption of its estimates of the ideal points of members of Congress. Although the NOMINATE project has not been immune from technical and conceptual critique, its impact on how we think about contemporary politics and its discontents has been extraordinary and has helped to stimulate the creation of several similar scores. In order to deepen appreciation of this broadly important intellectual phenomenon, we offer an intuitively accessible treatment of the mathematics and conceptual assumptions of NOMINATE. We also stress that NOMINATE scores are a major resource for understanding other eras in American political development (APD) besides the current great polarization. To illustrate this point, we introduce readers to Voteview, which provides two-dimensional snapshots of congressional roll calls, among other data that it generates. We conclude by sketching how APD scholarship might contribute to the contemporary polarization discussion. Placing polarization and depolarization in historical perspective may powerfully illuminate whether, how, and why our current polarization might recede.

Perhaps no single aspect of the American polity has been more analyzed, discussed, cited for evidence in grand theories of American political development, and yet less understood than the role of the urban voter in the regime formation and policy innovation of the Progressive era (circa 1890–1920). One century of prolific urban political analysis has produced an abundance of evidence, theory, and keen insight, yet we still have nothing like a systematic survey of urban voting behavior using reliable multivariate methods in more than a few elections or comparatively across several cities simultaneously. As a consequence, we have built for the urban voter a city of theoretical models without an adequate empirical infrastructure.

Struggles, both political and intellectual, over electoral structures – the legal arrangements, to borrow from Harold Lasswell, of who gets to vote for what, when, and how – are probably as old as democracy. Suffrage, its expansion and contraction, is no doubt the most prominent historical feature in the politics and study of electoral structures. But the “how” and “for what” of voting have also played crucial, though perhaps less understood, roles in the politics of democratization. However important the right of suffrage, political power is also allocated by both the “space,” for lack of a better word, that a vote occupies and affects (for example, districts or at-large) and the object of the vote (for example, representation or a referendum). Electoral structures are the quintessential “mobilization of bias.”E.E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: a Realist's View of Democracy in America (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960). See also, Benjamin Ginsberg, The Consequences of Consent: Elections, Citizen Control, and Popular Acquiescence (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1982). And they remain, in this era of universal suffrage, an ongoing object of contention even in stable regimes such as the United States.Indeed, few issues have such a consistent legal and political presence at all levels of American government. Most recently, the controversy over majority-minority districts has produced a significant political struggle involving state governments, Congress, the executive branch, and the courts, as well as a rapidly expanding scholarly debate over the rights and wrongs, and causes and effects of forms of minority representation: Abigail M. Thernstrom, Whose Votes Count?: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority (New York: Free Press, 1994); Carol M. Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); David Lublin, The Paradox of Representation: Racial Gerrymandering and Minority Interests in Congress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Taken as a group, the three commentaries reveal many of the difficult challenges, as well as opportunities, that confront social scientists exploring issues of temporality. Although the three authors take quite different stances, each highlights important issues for further work sensitive to historical process. Here I begin with Amy Bridges's more critical commentary before turning to the responses of Jervis and Thelen.

How are new forms of violence expertise organized and exploited? Most scholars view this as primarily a question of state-building; that is, violence experts use their skills in an attempt to regulate economic transactions or to extract and redistribute resources via protection rents either for themselves or at the behest of political elites. In an alternative view, this article demonstrates that historical gunfighters active in the late 19th-century American Southwest were actually market actors—the possessors of valuable skills cultivated through participation in the Civil War and diffused through gunfighting and reputation building in key market entrepôts. Neither solely state-builders nor state-resisters, as they have traditionally been interpreted, gunfighters composed a professional class that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s and who moved frequently between wage-paying jobs, seizing economic opportunities on both sides of the law and often serving at the behest of powerful economic, rather than political, actors. I establish this claim by examining a dataset of over 250 individuals active in the “gunfighting system” of the post-bellum West, demonstrating that the social connections forged through fighting, and diffused through social networks, helped generate a form of organized violence that helped bring “law and order” to the frontier but as a byproduct of market formation rather than as state-building.

Payroll taxes and payroll deductions became ubiquitous in the United States by the mid-1940s, crucial to the financing of the emerging “mixed” welfare state as well as World War II. While scholars have firmly established the importance of elements of the warfare/welfare state such as Social Security, employer-based pensions and health insurance, and the mass income tax, voluntary sector institutions have garnered less attention. The history of payroll deduction demonstrates how this “infrastructural power” also advantaged institutions outside of the state, notably, charitable fundraising organizations commonly known as Community Chests (the forerunners of the United Way). Chests began to look toward the payroll deduction in the 1920s as an efficient and effective way of extracting donations from workers of modest means—though these were often fiercely resisted by an empowered labor movement in the 1930s. But it took the state's vast expansion of deductions during World War II, and the patriotic impulse of donating to war-related charities, to convince industrial unions and employers to support this method of donation. Like the income tax, this change in charitable giving remained in place after the war and became a vital element of financing this part of the public–private social safety net—a crucial boost to the voluntary sector from the state.

The following essay elaborates the proposition that changing work relations has been a major problematic of American constitutional development. By work relations I refer to the hiring and firing, compensation, and discipline, of persons assigned to perform designated tasks in public and private settings. By “problematic” I have in mind cause and project, dynamic and rationale, of constitutional duration and change. By “constitutional development” I mean the authoritative reordering of government institutions or of the transactions between government and society.

John Gerring's methodological critique of American political development can be viewed from at least three perspectives. First and most generally, Gerring proposes procedural and analytical standards that should apply to all the social and natural sciences. As a methodological virtue, for instance, conceptual clarity strengthens the underpinnings of knowledge, regardless of the substantive focus. Rigorous specification of causal relations is equally universal. From a second perspective, Gerring invites his readers to at least entertain the possibility that methodological rigor might vary over the lifespan of a research field. From this angle, seminal work often involves more relaxed methodological styles because initial exploration of a topic or area, almost by definition, must be unguided by research conventions and norms. Such conventions and norms only emerge if and when that exploration attracts a self-sustaining community of scholars.

This article uses a political developmental approach to examine African American poll-tax registration and voting in Virginia from 1940 to 1954. Using the concept of multiple orders, the article traces how changes in the state's political system of managed race relations created an opening for African American political mobilization. The Virginia Voters League (VVL), in alliance with other African American political, civic, and social organizations, conducted voter education and poll-tax payment campaigns in order foster political efficacy among the state's disenfranchised black voters. The VVL met with mixed success, affected by past political mobilizations, the impact of NAACP mobilization, and local and statewide political competition between the state's main political machine and insurgents. The VVL campaign was successful in achieving short-term victories, including the election of a few African Americans to local office. By 1954, the VVL's internal weakness coupled with the emergence of “massive resistance” stymied further black electoral mobilization through politics and made protest a more viable option for achieving political and civil rights for black Virginians. By tracing the path from politics to protest, this article shows how a political developmental approach can be successfully used to develop a nuanced understanding of the emergence of the civil rights movement and Southern politics in the pre–Brown v. Board of Education era.

Conventional wisdom states that where ideas and values have mattered in American political life they have usually been the product of a single, overarching political culture. The United States, it is argued, has had political conflict but not ideological conflict. Perhaps nowhere is this premise more noticeable than in the study of political parties. According to Du-verger, “[T]he two parties are rival teams, one occupying office, the other seeking to dislodge it. It is a struggle between the ins and the outs, which never becomes fanatical, and creates no deep cleavage in the country.” Everett Carll Ladd writes, “[T]he need to seek support within an overarching ideological consensus, has historically imposed certain characteristics on the major American parties – social group inclusiveness, accommodationism, a ‘non-ideological’ stance vis-a-vis their principal opponents (which, after all, accept the same ideology).”

In the course of the debates over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, no one disputed that the people were sovereign, but how this sovereignty was to be embodied proved quite controversial. The post-Revolutionary generation faced the challenge of creating a republican form of government from an oppositional popular politics. Federalists responded by claiming for their Constitution, and for the national government it created, a monopoly on the legitimate representation of the people. They championed the official over the popular and invoked the idea of the nation to authorize this transfer of authority. It was a transfer that would not go unchallenged, and, as a result, the constitutional politics of the early republic repeatedly posed the question of whether popular sovereignty could survive the transformation of the demos into a nation.

On 1 June 1779, Thomas Jefferson became the second governor of the state of Virginia. Shortly thereafter, he was elected to the Board of Visitors of the College of William and Mary where he pursued a series of educational innovations that he had unsuccessfully promoted earlier while engaged in his mammoth revision of the laws of Viriginia. The goal of Jefferson's proposed educational reforms was the creation of an educational system which would be a training ground for republican citizenship. It is therefore of interest that among the innovations he pressed on the College of William and Mary was the establishment of the first chair of law in North America—indeed the first chair anywhere after the Vinerian chair at Oxford. What is of greater interest, however, is that the chair that Jefferson pioneered was not a chair of law, as such, but a chair of “Law and Police.”

For a long time the question of whether the framers of the U.S. Constitution intended to establish judicial review of legislation was the subject of extensive and repeated investigation. The issue, however, was never definitively resolved, a consequence, it is widely agreed, of ambiguities and internal contradictions in the early record. More recently, interest in this basic question has declined, and it has simply been assumed that some form of judicial review was contemplated by the framers. At the same time support for the practice has deepened, and the debate, although still heated, has shifted to different grounds.

Can the U.S. Congress address major challenges? Can Congress govern? Questions like these keep getting asked. This article addresses them by consulting the record since 1789. Given the separation-of-powers structure of the American system, such questions cannot be addressed directly. They need to be deconstructed. The presidency needs to enter the discussion, too. Also, what is a major challenge? To identify such challenges, and to supply a way of seeing how and in what respects Congress, as well as in a background frame the U.S. system more broadly, has performed, I draw on comparative analysis. How has the United States participated in thirteen major “impulses” that have invested a comparable set of nations at various times since the late eighteenth century? These challenges range from launching a new nation through building a welfare state through dealing with climate change and debt/deficit problems today.

As the United States industrialized, its state constitutions began to include protections for laborers. In this article, I describe the origins of these constitutional provisions and ask why labor organizations and other reformers pursued their inclusion in state constitutions. I argue that they saw state constitutions as a vehicle to prompt reluctant legislatures to pass protective statutes, to entrench existing protections against future legislatures, to safeguard labor legislation from constitutional challenges in state courts, and to facilitate further union organizing. Labor activism in this arena is particularly interesting in light of the literature on constitutional change, which contends that constitutional development is a tool through which actors attempt to usher courts into political conflicts; in contrast, I will argue that unions turned to constitutional change in large part to exclude courts from policymaking. Further, the union activism on behalf of constitutional change serves as a challenge to the prominent view among many scholars of American political development and law that judicial hostility to worker rights and union organizing discouraged unions from demanding state protection or institutionalizing their demands through law.

Between 1968 and 1972, with political conflict in America unusually high, major changes were made in rules for consituting Democratic national conventions and selecting Democratic candidates. Basic issues about the practical meaning of democratic commitments were sharply contested, and debates about party organization proved vigorous and substantial. The reforms enacted aimed partly to enhance participation and restore public respect for political life. They did not escape criticism. In fact, critics of reform became the dominant voice in subsequent discussion of what happened to the Democratic party and to party politics in the United States more generally.

These quotes point to a puzzle, the puzzle with which this study begins: Within the past forty years, national member-states not only accepted the interpretive authority of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) as the supreme decision maker for conflicts between member-state authority and central federal authority of the European Community (since 1994, the European Union) but also accepted this court's dictates that the treaties forming the community had constitutional status as supreme law in every member state and that European-level law had higher law status within every member state, superseding any national law to the contrary. Indeed, European member-state acceptance of this development advanced much more rapidly than state acceptance of the U.S. Supreme Court in its first several decades. Yet this pattern of respective acceptance of central federal authority runs counter to prevailing understandings of sovereignty.

In 1884, a committee of dissenting bondholders for the Wabash, St. Louis and Pacific Railway entered a federal district court in Illinois to complain that St. Louis Federal Judge David Brewer had, at the request of the notorious robber baron, Jay Gould, thrown the road into receivership prior to default. Judge Walter Gresham (whom the Populists would try to recruit for their 1892 presidential candidate) listened sympathetically and put the eastern division of the road into a separate receivership. For the time being, a key link, in Gould's national system was broken in two. Soon, however, the courts and bondholders capitulated, and Gould succeeded, at the expense of the sanctity of property and contract, in revolutionizing the corporate doctrine of receiverships to assimilate huge national systems.

War has probably been the single most important influence on the development of central state authority in the United States. Although the state-centered mobilization of economic resources and manpower that accompanies military conflict is commonly conceded to have had this effect throughout American history, the centralizing influence of the Civil War on the southern Confederate government has not been accorded the precedent-setting importance it deserves. The consolidation of economic and social controls within the central government of the Confederacy was in fact so extensive that it calls into question standard interpretations of southern opposition to the expansion of federal power in both the antebellum and post-Reconstruction periods. Southern reluctance to expand federal power in those periods has been attributed variously to regional sympathy for laissez-faire principles, the “precapitalist” cultural origins of the plantation elite, and a general philosophical orientation hostile to state development.