Racial Orders in American Political Development

Abstract

American political science has long struggled to deal adequately with issues of race. Many studies inaccurately treat their topics as unrelated to race. Many studies of racial issues lack clear theoretical accounts of the relationships of race and politics. Drawing on arguments in the American political development literature, this essay argues for analyzing race, and American politics more broadly, in terms of two evolving, competing “racial institutional orders”: a “white supremacist” order and an “egalitarian transformative” order. This conceptual framework can synthesize and unify many arguments about race and politics that political scientists have advanced, and it can also serve to highlight the role of race in political developments that leading scholars have analyzed without attention to race. The argument here suggests that no analysis of American politics is likely to be adequate unless the impact of these racial orders is explicitly considered or their disregard explained.