Year: 1986
Type: article
Abstract: The occasion for Studies in American Political Development is the current revival of scholarship on American institutions and the related turn by political scientists to history.After a long season in which social forces and processes were the predominant topics of study, political structures and elites have gradually been reestablished at the center of inquiry.This "new institutionalism" has not returned to older formalisms.It has, instead, used the work of the recent past as a new point of departure from which to specify more closely the complex patterns of statesociety relations.History provides the dimension necessary for understanding institutions as they operate under varying conditions.Beyond that, it is also the natural proving ground for the claim that institutions have an independent and formative influence on politics.This new research agenda argues for a periodical in which these efforts may be brought together, learned from, and debated.Studies' institutional perspective is defined broadly to encompass the social and cultural institutions that impinge on government as well as governmental institutions themselves.It seeks to bring specialists concerned with particular agencies and organizations into a discussion different from that found in those journals that focus on one institution or another.Its historical perspective is an implicit endorsement of the usual (indeed ritual) call for the crossing of disciplinary boundaries, but the more immediate contribution in this regard may be intradisciplinary.Studies looks toward the rediscovery of a subject matter common to scholars working in different corners of political science by offering a forum in which their various skills and viewpoints may fruitfully converge.Here again, Studies only catches a drift already under way.Our editorial board ranges the spectrum of subfields, theoretical perspectives, and analytic methods.Yet each can be associated with scholarship on some aspect of political change and institutional development in the vii
Authors: Karen Orren, Stephen Skowronek
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4241848674