Rogers M. Smith

Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America

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.

Racial Orders in American Political Development

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.

Problems and methods in the study of politics

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Identities, Interests, and the Future of Political Science

tioners have settled on the agenda, they must then determine what methods can best illuminate those topics. This essay argues that political science today needs to give higher priority to studies of the processes, especially the political processes, through which conceptions of political membership, allegiance, and identity are formed and transformed. To do this, we need to identify, to a greater extent than most political scientists have, the historical contexts of the conflicts and political institutions that have contributed to political identities and commitments, and our approaches must provide empathetic interpretive understandings of human consciousnesses and values. We cannot rely solely, or even predominantly, on efforts to identify abstract, ahistorical, and enduring regularities in political behavior such as those that prevailed during the behavioralist era of modern American political science. Nor can we depend primarily on approaches, ascendant in our discipline’s more recent “rational choice” phase, that enhance our formal grasp of instrumental rationality. 2 Those sorts of work can certainly offer important contributions, but in general they are most effective as elements in projects that rest extensively on contextually and historically informed interpretive judgments. Despite what some may fear, an increased focus on how political identities are formed and on their behavioral and normative significance need not mean abandoning aspirations to do rigorous social science in favor of purely thick descriptive or subjective accounts. Political scientists who study problems of political identity should still be able to develop less abstract theoretical frameworks that can help us to discern and explain both the origins and transformations of particular political identities and near-universal patterns of political conduct. We may also be able to develop some supra-historical theories about the means and mechanisms of consequential historical transformations in political affiliations and behavior. Even in our interpretive and contextual characterizations, moreover, we still have to conform as rigorously as we can, as King, Keohane, and Verba have rightly urged, to a unified “logic of scientific inference,” although we should not equate that logic with the particular statistical techniques, all necessarily limited, that are commonly used to approximate it at any given time. 3 If we are to judge, for example, to what conceptions of their identities and interests particular political actors are giving priority, we need to form some hypotheses based on what we think we know about those actors. Then, we define the different implications of alternative hypotheses. Finally, we look for observable data about their lives that we can use to falsify some of the hypotheses. That logic is constant, though the techniques of falsification will vary with the types of problems particular data present and with the tools currently at our disposal. Yet though the challenge of drawing reliable inferences is universal in social science, the most crucial work in analyzing political identities must often be done by immersing ourselves in information about the actors in question, and using both

BARACK OBAMA AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN RACIAL POLITICS

In 2008, following a campaign in which racial issues were largely absent, Americans elected their first Black president. This article argues that Obamas 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.

Should We Make Political Science More of a Science or More about Politics

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.

Citizenship and the Politics of People-Building

Many scholars contend persuasively that ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationalism’ are linked and substantially modern creations. At the end of the 18th century, in contexts shaped by expanded market and communication systems, the antimonarchical struggles of many British American colonists and French commoners spawned the ideas and institutions of the modern ‘citizen’ and ‘nation’. Such citizenship means membership in a large-scale republic that has boundaries roughly conforming to some partly pre-existing ‘national’ community, and it thus is a feature of many ‘nation-states’ (Smith, 1983, p. 191; Turner, 1986, pp. 18–19; Brubaker, 1992, p. 35). These views tacitly treat citizenship statuses in every regime, and nationalisms as well, as products and instruments of deeper political processes through which particular political regimes and membership positions, and also distinctive senses of collective political identity or ‘political peoplehood’, are formed. Because basic institutions like citizenship and nationality laws result from them, the formation and transformations of all such senses of political status and community (whether ‘citizen’, ‘subject’, or ‘comrade’ in a ‘nation’, ‘tribe’, ‘federated republic ’ or something else) are among the most basic of political processes. Yet though we have much highly pertinent work, such as theories of ethnicity, nationalism, race, citizenship, gender, regime formation, and social movements, we do not have a lot in the way of more general theories about the shaping of such senses of ‘political peoplehood’. Perhaps such theories would have to be too general to be of use, but we cannot know that in advance. This essay sketches what I take to be key building blocks of a theory of ‘the politics of people-building’. It especially calls attention to the role of what I term ‘constitutive stories’ in politics, indicating how this role helps explain the historical importance of race in American nationality and citizenship laws. I focus on this dimension of a large topic in part because the dominant tendency in political science is to minimize the role of such idea-laden narratives. Instead we feature economic incentives, entrenched institutional practices and customs, demographics, socialization systems, psychological drives, and other such structural features of political life. I do not seek to minimize those factors. I do wish

Factors Affecting Saving, Policy Tools, and Tax Reform: A Review

The literature on factors affecting saving and capital formation in industrialized countries is reviewed, and measurement problems are examined. The effect on the saving rate of real rates of return, income redistribution, allocation of saving between corporations and individuals, growth of public and private pension plans, tax incentives, the bequest motive, energy prices, and inflation is considered, and the limited tools available to policymakers to affect savings are discussed. Finally, the extent to which recent tax reforms in a number of countries have been affected by the desire to increase saving is reviewed.

If Politics Matters: Implications for a “New Institutionalism”

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 political science ” . l Subsequently, rational choice has indeed become the most prominent pretender to the throne of scientific theory within the discipline.

“Without Regard to Race”: Critical Ideational Development in Modern American Politics

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