The Tension between American Political Development as a Research Community and as a Disciplinary Subfield

Studies in American Political Development

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 103-106

  Bensel, Richard ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0042378809     PISSN: 0898588X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0898588x03000087     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. Richard Franklin Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880-1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). In 1986, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek founded this journal, which quickly became and has remained the flagship forum for the field. The first and only prior use of the phrase may have been in Edward Elliott, American Government and Majority Rule: A Study in American Political Development (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1916). A half century later, William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham published an edited volume containing similar wording: The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
2. Richard Franklin Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880-1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). In 1986, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek founded this journal, which quickly became and has remained the flagship forum for the field. The first and only prior use of the phrase may have been in Edward Elliott, American Government and Majority Rule: A Study in American Political Development (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1916). A half century later, William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham published an edited volume containing similar wording: The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
3. Richard Franklin Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880-1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). In 1986, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek founded this journal, which quickly became and has remained the flagship forum for the field. The first and only prior use of the phrase may have been in Edward Elliott, American Government and Majority Rule: A Study in American Political Development (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1916). A half century later, William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham published an edited volume containing similar wording: The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
4. In chronological order, Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Peter F. Nardulli, ed., The Constitution and American Political Development: An Institutional Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Cynthia A. Hody, The Politics of Trade: American Political Development and Foreign Economic Policy (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996); and Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development during the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2002).
5. In chronological order, Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Peter F. Nardulli, ed., The Constitution and American Political Development: An Institutional Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Cynthia A. Hody, The Politics of Trade: American Political Development and Foreign Economic Policy (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996); and Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development during the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2002).
6. In chronological order, Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Peter F. Nardulli, ed., The Constitution and American Political Development: An Institutional Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Cynthia A. Hody, The Politics of Trade: American Political Development and Foreign Economic Policy (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996); and Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development during the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2002).
7. In chronological order, Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Peter F. Nardulli, ed., The Constitution and American Political Development: An Institutional Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Cynthia A. Hody, The Politics of Trade: American Political Development and Foreign Economic Policy (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996); and Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development during the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2002).
8. In chronological order, Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Peter F. Nardulli, ed., The Constitution and American Political Development: An Institutional Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Cynthia A. Hody, The Politics of Trade: American Political Development and Foreign Economic Policy (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996); and Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development during the Early Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2002).
9. All of these are articles which were cited in other articles published between 1945 and 2002. The phrase First appeared in William G. Shade, "American Political Development: 1789-1840," Current History 67 (1974): 5-8. The later articles were distributed as follows: 1993 (3); 1994 (4) ; 1996 (2); 1997 (2); 1998 (1); 2000 (2); and 2001 (1). By journal, they appeared in: Studies in American Political Development (3); Journal of American History (3); Polity (2); American Historical Review (1); American Political Science Review (1); Civil War History (1); Journal of American Studies (1); Journal of Economic History (1); Journal of Politics (1); and Reviews in American History (1).
10. Although rather elaborate definitions for a number of basic concepts, such as "sectional stress" and "trade areas," were provided in Sectionalism, I had utterly neglected to explain what "American political development" might be.
11. See, for instance, the various dimensions of "state authority" laid out in Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority, 1859-1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 106-16.
12. Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4n. Although, as Gerring correctly notes, Yankee Leviathan lacked such a clear statement, this definition still informed that earlier work. Because this definition views "political economy" as the ground upon which political contention takes place, the concept is almost never an object or agent involved in causal relationships.
13. As illustrations of the materialist foundations of the general theoretical perspective, reversals in political orientation and sentiment are extremely important. For example, the opposition of southern elites to central state authority just before the Civil War changed to support under the Confederacy and back to opposition once the region was reincorporated into the Union. These reversals can only be explained, I think, by reference to southern opposition to northern expansionism, which led southerners to oppose a strong central state inside the Union and construct a strong Confederate state outside of it. A somewhat different series of reversals occurred when northern financiers: (1) were reluctant to support Union repression of the South until the North offered terms that compensated them for risk; (2) subsequently and strongly supported the war effort because their own financial institutions had become materially committed to Union success (e.g., through the marketing of Union bonds and the establishment of the national bank system); and (8) came to oppose Reconstruction because Union occupation of the South delayed resumption of the gold standard and, more generally, impaired the ability of the central state to service the federal debt. Ideology and ideation were clearly secondary, as explanations for the political orientation of financiers, to changes in the material interests of finance capital within the political economy.
14. In Gerring's critical commentary, I counted twenty-three page citations. Twenty-one of these were to passages in the Preface and chapter one. The other two referenced passages in the conclusion. The only references to the main body of the work were either descriptive or praiseworthy.
15. I realize, of course, that this is not what Gerring is asking for in his article. In fact, taken on its face, his criticism recommends just the kind of cross-disciplinary, general transparency I would personally favor. In this sense, methodological sophistication, in the form of discipline preferences for specific mathematical techniques, is not part of his agenda. While advocacy of such techniques is almost always a part of a program reinforcing disciplinary boundaries, statistical simplicity works in the opposite direction by broadening the potential audience for research. Viewed from this angle, his criticism appears to rest on a similar broadening of accessibility. However, in practice, his recommendations would reify and strengthen the boundaries of a research community if, as is likely, his requests for clarity and causal specificity produced an increasingly specialized disciplinary lexicon. That he does not intend this result would not prevent it.