Race has been present at every critical moment in American political development, shaping political institutions, political discourse, public policy, and its denizens’ political identities. But because of the nature of race—its evolving and dynamic status as a structure of inequality, a political organizing principle, an ideology, and a system of power—we must study the politics of race historically, institutionally, and discursively. Covering more than three hundred years of American political history from the founding to the contemporary moment, the contributors in this volume make this extended argument. Together, they provide an understanding of American politics that challenges our conventional disciplinary tools of studying politics and our conservative political moment’s dominant narrative of racial progress. This volume, the first to collect essays on the role of race in American political history and development, resituates race in American politics as an issue for sustained and broadened critical attention.

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.

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.

Leading political scientists analyze the presidency of Donald Trump and its impact on the future of American politics In virtually all respects, the Trump presidency has disrupted patterns of presidential governance. However, does Trump signify a disruption, not merely in political style but in regime type in the United States? Assessing Trump's potential impact on democratic institutions requires an analysis of how these institutions—including especially the executive branch—have developed over time as well as an examination of the intersecting evolution of political parties, racial ideologies, and governing mechanisms. To explore how time and temporality have shaped the Trump presidency, editors Zachary Callen and Philip Rocco have brought together scholars in the research tradition of American political development (APD), which explicitly aims to consider how interactions between a range of institutions result in the shifting of power and authority in American politics, with careful attention paid to complex processes unfolding over time. By focusing on the factors that contribute to both continuity and change in American politics, APD is ideally situated to take a long view and help make sense of the Trump presidency. American Political Development and the Trump Presidency features contributions by leading political scientists grappling with the reasons why Donald Trump was elected and the meaning of his presidency for the future of American politics. Taking a historical and comparative approach—instead of viewing Trump's election as a singular moment in American politics—the essays here consider how Trump's election coincides with larger changes in democratic ideals, institutional structures, long-standing biases, and demographic trends. The Trump presidency, as this volume demonstrates, emerged from a gradual unsettling of ideational and institutional lineages. In turn, these essays consider how Trump's disruptive style of governance may further unsettle the formal and informal rules of American political life. Contributors: William D. Adler, Gwendoline Alphonso, Julia R. Azari, Zachary Callen, Megan Ming Francis, Daniel J. Galvin, Travis M. Johnston, Andrew S. Kelly, Robert C. Lieberman, Paul Nolette, Philip Rocco, Adam Sheingate, Chloe Thurston.

The volume brings together some of the best of both the most established and the newest urban scholars in political science, sociology, and history, each of whom makes a new argument for rethinking the relationship between cities and the larger project of state-building.

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

Why have American politics developed differently from politics in Europe? Generations of scholars and commentators have wondered why organized labor in the United States did not acquire a broad-based constituency or form an autonomous labor party. In this innovative and insightful book, Gwendolyn Mink finds new answers by approaching this question from a different angle: she asks what determined union labor's political interests and how those interests influenced the political role forged by the American Federation of Labor. At bottom, Mink argues, the demographic dynamics of industrialization produced a profound racial response to economic change among organized labor. This response shaped the AFL's political strategy and political choices. In her account of the unique role played by labor in politics prior to the New Deal, Mink focuses on the ways in which the organizational and political interests of the AFL were mediated by the national issue of immigration and links the AFL's response to immigration to its conservative stance in and toward politics. She investigates the political impact of a labor market split between union and nonunion, old and new immigrant workers; of dramatic demographic change; and of nativism and racism. Mink then elucidates the development of trade-union political interests, ideology, and strategy; the movement of the AFL into established state and party structures; and the consequent separation of the AFL from labor's social base.

This collection provides a deep engagement with the political implication of Black Lives Matter. This book covers a broad range of topics using a variety of methods and epistemological approaches. In the twenty-first century, the killings of Black Americans have sparked a movement to end the brutality against Black bodies. In 2013, #BlackLivesMatter would become a movement-building project led by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. This movement began after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who murdered 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The movement has continued to fight for racial justice and has experienced a resurgence following the 2020 slayings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sean Reed, Tony McDade, and David McAtee among others. The continued protests raise questions about how we can end this vicious cycle and lead Blacks to a state of normalcy in the United States. In other words, how can we make any advances made by Black Lives Matter stick? The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Politics, Groups, and Identities.

On Obama examines some of the key philosophical questions that accompany the historic emergence of the 44th US president. The purpose of this book is to take seriously the once common thought that the Obama presidency had ushered in a post-historical age. Three questions organize the argument of the book: What’s living and dead in the idea of post-racialism? Did Mr. Obama’s preference for problem-solving over ideological warfare mark him not just as a post-partisan figure but as a philosophical pragmatist? Did the US become post-imperial when the descendants of slaves and of British imperial subjects inhabited the White House? In addition to taking up these questions, the book considers Mr. Obama’s own relationship to the post-historical idea and explores the ethical implications of certain ways of entertaining that idea.

The 2008 presidential election was celebrated around the world as a seminal moment in U.S. political and racial history. White liberals and other progressives framed the election through the prism of change, while previously acknowledged demographic changes were hastily heralded as the dawn of a "post-racial" America. However, by 2011, much of the post-election idealism had dissipated in the wake of an on-going economic and financial crisis, escalating wars in Afghanistan and Libya, and the rise of the right-wing Tea Party movement. By placing Obama in the historical context of U.S. race relations, this volume interrogates the idealized and progressive view of American society advanced by much of the mainstream literature on Obama. Barack Obama and the Myth of a Post-Racial America takes a careful look at the historical, cultural and political dimensions of race in the United States, using an interdisciplinary analysis that incorporates approaches from history, political science, and sociology. Each chapter addresses controversial issues such as whether Obama can be considered an African-American president, whether his presidency actually delivered the kind of deep-rooted changes that were initially prophesised, and whether Obama has abandoned his core African-American constituency in favour of projecting a race-neutral approach designed to maintain centrist support. Through cutting edge, critically informed, and cross-disciplinary analyses, this collection directly addresses the dimensions of race in American society through the lens of Obama’s election and presidency.