If our definition of political development seems as comfortable as we hope, it will be because APD researchers discover they have been studying shifts in authority all along. Inclined as we are to quit while we are ahead, we feel an obligation to pick up again at the point where we bracketed larger issues of meaning and value in order to pursue a neutral definition of political development, one that could stand up empirically against the diverse historical materials engaged by scholarship in the field. The plan was not to leave these larger issues behind permanently; they were, and to many APD scholars still are, what makes political development worth thinking about. A clearer-cut definition anticipated a return, and now we are better equipped to look for answers. There is no expectation that profound matters of political philosophy will be settled by the idea of historical construction or our temporal matrix of intercurrent controls. But insofar as these profound matters contemplate, for instance, the prospects of different arrangements of authority being established and successfully sustained over time, we believe APD will have something of its own to contribute.

In this chapter we can provide only the briefest of previews of how the study of political development we describe might deliver on this promise, but we will try to do that much.

Together, the cultural critique of developmental thinking, recounted in Chapter Two, and the institutional turn in historical research, recounted in Chapter Three, leave APD spinning around a wobbly center. Neither provides a ready response to a disarmingly simple question: What is political development? With the concept purged of teleology, the leading formulation so far is the inconclusive metaphor of “path.” In this chapter, we set these literatures aside for the purpose of offering a definition that identifies political development as a distinguishable event, one that can be established empirically and is a phenomenon worth study in its own right.

That a definition of this sort is desirable may not be self-evident. No one has complained that the topics addressed so far by APD scholars are misguided or that the substantive payoff on particular historical questions of broad interest has been inadequate. In fact, the flip side to APD's current lack of focus is the growing attachment of historical researchers to other areas of political science with well-established protocols of their own – political economy, for instance, or public law, or comparative government. Under these circumstances, why look for trouble?

This book is the product of a long, sometimes exasperating, sometimes exhilarating collaboration. Certain values helped us through, chief among these the value of friendship. We began more than twenty years ago when casual conversations about politics and history led us to create a journal outlet for scholars with similar interests, Studies in American Political Development. Among the benefits of editorship has been regular contact with a wide range of perspectives and participation, however vicariously, in each. In this way, our collaboration has included the unwitting persons whose names are found on Studies' tables of contents.

That said, we are inclined to add something more than a routine statement absolving others of responsibility for what we have written here. While in editing the journal we seek to present historical research by political scientists in all its variety, in writing this book we set out to craft a statement of our own. The title of the book is meant to capture the dual nature of “the search” for American political development as we see it today: in part, it is an effort to bring a story – the story of America's political development – into sharper relief; in part, it is an effort to bring into sharper relief an academic subfield, “APD,” within the discipline of political science. How this subfield defines itself will have a lot to do with how it tells the story, and the time seems ripe for a considered treatment.

Examining political development in the united states is tantamount to interrogating the national premise. Faith in development, with this nation in the vanguard of development, are relentless themes of the culture, inscribed in stories about the origins, common struggles, and higher purposes of the American people. The master narrative of American politics tells of a land set apart by Providence to “bear the ark of the liberties of the world,” of a nation released from power relationships accumulated by the “Old World” to “break a new path,” of “pioneers” who cleared the way for humankind's advance.

The scholars of the late nineteenth century who first turned American political development into a topic for critical inquiry knew exactly what they were doing. They were the embodiment of Melville's “skeptics with regard to ourselves,” avowed in their determination to subject the cornerstones of American national identity to empirical scrutiny.

The claim of conservative idealists like burgess, that political institutions express the aspirations of the civilization they serve, gave us one view of political development; the claim of progressive scholars that political institutions reflect economic interests and the balance of power among them offered another; the claim in some recent studies in APD that institutions subvert culturally generated alternatives calls into question the notion of political development itself. What scholars say about political development turns in good measure on how they think about political institutions, and the question of how institutions affect political outcomes currently supports a multifaceted intellectual movement of its own. The claim of the “new institutionalists” is that institutions do not merely express or reflect or deflect elements in their political surroundings. Institutions participate actively in politics: they shape interests and motives, configure social and economic relationships, promote as well as inhibit political change.

For APD scholarship, a “new institutionalism” has several attractions. The more proactive role attributed to institutions in processes of political change is of obvious interest, but an institutional turn has a strong instrumental appeal as well.