The Search for American Political Development (review)

For almost twenty years, in the face of contemporary political science's relentless drive toward formalism, the journal Studies in American Political Development has been a prominent voice for historical political analysis. Many of the political scientists who have exerted a strong paradigm-making influence on historians of American politics found outlet in its pages. Now its two editors, both major contributors to the subject in their own right, have combined to write a primer to the field, its current issues, and its key analytical categories.

Structures and timing are the keynotes of their analysis. Institutions loom large—not "state" or "society" in the abstract but arrangements of governance in all their multiple, overlapping, and competing institutional forms. Broad and lasting shifts in governing authority loom large as well, whether designated as critical electoral realignments or patterns of institutional succession. But because every regime and institution takes rise within the particulars of historical time, all are sequentially entangled. New structures follow path-dependent courses set down by older institutions, but they never do so completely. They layer upon one another in complex, incongruous, even antagonist relationships. Historical-institutionalism maps a world of ordered disorder, "relatively independent institutions moving in and out of alignment with one another" in patterns of deep structural continuities and ceaseless change (96). "Intercurrence" is Orren and Skowronek's name for this phenomenon of multiple orders in action. Students of Orren's exploration of the mixed consequences of the nineteenth-century breakdown of master-and-servant law on American labor relations; Skowronek's mapping of the ways in which new bureaucratic forms intruded into the turn-of-the-century regime of courts and parties; Skocpol's case for the inhibiting effects of veterans' pension largesse on subsequent welfare policy—to pick only a few examples from this rich and influential literature—will recognize the point.¹

Much of this volume's persuasive energy is aimed at those who find themselves surrounded by the powerful forces of modern ahistorical political science: game theory and rational choice analysis, interest-group analysis and notions of "fit" and functionalism, or the teleological mystifications of a timeless American "tradition." Their own ventures into the language of theory building will seem to many historians more lifeless than their examples of the field's concrete achievements. Committed to rhetorics of time and contingency, historians may read Orren and Skowronek's plea for deeper, more complex understandings of historicity in analyses of American politics and governance with a sense that these methodological homilies are not meant for them. They will notice with surprise the distance that Orren and Skowronek tacitly erect between their field and the field of social-movement analysis. "Agency" is not among this primer's keywords. Nor are the key categories of enduring social inequality.

But if theirs represents a more narrow understanding of "American political development" than most historians would adopt, Orren and Skowronek's insistence on the primacy of institutions, structures, and regimes holds powerful lessons for historians. "Men make their own history," Marx wrote long ago, but "they do not make it under self- selected circumstances."² Orren and Skowronek pitch a structural analysis of politics that is contingent, historical, supple, and important.