non-effects) of the cases immediately preceding and proceeding from the “revolution of 1937” in
developing accounts of constitutional change and development.
Enter historical-institutionalism and its impact on the work of historically-minded political
scientists and historians. “APD” has provided a methodological alternative to those whose research seeks
to complicate, challenge, and move past canonical literatures of the past fifty years. Focusing particularly
on the assumptions of unlinear development in politics that, in the words of Karen Orren and Stephen
Skowronek, assume “order-change-reorder,” APD seeks to problematize accepted notions of time and
periodization in political and historical analyses.
successful in this sense. It has spawned detailed historical excavations of periods and events that had
thought to have been settled in the service of emphasizing the effects that timing in institutional
development have on politics: disjuncture, unintended consequences, and incomplete development. APD
has mounted an important challenge the extant literature of the development of the institutions of
American government.
However, while APD emphasizes the stickiness of institutions within time, it usually does so by
neglecting the ideas of the political actors that run institutions and the ideas of those who vote for them
Instead, physical institutions – with all of their idiosyncrasies –
become, in a sense, the dependent variables that explain a scholar’s findings. While this is not in any
sense incorrect, it is strange that ideas get short-shrift.
ideas of the old literature as contributing to incorrect theories of change, then why shouldn’t we assume
that the ideas of political actors (again, politicians and citizens) themselves contribute to the fact that
institutions are time-bound and developmentally non-linear?
4
Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).
5
See, for example, Robert C. Lieberman “Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change”
American Political Science Review vol. 96, no.4 2002, 697-712
6
Exceptions include Rogers M. Smith, “Political Jurisprudence, the ‘New Institutionalism,’ and the Future of Public
Law,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 1, (March 1988) 101, and Smith, “Which Comes First, the
Ideas or the Institutions? Toward a Synthesis of Multiple Traditions and Multiple Orders,” paper presented at Yale
University, April 11-13, 2003.
3
Convention