The connections between ideas of political culture and political development are intrinsically problematic. The term development typically refers to change, contingency, and the impact of causal forces in reshaping a social or political order. The concept draws on the powerful intuition that no feature of human experience, including language itself, is exempt from change and transformation. By contrast, culture typically refers to the framework of symbols, norms, assumptions, and expectations with which a people make sense of their experiences and formulate appropriate courses of action. At least for long periods, this interpretive framework molds the process of social change and limits the extent to which it occurs. Here, the controlling intuition is that without some stable set of meanings no complex human discourse can be really coherent—for there is no stable marker against which change itself can be measured. It is easy enough, of course, to assert that a particular political regime exhibits both a distinctive culture and a particular pattern of development. But it is another matter to indicate the precise relationship between the two.

The movement of new social forces into the political system is one of the central themes in the study of American political development on both the national and local levels. For example, Samuel P. Huntington has characterized the realignment of 1800 as marking “the ascendancy of the agrarian Republicans over the mercantile Federalists, 1860 the ascendancy of the industrializing North over the plantation South, and 1932 the ascendancy of the urban working class over the previously dominant business groups.” And the process of ethnic succession—the coming to power of Irish and German immigrants, followed by the Italians and Jews, and then by blacks and Hispanics—is a major focus of most analyses of the development of American urban politics.

There is a standard historical lore of the Supreme Court's role in the economy and it runs as follows. The due process clause, like the rest of the Fourteenth Amendment, was enacted after the Civil War to help blacks. The Supreme Court proceeded to empty the amendment of its protections for minorities and then, from the turn of the century on, used the due process clause to protect business from government regulation. It did so (1) by interpreting the word person in the amendment to include the corporation and (2) by finding that the clause not only for-bade the government from interfering with private property unless it followed fair procedures, but also forbade the government to do so unless it had a good, substantive reason. Substantive due process meant that no statute regulating property was constitutional unless it was reasonable, and the Court was the final arbiter of reasonableness. The Court's approach to reasonableness was that free market laissez-faire was the rule, and government regulation the exception.

Antitrust law in the United States—framed in the Sherman, Clayton, and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) acts and their subsequent amendments—establishes a policy toward industrial concentration and business practices that sets the United States apart from other industrial democracies. In Europe and Japan, large-scale industry has been perceived as a national and international asset and, while particular abuses may be condemned at the government's discretion, emotional antibigness rhetoric and statutory prohibition of monopolistic practices are largely absent.

It is evident now that the political structures built in the United States over the last half-century depended for their successful functioning on a set of international conditions that no longer exist. The government programs of the 1930s to protect labor organization, promote high agricultural prices, and provide cheap credit would have caused, had the gold standard not been defunct, massive gold outflows, worsening the already severe economic contraction. The postwar offspring of these programs have multiplied under conditions of international trade and finance that in effect permitted the export of excess economic demand. For the last decade, with international circumstances less obliging, the task of whittling government down or at least controlling its growth has vexed successive administrations.

When Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in the 1830s, he found Washington occupying a lowly position in the political life of the country. In a footnote, Democracy in America informs the European reader, “America has no great capital city where direct or indirect influence is felt over the whole extent of the country.” Throughout the book, he expands on the effects of this decentralization. And we may fairly suspect that as much as any other, this observation led de Tocqueville to concentrate his inquiry on the performance of democracy in communities across the country.

This is the beginning of a journey that promises to be eventful for students of American political development. Samuel Kernell is on to some-thing. The speculative and substantive implications of his findings, especially if they can be expanded and replicated, seem to be very great indeed.

The American presidency reflects nothing so clearly as the idiosyncrasies of personality and circumstance. The discrete dynamics of the men and their times are naturally pronounced; the general dynamics that define the institution in time, correspondingly obscured. This makes thematic analysis of the presidency peculiarly dependent on uncovering broad-ranging patterns in institutional history. By isolating different historical regularities we can locate different dimensions of the problem and significance of presidential action.