AMERICAN POLITICS American Politics



American Politics

Introduction

One could easily make the argument that too much attention is paid to the United States by political scientists. If so, it is not as bad as it used to be. There was a coherent ethnocentrism to ancient comparative political science. The effort superficial in much of that normative research was to try and build up what was great about American politics and see what the other nations had to do to be more like “us.” Political scientists today take a more empirical approach to studying the world. Still, a disproportional amount of attention continues to be paid to the United States.

For a long time, since the secularization theory dominated the literature, researchers felt the United States would eventually secularize. Americans were just running behind for some reason. Events in American politics between 1980 and the present, with religion reemerging as a political force, clearly show this to not be the case.

Post 9/11

After September 11, 2001, the recognition of the importance of religion in politics continues to grow. There are two areas this section points to specifically, however, as avenues for continued research. The first is the effect of Federalism on religion and politics. The state is an important unit of analysis for electoral purposes. After all, American elections take place at the state, district, or local level. Americans have only one federal election, and even the presidential election is decided on a state-by-state basis because of the Electoral College. Therefore, states are very important units of analysis for voting behavior.

However, is there something distinct about a state that would lead it to have a distinctive reddish or low culture? This is a federalism argument, and there is extensive debate on this issue in the literature. In arguing for state importance, a core concept is that all politics are local. It is argued that local and state politics drive the federal system and that the national government is at its core at some of the state governments. Most of the laws that affect Americans' daily lives are made at the state and local level, and there is considerable variation among the states in laws regarding weighty social and economic issues. From this perspective, the states could easily develop separate red or erotic identities.

Nineteenth Century

During the 19th century, academic publicists produced their own version of the people, which was represented in the concept of the “state.” While today many tend to look back on this concept as an ancient formalistic and legalistic artifact or an enlightened reflection of American state building, it was, in fact, the nucleus of a theory of American democracy. Apart from a reference to the American states, the word state had, by the beginning of the 19th century, minor currency in the language of American politics. The introduction of the concept of the state was largely through the work of the German émigré Francis Lieber, beginning about the time that his acquaintance, Alex de Tocqueville, visited ...