“Order Maker and Order Taker”: Renewing the IR-APD Research Tradition

• In Event: New Directions in International Relations and American Political Development

Abstract

American political life since at least the Great Recession highlights the mutually reinforcing connections between the U.S.’s international position and its domestic political dynamics. A variety of political attitudes, behaviors, and institutional processes commonly studied in American Politics have been credibly linked to trends outside the U.S. Recent developments, underscored foremost by increasing security and economic competition between the U.S. and China, signal the promise of revitalizing an earlier IR-APD research tradition that fruitfully considered American governance and the state as shaped by international forces. To understand how the U.S. is responding to a changing international environment we argue that a long-term, historically-attuned lens is critical. We believe that adopting a historically grounded analytical framework will provide greater insight into the interaction of the American political system and international politics, sensitize the policy community to longer-term consequences of great power competition, and ultimately foster greater public engagement in the foreign policy process. From this vantage point, scholars and policy makers should consider things like how federal investments intended to foster geopolitical competitiveness–in the semiconductor, green, or defense industries–could reorder domestic political coalitions or incentivize unintended paths of action. A historically minded approach to analyzing U.S. competitiveness would foreground the tendency for major domestic reforms to create new interests that in turn shape future patterns of contestation. We support our argument by tracing the emergence and influence of the “China challenge” as a major impetus behind U.S. economic and political change over the past decade.

Authors

• Samuel Gerstle, Boston University

• Matthew Conklin, University of Chicago