Search

Most modern Western political theories embrace equal citizenship as a normative ideal. Many scholars, however, focus on “legal citizenship” and conceive of equal citizenship as uniformity of legal rights and duties. Others focus on experiences of “lived citizenship” and conceive of equal citizenship as achieving sufficient economic, political, and social standing for persons to be seen as civic equals. Using the United States as its example, this article offers a unifying framework for mapping the relationship of legal citizenship to lived citizenship. It illustrates the value of this framework by using it show why realistic efforts to achieve equal citizenship must aim for not uniform legal rights and duties but instead equity in the possession of economic resources, political representation, and social recognition among different categories of citizens.

After more than half a century in which American racial politics has been structured primarily as a clash between two rival “racial orders” or “policy alliances,” the longstanding coalitions are transforming into ones centered on significantly new themes. The racially conservative “color-blind” policy alliance is, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, becoming an alliance promising “white protectionism.” The “race-conscious” policy alliance is, with the mobilizations around the slogan of Black Lives Matter, becoming an alliance focused on “racial reparations” to end “systemic racism.” These new, even more, polarized racial policy alliances have counterparts across the globe, and they are likely to shape political life for many years to come.

The Democratic Party in the United States, like other left-leaning parties around the world, is struggling to counter the rise of right-wing populism. The premise of this symposium is that the part...

Donald Trump is one of many leaders who have come to power in recent years championing right-wing nationalisms often called populist. He has done so by advancing an “America First” vision of U.S. h...

Erica Lee’s America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States provides a valuable overview of opposition to immigration from the nation’s colonial era to the present. Jame...

The severe political polarization that besets contemporary America cannot be successfully diminished unless Americans advance narratives of common identity, stories of peoplehood, in which ...

In 2013, the United States Supreme Court decidedShelby County v. Holder, which invalidated Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The ruling is part of longstanding efforts to maintain American institutions that have provided wide-ranging benefits to White citizens, including disproportionate political power. Over time, such efforts are likely to fail to prevent significant increases in political gains for African Americans, Latinos, and other minority citizens. But they threaten to foster severe conflicts in American politics for years to come.

Political scientists have the potential and responsibility to illuminate distinctive dimensions of immigration politics. The papers in this Symposium do so by mapping the persistence of anti-immigrant stereotypes and “strange bedfellow” immigration politics; the neglected history of state and federal struggles for immigration policy control; the rise of new immigrant advocacy forces; and the manner in which policymakers use facially neutral means, such as measures of time, to pursue controversial ends.

What does it mean to put the civic idea at the center of one’s concerns in this way? And what is its connection to citizenship? What, finally, is the relevant meaning of citizenship? Citizenship as a form of membership (separating those who are in from those who are out), with its associated rights and duties, is not the relevant notion; and certainly not citizenship as a form of membership in the state. Our understanding of citizenship derives instead from a distinctive civic ideal and set of practices involving creative agency and a form of loyalty— a commitment to a civic minded co-creation.

This paper argues that, in addition to humanitarian concerns, policies toward immigrants should also be shaped by recognition of special responsibilities toward some populations of noncitizens. National governments acquire such responsibilities in part through their histories of coercive impositions on those populations. Former imperial powers, in particular, often possess special obligations toward the inhabitants of their foreign colonies that go beyond their general humanitarian responsibilities. Those obligations might be met in various ways; but if national governments of wealthy, formerly imperial states granted greater access for immigration to the poor of their former colonies, migration flows might significantly contribute to reductions in global levels of inequality.

Much important work on American political development does not feature the study of political ideas. This article sketches a general framework of how politics proceeds, the “spiral of politics.” It suggests how and why idea generation and reformulation may comprise a crucial stage in politics. It thereby highlights the need for interpretive studies of ideas, while also indicating how different sorts of political science research can be constructively connected.

Arthur Melzer's outstanding book decisively proves the historical prevalence of esoteric writing and persuasively identifies four main types. It also provides reasons why the worldviews that long made esotericism seem necessary should not be dismissed, reasons that should give pause to proponents of progressive reform agendas. There still remain, however, good reasons to think that such agendas can and should be prudently pursued.

In 2008, following a campaign in which racial issues were largely absent, Americans elected their first Black president. This article argues that Obama's election does not signal the dawn of a postracial era in U.S. politics. Rather, it reflects the current structure of racial politics in the United States—a division between those who favor color-blind policies and seek to keep racial discussions out of politics, and those who favor race-conscious measures and whose policies are often political liabilities. The Obama campaign sought to win support from both camps. Only if pervasive material racial inequalities are reduced can such a strategy succeed in the long run.

The founding generations of Americans saw themselves as undertaking experiments in government that included creating constitutional democratic republics and promoting commerce, science, and religious freedom. As Tocqueville recognized, their efforts fostered a society in which, for a time, there was extensive agreement on what James Ceaser has termed “foundational concepts,” despite sharp policy differences, and a society in which commerce, science, and religion all flourished. Yet as they did, they created a national context in which, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many embraced notions of evolution that challenged older rationalist and religious foundational concepts, while many others continued to affirm these older beliefs. The American experiments in government thus initiated changes that have increasingly fostered deep political and philosophical divisions, creating major new challenges for democratic republican self-governance today.

The two books that have occasioned this symposium represent efforts to research thoroughly, think rigorously, and argue honestly about complex and significant issues of race and ethnicity in America. There is much to be learned from them on many topics. I read them chiefly for insights about whether and how a defensibly democratic politics of egalitarian change can be achieved by, for, and with racial minorities in a country whose majorities, like most majorities, have long been reluctant to pursue policies that did not predominantly benefit themselves. I raise some challenges to the perspectives offered in these books, but only as an effort, kindred in aim if not achievement, to carry forward the work they have thus far so nobly advanced.

Many modern readers of Tocqueville have rightly stressed his concerns that democracy may bring tyranny of the majority, unduly centralized government, and excessive, leveling egalitarianism. Yet Tocqueville also saw in American democracy, in particular, dangers of racial hierarchies and industrial aristocracies protected by decentralization, and his analysis also can prompt more concern about gender equality in the United States than expressed. The challenges to American democracy in Tocqueville’s day and ours can be illuminated if we attend to his fears about forms of both equality and inequality in the United States.

Political theorists have argued for and against the propriety of a civic ethics of “public reason” that would set normative bounds on the expression of religious views in the public discourse of government officials and, to a lesser degree, citizens. This essay explores whether critics of ethical restraints on religious discourse have grounds to criticize the religious rhetoric of President George W. Bush. Quantitative and qualitative studies show that Bush has used a distinctive “prophetic” mode of religious expression more often than any modern predecessor. This sort of religious discourse is argued to be ethically dubious from the standpoints of most public reason advocates and most of their critics. Even as it champions democracy and adherence to the plans of divine providence, it discourages and de-legitimates democratic dissent and fails to provide the religious guidance it promises.

Some scholars see contemporary American politics as characterized by “strange bedfellows” on racial issues and by polarization driven by economic, not racial, views. The authors argue instead that on most issues with racial dimensions, political actors and institutions are aligned into two racial orders, one favoring “color-blind” policies and the other “race-conscious” measures. Coalitions on two issues—affirmative action in employment and majority-minority districting—are explored to support this “racial orders” thesis.

American political science has long struggled to deal adequately with issues of race. Many studies inaccurately treat their topics as unrelated to race. Many studies of racial issues lack clear theoretical accounts of the relationships of race and politics. Drawing on arguments in the American political development literature, this essay argues for analyzing race, and American politics more broadly, in terms of two evolving, competing “racial institutional orders”: a “white supremacist” order and an “egalitarian transformative” order. This conceptual framework can synthesize and unify many arguments about race and politics that political scientists have advanced, and it can also serve to highlight the role of race in political developments that leading scholars have analyzed without attention to race. The argument here suggests that no analysis of American politics is likely to be adequate unless the impact of these racial orders is explicitly considered or their disregard explained.

In spring 2002, APSA President-Elect Theda Skocpol appointed this Task Force on Graduate Education, representing a variety of institutions, political science subfields, scholarly backgrounds, and methodological viewpoints. She asked its members to report on ways to strengthen graduate education in political science. The Task Force quickly concluded that no single structure of graduate training could be appropriate for the wide range of institutions offering graduate instruction in political science, and that departments must decide for themselves what programs best suited their capacities and interests.

gates threatened to withdraw if "some gentlemen" did not disavow all notions of taking "their negroes" from slaveholders, conflicts over race have been highly visible in American politics (Farrand 1966, v. II: 95, 202-22, 356, 370, 378, 415). One might expect that theoretical accounts and empirical studies of racial issues would always have been among the main themes of the discipline devoted to the study of politics in America. Yet, as many scholars have shown, that has not been the case. Instead, after a late 19th century period of explicit disciplinary racism, through much of the 20th century American political science devoted less attention to race than

The longer I have taught constitutional law, a span now approaching a quarter of a century, the stranger I have found the whole enterprise of governing via a written constitution, espe cially a hard-to-amend written constitution with a powerful con stitutional court like that of the United States. Yet in that same quarter century, what was once a unique governmental structure has (with great variations) come to be widely imitated through out the world, in national, regionally transnational, and incipi ently global institutions. Ironically, many of those same developments clearly also have the potential to transform basic features of the American constitutional system rather radically in the decades ahead, perhaps by incorporating elements of it into one or more transnational governments of various sorts. Hence I am simultaneously increasingly struck by our system's peculiarity, impressed by its exemplary success, and piqued by the growing possibility that in at least some important respects it may not long endure. The sense of strangeness I have about the American consti tutional enterprise echoes the astonishment I had when I first read Mar bury v. Madison early in my college years. Here was the cornerstone of the whole grand edifice of judicial review. And yet its textual foundations, though not absent, were so wafer thin; its logic, though not unreasonable, so eminently debatable; its motivations, though indeterminable, so patently questionable. How could a mighty temple have been erected on this brittle shale? Still, I thought, it seems to have worked; so I focused on understanding how it worked and why it worked. That is also how I thought about the whole enterprise of written constitu tionalism that is so central to the reasoning of Mar bury (more so than any specific constitutional language). I soon learned our familiar mantras of the constitutional system's how and why. The point of a written constitution for a republic is to settle as clearly as possible a number of basic questions of governmental pow rs, procedures, and purposes so that we can both enable our selves to get on with our public and private lives and curb arbitrary, unjust political conduct. For that enterprise to work, the written limits must have some sort of ongoing enforcer, par ticularly in a potentially anarchical federal system; but this is concededly a dangerous if necessary power. It may be most safely assigned to an independent judiciary, well versed in textual inter pretation, structured and socialized to value and benefit from the rule of law, insulated from immediate political pressures, but "least dangerous" because it possesses neither purse nor sword. The ultimate popular rule that republican principles require is preserved by having both the original constitution and its

Many scholars note that racial policy issues now focus on color-blind versus race-conscious approaches to racial inequalities, but they have not adequately explained how this development occurred or its consequences. Using work theorizing the role of ideas in politics, this article argues that these changes represent a “critical ideational development.” Diverse strains in earlier racial policy positions were reformulated to advance not just old racial goals but new ones. This critical ideational development produced advantages for conservative coalition building and Republican electoral campaigns, thereby contributing to the Reagan Revolution and later polarization and gridlock, and it helped drive racial issues out of campaigns and into other venues, especially legislative, administrative, and judicial hearings. It has not been associated with great progress in reducing racial inequalities or promoting racial harmony

Answering the question posed by the organizers of this symposium, whether those of us who study history and politics have any wisdom to offer to contemporary political actors, strikes me as a very risky business. If we answer, "Political actors should understand the lessons of my work and the work of my friends," we seem conceited and self-serving. If we answer, "we actually have very little to offer political actors, our work is not able to provide concrete advice of that sort," we seem rather useless. And if we answer, "the question is inappropriate, it is not and should not be our goal to provide advice to politicians and policy-makers," we seem conceited, self-serving, and useless. But what other sort of answer might we possibly give? I can think of none, and so here I'll give versions of all three unhappy responses. My core answer is, however, more cheerful. It is that if we do our work well, then to some modest degree we make the conditions under which politicians, policymakers, and citizens choose a bit more propitious to good choices. Whether they make such choices is, however, up to them. Let me work toward that conclusion by developing my version of the three unhappy answers just listed, taking them in reverse order. It would indeed be a bad thing, I believe, if people who study politics and history, or any other political scientists, took their primary task to be the generation of knowledge that directly assisted politicians and policymakers. Our fundamental task has to be to understand as fully and honestly as possible how politics has worked and can work. To be sure, if we do that well, our results ought in principle to be valuable for both political leaders and citizens. Our research should help them to understand better the range of constraints and opportunities their political circumstances present to them. But if we conduct our studies as courtier scholars, seeking to whisper words of wisdom into the ears of candidates and governing officials, we are likely to go astray. We may well produce research that does not really aim to provide an honest account of our subject matter as far as we can grasp it. Rather, we may at least implicitly be providing credible stories that will please and assist our favorites among those who are in power or seeking power. I am not naive enough to deny that, at some level, we all do that to some degree already. I also know that many would disdain the notion that there is any "truth" to be found that is not in the end simply the version of reality that best serves the interests of those who endorse it (often quite sincerely). That epistemological claim may or may not be correct. Yet either way, I believe our duty as scholars still is to be as honest as possible with ourselves and our audiences in several ways. We must expose as fully as we can the assumptions, the evidence, and the arguments on which our contentions rely, we must indicate how far we really think them to be

I hope I will not seem ungrateful for Mark Hulliung’s many gracious comments regarding Civic Ideals when I say that I almost feel as if I agree with him more than he does.

In the 19th century, the greatest questions concerning American citizenship were whether this new modern experiment in large-scale republican self-governance could work at all, and whether its initial reliance on slavery could be overcome. The answers proved to be that a large-scale republic centered on commercial, not martial aspirations could indeed endure, and that it could achieve the elimination of chattel slavery, though not without enormous costs. In the 20th century, the major issues became whether formally equal citizenship could be extended to all adults, regardless of race and gender. The answer proved to be that women and non-whites could gain genuine possession of the franchise and access to public office, even if only through great civic struggles, and even if those gains still left the nation far short of achieving practical equality in many spheres of public and private life. Though much remains to be explored in regard to those past developments, it is obviously timely now to ask, “What are the major issues facing American citizenship in the 21st century?” It is also tempting to speculate about how laws and public policies will deal with them, though that quest of course carries us out over even thinner ice.

Karen Orren's critique wages more war with itself than it does with my main arguments and evidence, most of which she does not engage directly. The bulk of my essay was devoted to textual critiques of Tocqueville, Myrdal, Hartz, and a number of more recent authors. I argued that their assumptions that liberal democratic traditions formed the core of American political culture led to inadequate accounts of major systems of ascriptive hierarchy, especially racist, nativist, and patriarchal ones. Orren mentions none of the authors I critiqued except Carol Pateman, whom she invokes in a paragraph ending, like a third of her paragraphs in her first two sections, with a rhetorical question about my view, not a forthright contrary proposition. Her failure to address my specific critiques, and her recurring reliance on questions to do the work of affirmative arguments, make it unclear precisely how far she is defending the authors, challenging the criticisms, and disputing the evidence to which my essay was largely devoted.

Rogers Smith in “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America” in the September 1993 issue of thisReviewargues that ascriptive inequalities (eg. racism, sexism, nativism) are neither mere deviations from liberalism nor only symptoms of liberalism. Rather, multiple ideologies coexist in uneasy tension. Jacqueline Stevens criticizes Smith for failing to attend to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and others—whose descriptions of American ideological history, she says, provide the same insight that Smith claims as his own. She goes on to discuss how defining a “mainstream” of scholarship shapes inferences as to what counts as knowledge and further suggests that liberalism and exclusion betray an underlying consistency. In his reply, Smith recognizes the contributions of Du Bois and others, but argues that although they do foreshadow his work, they do not offer the same critique or do the same job. And he asserts that the linkages between liberalism and ascriptive inequality are political, economic, social and psychological—not logical—ones.

To paraphrase slightly, I have been asked to focus on the apparent tensions between making genuinely scientific contributions by advancing knowledge in rigorous ways within specialized subfields, on the one hand, and addressing substantive political issues of general interest in accessible fashion, on the other. My view is that, though we should try to do both things, we should give priority to the latter—to helping both disciplinary and general public understandings of important substantive political issues become better informed and reasoned. To adopt this priority is still, I believe, to pursue the main tasks of political science as scientifically as possible; but it is true that this course involves significant tradeoffs.

Analysts of American politics since Tocqueville have seen the nation as a paradigmatic “liberal democratic” society, shaped most by the comparatively free and equal conditions and the Enlightenment ideals said to have prevailed at its founding. These accounts must be severely revised to recognize the inegalitarian ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy that defined the political status of racial and ethnic minorities and women through most of U.S. history. A study of the period 1870–1920 illustrates that American political culture is better understood as the often conflictual and contradictory product of multiple political traditions, than as the expression of hegemonic liberal or democratic political traditions.

From Aristotle and Hobbes through Bentley, Truman, and Riker, many writers have claimed, more or less directly, that they are founding or helping to found a true political science for the first time. Modern scholars have usually expressed this aspiration via criticism of earlier “unscientific” approaches. Thus William Riker in 1962, advocating rational choice theory as the basis of political analysis, dismissed “traditional methods—i. e., his-tory writing, the description of institutions, and legal analysis” as able to produce “only wisdom and neither science nor knowledge. And while wisdom is certainly useful in the affairs ofmen, such a result is a failure to live up to the promise in the name politicalscience ”.lSubsequently, rational choice has indeed become the most prominent pretender to the throne of scientific theory within the discipline.

John Gerring's call for greater methodological self-consciousness and rigor in APD scholarship is valuable in several ways. Although some APD scholars deploy formal models and statistical analyses of large n data sets, many do not. Today, those choices inevitably raise questions of the rigor of such work. Gerring's essay usefully pushes us to provide answers. I also generally agree with his sense of what appropriate methods involve. The fact that his recommendations are fairly standard and noncontroversial then poses the further issue Steve Skowronek stresses: whether there is any distinctive method or substance that defines APD scholarship as a field.

A decade ago, we were among the scholars in political science who proudly associated ourselves with the Perestroika movement and its calls for greater respect for a range of productive methods, more substantively significant political research, and a more internally democratic profession. We retain those commitments. But Perestroikans have failed to focus on some broader trends in political science and the modern American academy that pose threats that are arguably still deeper, still more unjust, and still harder to overcome. In regard to what political scientists do that this society values most—teaching—we have a significant and growing equity deficit in the discipline.

My comments on Charles Williams' “Racial Politics of Progressive Americanism” can be brief, because it is an excellent essay and I could not agree more with its central argument. Williams demonstrates that, even though United Automobile Workers (UAW) leaders used the language of racial equality to support some civil rights advances, Walter Reuther and others also invoked a merely formal equality to deny power to blacks thought to be allied with Communists, and to sustain the support of anti-black workers. They pretended that African Americans were an ethnic group like those of many European-descended Americans, ignoring the enormous differences in the oppression black Americans had long experienced and continued to experience (and still experience). In these ways, an Americanist language, arguably a “liberal” language, of equal rights worked against the racial equality it purported to honor. On these points, I am fully persuaded.