Nature and History in American Political Development

Nature and History in American Political Development PDF Author: James W. Ceaser
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674021587
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

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.

Nature and History in American Political Development

Nature and History in American Political Development PDF Author: James W. Ceaser
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674021587
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

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.

Race and American Political Development

Race and American Political Development PDF Author: Joseph E. Lowndes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415961513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume explores how the study of race can transform our understandings of political development and how studying political development can inform our understandings of race and racialization.

The Supreme Court and American Political Development

The Supreme Court and American Political Development PDF Author: Ronald Kahn
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700614397
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 526

Get Book Here

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.

The Search for American Political Development

The Search for American Political Development PDF Author: Karen Orren
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521547642
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

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

Nature and History in American Political Development

Nature and History in American Political Development PDF Author: James W CEASER
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674029305
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this inaugural volume of the Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures, James Ceaser traces the way certain "foundational" ideas—including nature, history, and religion—have been understood and used over the course of American history. Ceaser treats these ideas as elements of political discourse that provide the ground for other political ideas, such as liberty or equality. Three critical commentators challenge Ceaser's arguments, and a spirited debate about large and enduring questions in American politics ensues.

The Lovers' Quarrel

The Lovers' Quarrel PDF Author: Elvin T. Lim
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199812195
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book Here

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.

The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development

The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development PDF Author: Richard M. Valelly
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191086983
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 898

Get Book Here

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.

Why Parties?

Why Parties? PDF Author: John H. Aldrich
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226012751
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since its first appearance fifteen years ago, Why Parties? has become essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the nature of American political parties. In the interim, the party system has undergone some radical changes. In this landmark book, now rewritten for the new millennium, John H. Aldrich goes beyond the clamor of arguments over whether American political parties are in resurgence or decline and undertakes a wholesale reexamination of the foundations of the American party system. Surveying critical episodes in the development of American political parties—from their formation in the 1790s to the Civil War—Aldrich shows how they serve to combat three fundamental problems of democracy: how to regulate the number of people seeking public office, how to mobilize voters, and how to achieve and maintain the majorities needed to accomplish goals once in office. Aldrich brings this innovative account up to the present by looking at the profound changes in the character of political parties since World War II, especially in light of ongoing contemporary transformations, including the rise of the Republican Party in the South, and what those changes accomplish, such as the Obama Health Care plan. Finally, Why Parties? A Second Look offers a fuller consideration of party systems in general, especially the two-party system in the United States, and explains why this system is necessary for effective democracy.

A History of American Political Thought

A History of American Political Thought PDF Author: A. J. Beitzinger
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 161097591X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 641

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a descriptive analysis and critical discussion of the origins, development, and interrelationships of American political ideas against the background of the birth, growth, and crises of the republic and the major historical movements of thought. Main emphasis is on the idea of constitutionalism and related concepts of higher law, liberty, justice, equality, democracy and the balanced state, as well as underlying notions of human nature, motivation, and behavior.

American Political History: A Very Short Introduction

American Political History: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: Donald T. Critchlow
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199393737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Founding Fathers who drafted the United States Constitution in 1787 distrusted political parties, popular democracy, centralized government, and a strong executive office. Yet the country's national politics have historically included all those features. In American Political History: A Very Short Introduction, Donald Critchlow takes on this contradiction between original theory and actual practice. This brief, accessible book explores the nature of the two-party system, key turning points in American political history, representative presidential and congressional elections, struggles to expand the electorate, and critical social protest and third-party movements. The volume emphasizes the continuity of a liberal tradition challenged by partisan divide, war, and periodic economic turmoil. American Political History: A Very Short Introduction explores the emergence of a democratic political culture within a republican form of government, showing the mobilization and extension of the mass electorate over the lifespan of the country. In a nation characterized by great racial, ethnic, and religious diversity, American democracy has proven extraordinarily durable. Individual parties have risen and fallen, but the dominance of the two-party system persists. Fierce debates over the meaning of the U.S. Constitution have created profound divisions within the parties and among voters, but a belief in the importance of constitutional order persists among political leaders and voters. Americans have been deeply divided about the extent of federal power, slavery, the meaning of citizenship, immigration policy, civil rights, and a range of economic, financial, and social policies. New immigrants, racial minorities, and women have joined the electorate and the debates. But American political history, with its deep social divisions, bellicose rhetoric, and antagonistic partisanship provides valuable lessons about the meaning and viability of democracy in the early 21st century. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.