Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics - and thus they question stylized facts about America's political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic
ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time - and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance?

Featuring contributions from leading academics in the field, The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development provides an authoritative and accessible analysis of the study of American political development.

About the Author:
Richard Valelly is Claude C. Smith '14 Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, and author of American Politics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2013), the multiple prize-winning The Two Reconstructions: The Stuggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago, 2004), and Radicalism in the States: The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the American Political Economy (Chicago, 1989).

Suzanne Mettler is the Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University. Her recent books include Degrees of Inequality: How Higher Education Politics Sabotaged the American Dream, and The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Programs Undermine American Democracy. She has been the recipient of the Derthick Award for Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism In New Deal Public Policy (Cornell, 1998) that has made an enduring contribution to the study of federalism, the Greenstone prize of the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association (APSA), and on two occasions, the APSA's Kammerer Award for the best book on US national policy.

Robert C. Lieberman is Provost and Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University and the author of Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Harvard, 1998), which won the 1999 Lionel Trilling Award among other prizes, and Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, 2005).