ABSTRACT
Whether studying ideas or institutions, American political development has historically equated development with progress. Development has been identified when American laws and policies transitioned from feudal to liberal traditions, or toward greater administrative capacity of the state (Skowronek 1982; Skocpol 1985; Orren 1991). Understood as such, studies of development that address subordinated racial groups would look for a transition from formal attribution of ascriptive status to these groups to constructions of citizenship based on the tenets of liberalism (Smith 1993; Ericson and Bertch Green 1999). The field of American political development is now moving away from Whiggish narratives and identifying more fundamental features of order and change. Racial orders are emerging in studies of citizenship (see chapter 4 of this book). Teleological conceptions of development of institutions are giving way to development understood as a durable shift in governing authority, which results in a “new distribution of authority among persons or organizations within the polity at large or between them and their counterparts outside” (Orren and Skowronek 2004: 123).
