APD from a Methodological Point of View

ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism. Thus the universalist ideological character of American nationalist meant that it was open to anyone who willed to become an American.53 How should one investigate the truth of this proposition? Smith’s approach is to construct within-country cases. It is perhaps already apparent to readers that there are many exceptions to Gleason’s thesis – that is, cases of would-be Americans who were excluded from the political community by virtue of their ascriptive characteristics (religion, ethnicity, race, sex, et al.). Does this mean that Gleason is wrong? One quickly encounters the half-empty/half-full quagmire that is characteristic of this topic. Those of a more centrist political bent like Gleason focus on cases of inclusion; those of a more critical bent accentuate cases of exclusion and exploitation. The argument has raged since the 1960s. Indeed, this debate bears striking resemblance to older debates over whether conflict or consensus characterizes American history, or whether the United States is (really) democratic.54 All of these questions are matters of degree, and matters of degree cannot be settled unless we have a baseline, a metric, upon which to judge variation. Limited to within-country evidence, we are at sea in a vast tumult of facts and easily redefined concepts. But with other country-cases at our disposal we have comparative reference-points that can settle (or at least provide ground for settling) such longstanding issues. It is simply not meaningful to say that the United States is liberal or illiberal unless one has a set of countries in mind that are more, or less, liberal. Indeed, Gleason’s perspective seems eminently defensible if judged against the backdrop of European countries, particularly those like Germany, which have defined citizenship in explicitly racial terms. It is not my objective to pose a solution to this vast question; rather, I should like to point the way to a method by which such a solution might be obtained. The initial step, it seems to me, is to exploit variation across units (defined by reference to an author’s principal thesis), not simply within the primary unit of interest. More broadly, APD’s methodological difficulties can be traced to its overweening ambition. None of our three authors, in common with most of their APD brethren (myself included), seems able to resist the big picture. We wish to say something about the United States, even though our primary evidence relates to intra-country variation. By contrast, scholars in most other subfields of American politics – e.g., Congress, the presidency, the judiciary, political behavior, parties, and so forth – are usually less ambitious. If an author intends to explain only variation in congressional behavior over time, or variation among different committees at the same point in time, one is not obliged to study the Bundestag. Of course, implicit in much work focused on American politics is the presumption that one is elucidating general truths – applicable everywhere and always. In this respect, traditional Americanists are on equally shaky methodological ground. For the theoretically ambitious, there is no easy way around the across-unit/within-unit dilemma. Sometimes, relevant crossnational reference-points can be integrated easily through secondary literature on the topic (i.e., without explicit study by the author). In other circumstances, the writer may undertake a brief study of these comparative cases on her own (in a comparative chapter of an otherwise U.S.-centered APD FROM A METHODOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW 99 52. What does the multiple-traditions thesis mean, in the absence of crossnational analysis? Can we examine a topic simply by reference to a definition, or to standard understandings? This does not seem like a very sound way of going about business. To be sure, if it is asserted that event X never occurred, and we can find evidence of its occurrence, we shall not need to resort to an extensive examination of other cases. But most academic disputes and, a fortiori, most disputes over American political culture, are not this simple. They hinge on delicate questions of definition and classification, e.g., what is liberalism, and is X properly understood as an example of it? These are precisely the sort of questions of judgment that require comparative cases. 53. Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization,” 62–63 (qtd. in Smith, Civil Ideals, 14–15). Following this passage – and, indeed, throughout the rest of the essay – Gleason qualifies the decisive quality of the universalist American ideology: About eight out of ten white Americans were actually of British derivation in 1790, and there was a latent predisposition toward an ethnically defined concept of nationality. Indeed, universalism had its limits from the beginning, because it did not include either blacks or Indians, and in time other racial and cultural groups were regarded as falling outside the range of American nationality. Yet such exclusiveness ran contrary to the logic of the defining principles, and the official commitment to those principles has worked historically to overcome exclusions and to make the practical boundaries of American identity more congruent with its theoretical universalism.