To many observers across the political spectrum, American democracy appears under threat. What does the Trump presidency portend for American politics? How much confidence should we have in the capacity of American institutions to withstand this threat? We argue that understanding what is uniquely threatening to democracy requires looking beyond the particulars of Trump and his presidency. Instead, it demands a historical and comparative perspective on American politics. Drawing on insights from the fields of comparative politics and American political development, we argue that Trump’s election represents the intersection of three streams in American politics: polarized two-party presidentialism; a polity fundamentally divided over membership and status in the political community, in ways structured by race and economic inequality; and the erosion of democratic norms. The current political circumstance threatens the American democratic order because of the interactive effects of institutions, identity, and norm-breaking.

The making of the Reed Rules – the source of today's U.S. House procedure – has often been studied, yet no one has previously noticed the extent to which they originated in a today forgotten Republican plan to federally regulate Southern House elections. This article shows how and why the Reed Rules and federal election regulation became fused in the 51st Congress. Republican members of the House not only had preferences over the internal governance of the House; they also simultaneously had preferences over the structure of the party system. In following this article's analysis of the linkage between the Reed Rules and the strategy of party conflict in the Gilded Age one comes to better appreciate the role of party building as a source of congressional development.

Over a career that spans the late 1960s to the present, APSAPresident Ira Katznelson has mounted a long and fruitfulinterrogation of political liberalism in the United States andEurope—asking for definition of its many forms, their origins, theirstrengths and weaknesses, and what kinds there can be. In doing suchwork, Katznelson has reframed several consequential phenomena andissues. They include African-American political incorporation overthe course of the 20th century and the role of partisanstrategy and policy design (as opposed to racial attitudes amongWhites) in structuring such incorporation, the roots of Americanexceptionalism in the lived experience of “class,” and, mostrecently, the surprising extent to which rational choice andhistorical institutionalism conceptually overlap.