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Recent political developments point to the presence of grave problems with democratic governance in the United States. They suggest that scholarship in American political development (APD) could be better at studying the experiences and thinking of everyday Americans. APD scholars often study institutional changes, policy initiatives, and other shifts in governance without studying how these developments affect the lives of U.S. citizens and residents. And many developments of critical political importance are ignored or do not receive the scholarly attention they deserve. For our scholarship to do justice to the recent crises and better relate to the political world around us, as several recent past American Political Science Association (APSA) presidents have recommended, the article calls for APD scholarship to be better at focusing on people themselves: on their health and safety, their material standing, and their personal and social educations. By adding a fuller study of people to their research, APD scholars would be better equipped to identify important political developments that do not always capture the attention of Congress, the White House, and the media, but that are too important to ignore.

Democracy in America has greatly influenced not only how political scientists think of democratic government, political equality, and liberalism in general, but also how we think of the United States as a whole. This article questions Tocqueville's interpretations of Americans’ habits and beliefs, given how little time Tocqueville actually spent in the South and the near West and given that he all but ignored the founding of Virginia and the other colonies not settled by the Puritans and for religious reasons. Contrary to Tocqueville's emphasis on the Puritan “point of departure,” I use historical evidence from the U.S. Census, state constitutions, and historical scholarship on slave ownership, tenant farming, political participation, and the American colonies and the early United States to show the existence of hierarchy among white Americans, rather than the ubiquitous social and political equality among European Americans described by Tocqueville. His writings actually indicate an awareness of another American culture in the South and near West—one that disregards education, condones coarse manners, tolerates aggressive behavior, and exhibits unrestrained greed—but Tocqueville does not integrate these observations into his larger conclusions about Americans’ mœurs and institutions. Because of the existence of these important, non-Puritan habits, the political institutions Tocqueville sees as facilitating democracy in America and hopes to apply to France and Europe may not have the effects he believes they will have.

Members of Congress have many ways to achieve their multiple goals of being reelected, making policy, and gaining power and prestige within their institution. Of these, roll call voting is the most visible and, many scholars argue, the most important signal that legislators send to their constituents, colleagues, and interest groups about their positions and achievements. Yet since 1790, and permanently since 1794, the U.S. Congress has included delegates who cannot vote on the House...

Sparrow profiles former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft during his second tenure in that office, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. It is asserted that although Scowcroft was highly effective and influential, he suffered from the same flaws as the president and most of the administration.

2 The American State of the 2000s There has been relatively little recent scholarship on the American state either in journals associated with research in American Political Development or in general political science journals.3 This seems odd, in view of the rich tradition of scholarship on the American welfare state, and how it evolved and obtained its distinct features.4 Too, there are rich veins of scholarship on the relationship between the U.S. party system and the state,5 on the distinctive role that race plays in the policies and administration of the American state,6 and on the dynamics of federal policy and the state.7 For all these reasons, research on state-building would appear to be a central component of APD scholarship.8 There are, I think, several reasons for the scarce recent scholarship on the American state. It may be that Orren and Skowronek's choice reflects the U.S. politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s--a political climate in which \"development\" (in the strict sense of the word) has not been visible in the form of enhanced federal government autonomy from dominant industries, stronger fiscal health for the national state, more inclusive and comprehensive social provision, achievement of greater political, social, or economic equality, modernized transportation infrastructure, or promulgation of policies to improve the long-term health of American society, such as mitigating climate change.

The U. S. president, the media, and public opinion survey data all represent the American public: the U. S. president serves as the personification and symbol of the U. S. government to press and people alike; the news and opinion publicized in the media constitute the public and public opinion polls are accepted as indicators of the public's opinions and beliefs. This article uses both existing research findings and new data to unpack the relationship between three institutions so as to determine under which conditions each institution speaks for the and under which it dominates or is subordinate to the others.

Studies of the organizational and behavioral characteristics of the American news media, as well as studies of media effects, often presume a basic institutional unity among news organizations. These studies typically analyze a small set of prestige media, and then make or infer conclusions with respect to the non-prestige media or the news media in general. The intention here is to verify empirically the extent to which the non-prestige \"outer ring\" media in fact take cues from the prestige \"inner ring\" news organizations. Using content analyses of forty-one daily newspapers from the 1992 presidential election campaign, we find that the outer ring newspapers sometimes replicate the issue agenda of the inner ring newspapers, but that they exercise significant discretion with respect to the favorability of their coverage of the presidential candidates and specific issues.

Timothy Mitchell's article “The Limits of the State” in the March 1991 issue of this Review stimulated an unusual variety of interested comments. John Bendix, Bartholomew Sparrow, and Bertell Ollman offer critiques and suggestions from quite different points of view. In response, Mitchell clarifies further the distinctiveness of his own approach and its implications.