The 'New Political History' and Narratives of Democratic Progress in Antebellum America

Jeffrey Selinger, Bowdoin College

The interdisciplinary project heralded under the banner of ‘American Political Development’ was preceded by a different sort of conversation between political scientists and historians—one that focused on the role political parties played in advancing democratic institutions in the U.S. This emphasis on the connection between parties and democratic change was developed by a group of historians who supported a disciplinary movement known as the ‘New Political History.’ This paper will take a closer look at how the New Political Historians and their interlocutors in political science portrayed processes of democratization and party development in the early 19th century and it will assess the fruits of their interdisciplinary conversation. The paper will focus in particular on how these scholars leveraged assumptions about the behavior and performance of competitive parties to reinforce claims made by mid-century ‘Consensus’ historians famous for their accounts of liberal democratic exceptionalism in America. Historians working in the tradition of the New Political History, I find, employed a variety of conceptual and empirical strategies that compartmentalized historical trends which might have been read to undercut exceptionalist narratives of democratic development. Their accounts of 19th century party development over-emphasized the stability-inducing effects of party competition and, in so doing, invited scholars of American political parties to avert their eyes away from disintegrative tendencies inherent in representative systems of government. In concluding reflections on the broader significance of this pattern, I suggest that recent work by scholars of party development offers important correctives to some of the conceptual ambiguities that were paradigmatic of a past generation of interdisciplinary scholarship.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 262. Theorizing the political