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  • Compared to what?: Setting American political development in comparative context

  • Robert C. Lieberman
  • Journal:
    Social Science History / Volume 48 / Issue 2 / Summer 2024
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    11 March 2024, pp. 361-382
    Print publication:
    Summer 2024
    • Article
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  • The recent crisis of democracy in the United States and around the world has highlighted the value of both historical and comparative analysis and brought the subfields of American political development and comparative politics into frequent conversation with each other. In fact, these subfields emerged from common origins and draw on similar conceptual and methodological tools. This essay identifies the historical and intellectual connections between the two fields and suggests the emerging possibilities of bringing the cross-national study of political development onto a common platform. It then draws out some themes that emerge from this pathway and considers how these themes might point the way toward a more systematic enterprise that can help illuminate some of the most pressing challenges of a turbulent political era.

  • Daniel Carpenter’s Democracy by Petition: A Symposium Introduction

  • Robert C. Lieberman
  • Journal:
    Social Science History / Volume 47 / Issue 1 / Spring 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    10 November 2022, pp. 145-147
    Print publication:
    Spring 2023
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  • 1 - How Democracies Endure

  • from Part I - Why Might Polarization Harm Democracy?
  • Edited by Robert C. Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler, Cornell University, New York, Kenneth M. Roberts, Cornell University, New York
  • Book:
    Democratic Resilience
    Published online:
    20 November 2021
    Print publication:
    25 November 2021, pp 3-34

  • Summary

    Politics in the United States has become more polarized in recent decades as both political elites and everyday citizens have been divided into rival and mutually antagonistic partisan camps. Increasingly, these rival camps question the political legitimacy and democratic commitments of the other side. Such polarization or “teamsmanship” can have a number of important political consequences: it can drive actors further apart, intensify political conflict, impede negotiation and compromise, and block the construction of bipartisan legislative and policymaking coalitions. Since polarization makes it difficult, if not impossible, to find common political ground, it can prevent democratic institutions from making important policy choices and responding to the critical issues of the day. Polarization, in short, can easily lead to democratic gridlock, paralysis, the decay of rights, and, in the extreme, violent conflict, as the Trump administration’s waning weeks so vividly demonstrated.

Democratic Resilience
  • Can the United States Withstand Rising Polarization?
  • Edited by Robert C. Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler, Kenneth M. Roberts
  • Published online:
    20 November 2021
    Print publication:
    25 November 2021
  • Politics in the United States has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. Both political elites and everyday citizens are divided into rival and mutually antagonistic partisan camps, with each camp questioning the political legitimacy and democratic commitments of the other side. Does this polarization pose threats to democracy itself? What can make some democratic institutions resilient in the face of such challenges? Democratic Resilience brings together a distinguished group of specialists to examine how polarization affects the performance of institutional checks and balances as well as the political behavior of voters, civil society actors, and political elites. The volume bridges the conventional divide between institutional and behavioral approaches to the study of American politics and incorporates historical and comparative insights to explain the nature of contemporary challenges to democracy. It also breaks new ground to identify the institutional and societal sources of democratic resilience.

  • “The Latter-Day General Grant”: Forceful Federal Power and Civil Rights

  • Desmond King, Robert C. Lieberman
  • Journal:
    Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics / Volume 6 / Issue 3 / November 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    03 August 2020, pp. 529-564

  • Progress toward racial equality requires the engagement of the American state, centered in the presidency and the executive branch, and in fact is not possible without the state's direct and forceful intervention. The key to this transformation is what we call “Forceful Federalism,” a multidimensional understanding of the American state. Forceful Federalism has four essential dimensions: standard-setting, coercion, associationalism, and fiscal authority. These four processes rise and fall over time, each charting its own history and unfolding according to its own logic. These processes usually work against each other. But occasionally they align with each other so that the state can pursue and achieve even difficult and challenging policy aims in a focused way. We sketch the outlines of Forceful Federalism and demonstrate its explanatory power with a case study of Forceful Federalism in action: James Meredith's integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962. The Meredith case exemplifies the convergence of the four dimensions of Forceful Federalism and marks the first time the modern American state was thus mobilized on behalf of civil rights. The case offers suggestive evidence that Forceful Federalism was a necessary condition for the emergence of the Civil Rights State.

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