University
of Virginia
Queries,
especially public ones, concerning the purpose of an intellectual tradition
force moments of self-consciousness and debate about a tradition’s past,
present, and possible futures.Keith
Whittington’s recent query concerning the purpose of the intellectual tradition
known as American political development (Clio, Summer 1999) opens
one of these moments but it offers only one view and voice to a debate
that necessarily requires a fuller representation of the many other perspectives
and dialects that presently appear within or at the edges of this tradition.
Given
the apparent unseemliness of an APD field embracing a diversity of interests
and methodologies, or greater empirical depth and analytical rigor, Whittington
suggests two alternative futures for the field.Like
all reference points, the content of these “futures” directly affects the
constitution of APD in both the past and the present.In
the first possible future, Whittington historicizes the field’s existence
by defining its original purpose in terms of a valiant revolt against the
reigning hegemony of behavioralism.The
subsequent success of this revolt, however, now means that the ‘revolutionaries’
who initially met for this common moment in the clearing are now free to
return to the woods of the individual institutional studies from whence
they originally emerged.Thus, like
an antidote for a disease that no longer exists, the future of APD seems
destined to be written in a footnote of the discipline’s history.
The
second future suggested by Whittington also has a diminishing effect upon
past and present APD scholarship.In
this second future, traditional concerns for “history” are to become “a
secondary concern” so that “contemporary material” can beapproached
“from the perspective of APD.”This
future, thus, enables the field to speak directly to “how current decisions
might affect the future” and how “current events” can be analyzed “as readily
as distant ones.”What, of course,
is lost in this second possible future is not merely the quaint difference
between scholarship and history-rummaging polemics, but also the sincere
commitments many old and new APD’ers made to ensure the historical accuracy
of their accounts regardless of their contemporary uses or their analytical
or ideological implications. Some,
it is certain, will find Whittington’s account of the origins, development
and possible futures of APD credible and compelling.Others,
by contrast, may see his “what’s the point?” query as a sign of a looming
epistemological crisis in political science.Still
others, however, may want to consider alternative ways of conceiving the
field’s purpose in ways that reconcile its origins and subsequent development
with the present diversity of interests and approaches that constitute
the field.For example, one alternative
to Whittington’s account of APD’s origins would explicitly recognize that
the reintegration of institutions into political analysis was not initially
caused by anyone in APD or by the analytical bankruptcy of behavioralism.Rather,
formal theorists like Kenneth Shepsle (1979) and William Riker (1980) among
many others embraced institutions as the solution to the troublesome decisional
problematic commonly known as the Chaos Theorem (McKelvey, 1976; Plott,
1967).For these original neo-institutionalists,
like their later cohorts in APD, institutions were introduced and employed
as independent variables to explain political outcomes.Moreover,
the embrace of institutions shared between these two groups was prompted
(explicitly in the latter, and implicitly in APD) by a similar need to
explain how consensus and collective outcomes were possible amidst the
background condition of social diversity.
Stripped
of what some might have contended was APD’s “central contribution to the
discipline,” an alternative view of the field’s original and most distinguishing
contribution to political science comes into view.For
the initial and enduring claim APD thundered through the discipline was
not that institutions or that “the state” mattered--though all recognized
they did--but that political science was and necessarily must become again
an historically-grounded science of the conditions, causes and consequences
of collective authority.This radical
claim was the unanswerable critique APD delivered against behavioralism
and it remains the standing critique against a good portion of the discipline
today. Alternative
accounts of the present constitution of APD also warrant consideration.For
while some may see the field divided between a ‘traditional’ core and its
new empirical and formal ‘rivals’, others may find such a division a highly
ironic development given the welcoming spirit that has illuminated the
field since the inaugural issue of Studies in American Political Development.Indeed,
every subsequent issue of the Studies has invited both “theoretical
and empirical research” and “a diversity of subject matters and methodologies.”Initially,
to be sure, a relatively narrow (and perhaps self-reinforcing) range of
interests and methodologies accepted the invitation to engage new or forgotten
dimensions of the American political past.To
the credit of those who crafted the original invitation, different interests
and approaches are now appearing more frequently at conferences and in
print, including the Studies.These
newest “immigrants” (as some may still see them) clearly are knocking at
the APD door considerably later than expected, but their tardiness hardly
seems to justify closing the curtains or withdrawing or reinterpreting
the original invitation.
Another
alternative account of the present field almost certainly would sustain
the claim that there is a greater convergence (not divergence) of interests
and analytical approaches in the field than during any previous point in
the developmental trajectory taken by APD.For
example, the recent contributions of John Aldrich in Why Parties?
(1995) or of other authors in Analytical Narratives (1998) and
in various journals and conferences could not have been imagined during
the early years of APD.Other signs
of convergence and of a deeper seriousness about historical research are
abundant throughout the discipline.For
example, who among us could have predicted even a few years ago that Robert
Bates or Barry Weingast would declare unconditionally that “game theoretic
accounts require detailed and fine-grain knowledge of the precise features
of the political and social environment” and that “a coherent and valid
rational choice account” must display “the same depth of understanding
as that achieved by those who offer ‘thick descriptions’” (Politics &
Society, 1998)?All of these works
and the responses they generated attest to APD’s role as a primary catalyst
for the discipline’s great turn toward history in recent years.These
new participants and their works, moreover, have not demonstrated a disinterest
in or genetic inability to recognize “the complexity of political life,”
but different means by which additional dimensions of this complexity can
be brought to light.In this respect,
there does not appear to be a necessary contradiction in the coexistence
of newer empirical and formal approaches with the ‘traditional’ interpretative
approach several conceive is the mainstay of APD.Indeed,
diversity alternatively can be seen as a unique, desirable quality in that
it possesses the potential for producing unexpected benefits not only when
different interests and methods engage each other in synthesis, but also
when discrete interests and methods complement or oppose each other.
A
third alternative account of APD in the present would not hesitate to challenge
the necessity or hidden costs of Whittington’s reconstruction of the field
into a “refuge” and “protective shield for interpretive work.”However
noble this preservationist goal may be, every interpretation—from “thick
descriptions” to “general theories”—requires some minimal grounds for assessing
or falsifying its claims that transcend the immediate willfulness of the
author and his or her similarly willful friends.Why
none of us are exempt from this criterion has less to do with the relative
strength of our wills or the pseudo-sophistication or imperialism of quantitative
and formal methodologies than with our common desire to make truthful statements
about “past” politics that no longer are and never will be again.With
the special exception of first-person experiences, the credibility and
truthfulness of all historical accounts require some form of public justification.By
convention, two forms of justification have become the principal pillars
upon which the discipline of political science assesses most of its works.The
first pillar of justification is that of external validity—or how well
an account explains and is supported by the available historical evidence.The
second pillar of justification is that of internal validity—or the logical
consistency of an account’s premises and ultimate conclusions.Thus,
the new empirical depth and analytical rigor that some have carried into
APD elevate the justificatory bar over which future works might strive,
but they do so according to the two most conventional means of ascertaining
the credibility of any account of politics in the past.
A
final alternative account would question how much APD has been and “is
wedded to an interpretive methodology.”Naturally,
this debate would require some initial clarification of the content of
this so-called “methodology.”At
the extreme, it seems evident that the requirements of this “interpretive”
approach extend considerably beyond authorial aesthetics or the poetics
of literary narration.In addition,
it seems equally as apparent that a significant number of works in the
field contain explicit research designs and explanations of the representativeness
of the cases selected for study.In
several recent works, the latter methodological problem has been partially
solved by analyzing all known American cases—thereby, dampening concerns
about sampling bias that persistently threaten the foundations of many
quantitative and qualitative works.Other
(arguably, non-interpretive) methodological techniques also have been introduced
into the field by “leading works in APD.”Charles
Stewart and Barry Weingast, for example, employ a form of counterfactual
analysis to support their argument about the state-making process after
the Civil War, and Anna Harvey in Votes Without Leverage (1998)
tests her thesis about national politics and policymaking by examining
(at a lower level of aggregation) the organization and activities of New
York state parties.Few,
moreover, would find either a longitudinal or cross-sectional comparative
study within APD unusual---thereby, attesting to the general acceptance
of the once unspeakable idea that American politics is in fact a special
category of comparative politics.In
addition, as Whittington suggests, the field always has seemed opened to
more sophisticated explorations of the concepts of order, change and time
itself.In Politics the Presidents
Make (1993), for example, Stephen Skowronek attunes his readers to
the possibility of reading his work in two sequentially different orders:
chapter-by-chapter or part-by-part—thus, inviting us to think about the
study of Presidents and their contexts (and of order and change) in terms
of the analytical problems raised by the agency-structure antinomy.
In
closing, let me only add that the future of APD as an intellectual tradition
will be shaped by how well others succeed in clarifying the forms, conditions,
causes and consequences of collective authority within the American constitutional
past.The “point” of these future
investments in things long past, I expect, will be strikingly similar to
the “point” of similar investments made in the past and present of APD.This
common point begins and ends in the fulfillment of our common desire to
know these objects for their own sake and to know them honestly and openly
with others as reference points illuminating present constitutional orders
and our places and possibilities within them.This
common purpose amidst the multiplicity of our individual research interests
inevitably will remain grounded in and advanced by our dogged pursuit of
new (or forgotten) empirical data, by our application of new or different
analytical methods, and by our articulation of new theories that linked
seemingly disparate particulars into intelligible wholes.
Bibliography R.
Bates, A. Grief, M. Levi, J. Rosenthal, B. Weingast., Analytic Narratives,
(1998). A.
Harvey, Votes Without Leverage: Women in American Electoral Politics,
1920-1970, (1998). R.
McKelvey, “Intransitivities in Multidimensional Voting Models and Some
Implications for Agenda Control, Journal of Economic Theory, (1976),
12: 472-82. C.
Plott, “A Notion of Equilibrium and its Possibility under Majority Rule,”
American
Economic Review, (1976) 57: 787-806. W.
Riker, “Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study
of Institutions,” APSR, (1980), 76: 753-66. K.
Shepsle, “Institutional Arrangements and Equilibrium in Multidimensional
Voting Models,” AJPS, (1979) 23(1): 27-59. S.
Skowronek, Politics the Presidents Make, (1993). C.
Stewart and B. Weingast, “Stacking the Senate, Changing the Nation: Republican
Rotten Boroughs, Statehood Politics, and American Political Development,
Studies
in American Political Development, (1992) 6: 223-71.
Whittington follows his pessimistic, post-modern
“what’s-the-point?” query with an account of the origins and principal
contributions of American political development. APD,
he contends, originated as a reaction against behavioralism’s failure to
provide satisfying descriptions and explanations of the causes and consequences
of political outcomes. From
these critical origins, APD emerged as a new form of political inquiry
defined by a common analytical and theoretical focus upon “bringing the
state back” into our understanding of collective outcomes. History
was the vehicle of choice for the expression of this new understanding,
but the real “pioneering” analytical tool introduced to fulfill this shared
interest in the state was the reintegration of “institutions into political
analysis.” Political science,
thus, is indebted to APD for its initial contributions to the new institutionalism
that has swept across the discipline and much of the social sciences.