Author: Karen Orren
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521547642
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Orren and Skowronek survey past and current 'APD' scholarship and outline a course of study for the future.

Author: Joseph E. Lowndes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136086420
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Race has been present at every critical moment in American political development, shaping political institutions, political discourse, public policy, and its denizens’ political identities. But because of the nature of race—its evolving and dynamic status as a structure of inequality, a political organizing principle, an ideology, and a system of power—we must study the politics of race historically, institutionally, and discursively. Covering more than three hundred years of American political history from the founding to the contemporary moment, the contributors in this volume make this extended argument. Together, they provide an understanding of American politics that challenges our conventional disciplinary tools of studying politics and our conservative political moment’s dominant narrative of racial progress. This volume, the first to collect essays on the role of race in American political history and development, resituates race in American politics as an issue for sustained and broadened critical attention.

Author: Ronald Kahn
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700614397
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
This innovative volume explores the evolution of constitutional doctrine as elaborated by the Supreme Court. Moving beyond the traditional "law versus politics" perspective, the authors draw extensively on recent studies in American Political Development (APD) to present a much more complex and sophisticated view of the Court as both a legal and political entity. The contributors--including Pam Brandwein, Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, Ronald Kahn, Tom Keck, Ken Kersch, Wayne Moore, Carol Nackenoff, Julie Novkov, and Mark Tushnet--share an appreciation that the process of constitutional development involves a complex interplay between factors internal and external to the Court. They underscore the developmental nature of the Court, revealing how its decision-making and legal authority evolve in response to a variety of influences: not only laws and legal precedents, but also social and political movements, election returns and regime changes, advocacy group litigation, and the interpretive community of scholars, journalists, and lawyers. Initial chapters reexamine standard approaches to the question of causation in judicial decision-making and the relationship between the Court and the ambient political order. Next, a selection of historical case studies exemplifies how the Court constructs its own authority as it defines individual rights and the powers of government. They show how interpretations of the Reconstruction amendments inform our understanding of racial discrimination, explain the undermining of affirmative action after Bakke, and consider why Roe v. Wade has yet to be overturned. They also tell how the Court has collaborated with political coalitions to produce the New Deal, Great Society, and Reagan Revolution, and why Native Americans have different citizenship rights than other Americans. These contributions encourage further debate about the nature and processes of constitutional change and invite APD scholars to think about law and the Court in more sophisticated ways.

Author: Brian J. Glenn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199706018
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
American political development (APD) is a core subfield in American political science, and focuses on political and policy history. For a variety of reasons, most of the focus in the twentieth century APD has been on liberal policymaking. Yet since the 1970s, conservatives have gradually assumed control over numerous federal policymaking institutions. This edited book will be the first to offer a comprehensive overview of the impact of conservatism on twentieth century American political development, locating its origins in the New Deal and then focusing on how conservatives acted within government once they began to achieve power in the late 1960s. The book is divided into three eras, and in each it focuses on three core issues: social security, the environment, and education. Throughout, the authors emphasize the ironic role of conservatism in the expansion of the American state. Scholars of the state have long focuses on liberalism because liberals were the architects of state expansion. However, as conservatives increased their presence in the federal apparatus, they were frequently co-opted into maintaining of even expanding public fiscal and regulatory power. At times, conservatives also came to accept the existence of the liberal state, but attempted to use it to achieve conservative policy ends. Despite conservatives' power in the US politics and governance, the American state remains gargantuan. As Conservatism and American Political Development shows, the new right has not only helped shape the state, but has been shaped by it as well.

Author: James W. Ceaser
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674021587
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In this inaugural volume of the Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures, Ceaser traces how certain “foundational” ideas—including nature, history, and religion—have been understood and used over the course of American history. Three commentators challenge his arguments, and a spirited debate about large and enduring questions in American politics ensues.

Author: Richardson Dilworth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135853177
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
There are nearly 20,000 general-purpose municipal governments—cities—in the United States, employing more people than the federal government. About twenty of those cities received charters of incorporation well before ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and several others were established urban centers more than a century before the American Revolution. Yet despite their estimable size and prevalence in the United States, city government and politics has been a woefully neglected topic within the recent study of American political development. The volume brings together some of the best of both the most established and the newest urban scholars in political science, sociology, and history, each of whom makes a new argument for rethinking the relationship between cities and the larger project of state-building. Each chapter shows explicitly how the American city demonstrates durable shifts in governing authority throughout the nation’s history. By filling an important gap in scholarship the book will thus become an indispensable part of the American political development canon, a crucial component of graduate and undergraduate courses in APD, urban politics, urban sociology, and urban history, and a key guide for future scholarship.

Author: Richard M. Valelly
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191086983
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 898

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Book Description
Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics - and thus they question stylized facts about America's political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time - and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance? Featuring contributions from leading academics in the field, The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development provides an authoritative and accessible analysis of the study of American political development.

Author: Jacob S. Hacker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316516369
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
Drawing together leading scholars, the book provides a revealing new map of the US political economy in cross-national perspective.

Author: Sarah Reckhow
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199937737
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Some of the nation's wealthiest philanthropies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in education reform. With vast wealth and a political agenda, these foundations have helped to reshape the reform landscape in urban education. In Follow the Money, Sarah Reckhow shows where and how foundation investment in education is occurring and presents in-depth analysis of the effects of these investments within the two largest urban districts in the United States: New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, centralized political control and the use of private resources have enabled rapid implementation of reform proposals. Yet this potent combination of top-down authority and outside funding also poses serious questions about transparency, responsiveness, and democratic accountability in New York. Furthermore, the sustainability of reform policies is closely linked to the political fortunes of the current mayor and his chosen school leader. While the media has highlighted the efforts of drastic reformers and dominating leaders such as Joel Klein in New York City and Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., a slower, but possibly more transformative, set of reforms have been taking place in Los Angeles. These reforms were also funded and shaped by major foundations, but they work from the bottom up, through charter school operators managing networks of schools. This strategy has built grassroots political momentum and demand for reform in Los Angeles that is unmatched in New York City and other districts with mayoral control. Reckhow's study of Los Angeles's education system shows how democratically responsive urban school reform could occur-pairing foundation investment with broad grassroots involvement. Bringing a sharp analytical eye and a wealth of evidence to one of the most politicized issues of our day, Follow the Money will reshape our thinking about educational reform in America.

Author: Elvin T. Lim
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199812195
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
The United States has had not one, but two Foundings. The Constitution produced by the Second Founding came to be only after a vociferous battle between Federalists and Anti-Federalists. The Federalists favored a relatively powerful central government, while the Anti-Federalists distrusted the concentration of power in one place and advocated the preservation of sovereignty in the states as crucibles of post-revolutionary republicanism -- the legacy of the First Founding. This philosophical cleavage has been at the heart of practically every major political conflict in U.S. history, and lives on today in debates between modern liberals and conservatives. In The Lovers' Quarrel, Elvin T. Lim presents a systematic and innovative analysis of this perennial struggle. The framers of the second Constitution, the Federalists, were not operating in an ideational or institutional vacuum; rather, the document they drafted and ratified was designed to remedy the perceived flaws of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. To decouple the Two Foundings is to appreciate that there is no such thing as "original meaning," only original dissent. Because the Anti-Federalists insisted that prior and democratically sanctioned understandings of federalism and union had to be negotiated and partially grafted onto the new Constitution, the Constitution's Articles and the Bill of Rights do not cohere as well together as has conventionally been thought. Rather, they represent two antithetical orientations toward power, liberty, and republicanism. The altercation over the necessity of the Second Founding generated coherent and self-contained philosophies that would become the core of American political thought, reproduced and transmitted across two centuries, whether the victors were the neo-Federalists (such as during the Civil War and the New Deal) or the neo-Anti-Federalists (such as during the Jacksonian era and the Reagan Revolution). The Second Founding -- the sole "founding" that we generally speak of -- would become a template for the unique, prototypically American species of politics and political debate. Because of it, American political development occurs only after the political entrepreneurs of each generation lock horns in a Lovers' Quarrel about the principles of one of the Two Foundings, and succeed in justifying and forging a durable expansion or contraction of federal authority.