Contents:
Topic 1. American Exceptionalism (1-11)
Topic 15. Mass Media (12-22)
Topic 9. Interest Groups (22-31)
Topic 4. The Electoral System and Voting Behaviour (31-42)
Topic 10. The Federal Courts (42-52)
Topic 1. American Exceptionalism
American exceptionalism is the belief that there is something unique
about the United States relative to other nations.
According to Ceaser (2012), American exceptionalism could be taken to
mean that there is something empirically distinct about America or
something normatively special about America. Further, this latter claim of
specialness may be taken to refer either to the possession of a certain
quality or the embrace of a certain duty or mission.
The first perspective, about empirical distinctiveness, has come under
scrutiny in recent years. According to Baldwin (2009), all contemporary
discussion of American exceptionalism – whether proudly asserted by US
citizens or disparagingly critiqued by Europeans – is nothing more than
‘the narcissism of minor differences.’ Distinctions between America and
Europe are typically no greater, and often smaller, than distinctions
between European nations and, with a few exceptions, the US fits into the
span of all social, economic and policy measures for which comparative
data exists. When truly studying the data, the US is only exceptional when
it comes to murder and incarceration rates, relative poverty rates, the
strength of civil society, the survival of the death penalty, some aspects of
religious belief.
You could formulate an exceptionalist argument for almost any Western
European nation, depending on the subject.
Socialism and Trade Unions
The first sustained formulation of American exceptionalism, advanced by
Werner Sombart (1906), focused on the absence of a successful labour
party in the United States. In contrast to all other advanced capitalist
countries, where labour-based parties emerged in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the American experience was, in this respect,
considered genuinely exceptional.
Early explanations emphasized distinctive social conditions: the absence
of a feudal past and the resulting Lockean liberal consensus, relatively
high standards of living, high rates of social and geographic mobility,
,ethnic and racial diversity, and the early achievement of universal white
manhood suffrage, which allegedly entrenched partisan rather than class
loyalties. American workers, on this view, simply responded to
industrialization differently from their class-conscious European
counterparts.
Revisionist scholarship challenges this empirical foundation. American
workers in the late nineteenth century were no less class-conscious than
European workers: at its peak in 1886 union density in the US may well
have exceeded Britain, and the American Socialist Party won six percent
of the presidential vote in 1912. Archer (2007) further argues that
Australia is a more appropriate comparator than older European societies:
a similarly prosperous, racially divided liberal democracy with early male
suffrage and even higher worker wages, yet it nonetheless developed a
labour party. The supposedly distinctive American conditions therefore
cannot explain the outcome.
What was genuinely exceptional, Archer argued, was the level of employer
hostility and state repression. Unlike employers elsewhere – who often
relied on craft unions to regulate wages - American firms, with their direct
control over the shopfloor, had little incentive to accommodate unions and
actively resisted collective bargaining. Furthermore, politically ambitious,
inclusive unions were systematically dismantled by government action,
and the independent US judiciary routinely nullified pro-labour legislation
through anti-union injunctions. After repeated judicial defeats, labour
leaders abandoned political action and adopted an anti-statist ideology.
Finally, religious sectarianism compounded the problem, with union
leaders fearing that a labour party would import Catholic-Protestant and
liturgical-evangelical divisions into worker solidarity.
Further, how relevant really is this finding? On contemporary measures
the US is not an outlier: union membership is within the European span
and higher than in France, and proportionately more American workers
report active union involvement than in France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland,
or Germany (Baldwin, 2009).
Welfare State
Unlike the case of socialism, the US is genuinely exceptional when it
comes to welfare. It is the only advanced industrial democracy – aside
from South Africa – without some form of universal national health
insurance, and it maintains a far less generous welfare state than other
developed countries, with lower social spending, weaker income
redistribution, and more limited protections against illness,
unemployment, and poverty.
,One reason is institutional. The US operates under an eighteenth-century
constitution designed by property-owning elites determined to prevent
state expropriation of their wealth. Its nonproportional electoral system,
strong presidency, extensive checks and balances, powerful Senate, and
property-protecting Supreme Court make it exceptionally difficult for
redistributive coalitions to translate popular support into policy outcomes.
Yet this alone cannot explain American exceptionalism: in 1890 most
European countries had political institutions that were far more
conservative than those of the United States. The question, therefore, is
why American conservatives were able to preserve eighteenth-century
institutions while their European counterparts were not.
Glaeser (2004) argues geography provides the answer. America's
geographic isolation insulated it from existential foreign threats and
devastating wars on its own soil. In Europe, mass warfare – especially
after WWI – generated grievances, poverty, and a fertile ground for
Socialist and Communist parties to establish themselves. This led to
constitutional rewriting under the influence of a powerful left, with
proportional representation widely adopted. American eighteenth-century
institutions, by contrast, survived intact. Glaeser finds a strong correlation
between the age of a country's political institutions and its level of social
welfare spending, making the United States an outlier precisely because
its eighteenth-century institutions survived.
Institutional explanations are reinforced by America's exceptionally high
ethnic and racial diversity, which is known to reduce support for
redistribution. Individuals are more willing to support transfers to those
they perceive as similar to themselves (Glaeser, 2004). Thus, ethnic and
racial fractionalization – due to high immigration and the legacy of slavery
- has hampered the development of a more rigorous welfare state. Welfare
states began earlier and are more extensive in nations that were most
ethnically, religiously, and socially uniform (Baldwin, 2009).
These dynamics are reinforced by distinctive beliefs about poverty.
Americans, believing they live in a socially mobile society, tend to view
the poor as lazy; Europeans are far more likely to attribute poverty to
structural forces beyond individual control (60% of Americans attribute
poverty to laziness, versus 26% of Europeans). Glaeser suggests these
beliefs are not grounded in economic reality but are themselves the
product of political outcomes: in Europe, a century of socialist influence
embedded structural explanations of inequality into education, media, and
political culture, while in the US the suppression of socialist parties
allowed an ideology of individual effort and moral responsibility to
dominate.
, Crime
American society is exceptional relative to the rest of the developed world
when it comes to the murder rate: almost twice the number of murders
per capita are committed compared to the nearest European competitors.
The United States also locks into prison a far higher percentage of its
population than any of its peers and is unrivalled among industrialized
nations when it comes to police lethality.
Underclass
Many absolute differences between the United States and Europe are
merely artefacts of aggregation that conceal the effects of a concentrated
underclass. For example, while the robbery rate in the US is relatively
high, the proportion of citizens who are victims is far lower. These
statistics reflect a violent underclass largely preying on itself, leaving the
average citizen no more likely to be robbed than in Europe. Indeed, once
America’s black underclass is removed, the US murder rate falls to
European levels. (Of course, rather than a racial marker, “black” functions
here as a proxy for the poverty and unemployment of big-city ghettos).
Looking at social outcomes more broadly, child poverty rates, though
exceptionally high in the aggregate, fall below British, Italian, and Spanish
levels when figures for whites alone are considered. For Baldwin (2009),
the presence of this ethnically distinct underclass is arguably the main
difference between the United States and Europe. What most clearly sets
America apart is not an inherent aversion to equality or social provision,
but the unresolved legacy of slavery and its tragic modern consequence of
a ghettoized and racially identifiable underclass.
Religion
The United States is a clear statistical outlier among advanced industrial
societies in the salience of religious belief. Comparative evidence from the
World Values Survey shows that while advanced industrial societies
typically experience declining religiosity and increasing secular-rational
values, the United States has not followed this trajectory (Inglehart and
Baker 2000). In fact, since the 1981 survey, the US showed a slight
decrease in these secular-rational values.
Furthermore, what is more remarkable, is how religion play such a role in
shaping cultural issue attitudes. In most affluent democracies, value
conflict takes the form predicted by postmaterialist theory: middle-class
citizens move left on cultural issues such as environmentalism and gender
equality, while working-class voters retain more materialist priorities. In
the United States, by contrast, progressive postmaterialist influences have
triggered a countermovement not from working-class materialists but
Topic 1. American Exceptionalism (1-11)
Topic 15. Mass Media (12-22)
Topic 9. Interest Groups (22-31)
Topic 4. The Electoral System and Voting Behaviour (31-42)
Topic 10. The Federal Courts (42-52)
Topic 1. American Exceptionalism
American exceptionalism is the belief that there is something unique
about the United States relative to other nations.
According to Ceaser (2012), American exceptionalism could be taken to
mean that there is something empirically distinct about America or
something normatively special about America. Further, this latter claim of
specialness may be taken to refer either to the possession of a certain
quality or the embrace of a certain duty or mission.
The first perspective, about empirical distinctiveness, has come under
scrutiny in recent years. According to Baldwin (2009), all contemporary
discussion of American exceptionalism – whether proudly asserted by US
citizens or disparagingly critiqued by Europeans – is nothing more than
‘the narcissism of minor differences.’ Distinctions between America and
Europe are typically no greater, and often smaller, than distinctions
between European nations and, with a few exceptions, the US fits into the
span of all social, economic and policy measures for which comparative
data exists. When truly studying the data, the US is only exceptional when
it comes to murder and incarceration rates, relative poverty rates, the
strength of civil society, the survival of the death penalty, some aspects of
religious belief.
You could formulate an exceptionalist argument for almost any Western
European nation, depending on the subject.
Socialism and Trade Unions
The first sustained formulation of American exceptionalism, advanced by
Werner Sombart (1906), focused on the absence of a successful labour
party in the United States. In contrast to all other advanced capitalist
countries, where labour-based parties emerged in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the American experience was, in this respect,
considered genuinely exceptional.
Early explanations emphasized distinctive social conditions: the absence
of a feudal past and the resulting Lockean liberal consensus, relatively
high standards of living, high rates of social and geographic mobility,
,ethnic and racial diversity, and the early achievement of universal white
manhood suffrage, which allegedly entrenched partisan rather than class
loyalties. American workers, on this view, simply responded to
industrialization differently from their class-conscious European
counterparts.
Revisionist scholarship challenges this empirical foundation. American
workers in the late nineteenth century were no less class-conscious than
European workers: at its peak in 1886 union density in the US may well
have exceeded Britain, and the American Socialist Party won six percent
of the presidential vote in 1912. Archer (2007) further argues that
Australia is a more appropriate comparator than older European societies:
a similarly prosperous, racially divided liberal democracy with early male
suffrage and even higher worker wages, yet it nonetheless developed a
labour party. The supposedly distinctive American conditions therefore
cannot explain the outcome.
What was genuinely exceptional, Archer argued, was the level of employer
hostility and state repression. Unlike employers elsewhere – who often
relied on craft unions to regulate wages - American firms, with their direct
control over the shopfloor, had little incentive to accommodate unions and
actively resisted collective bargaining. Furthermore, politically ambitious,
inclusive unions were systematically dismantled by government action,
and the independent US judiciary routinely nullified pro-labour legislation
through anti-union injunctions. After repeated judicial defeats, labour
leaders abandoned political action and adopted an anti-statist ideology.
Finally, religious sectarianism compounded the problem, with union
leaders fearing that a labour party would import Catholic-Protestant and
liturgical-evangelical divisions into worker solidarity.
Further, how relevant really is this finding? On contemporary measures
the US is not an outlier: union membership is within the European span
and higher than in France, and proportionately more American workers
report active union involvement than in France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland,
or Germany (Baldwin, 2009).
Welfare State
Unlike the case of socialism, the US is genuinely exceptional when it
comes to welfare. It is the only advanced industrial democracy – aside
from South Africa – without some form of universal national health
insurance, and it maintains a far less generous welfare state than other
developed countries, with lower social spending, weaker income
redistribution, and more limited protections against illness,
unemployment, and poverty.
,One reason is institutional. The US operates under an eighteenth-century
constitution designed by property-owning elites determined to prevent
state expropriation of their wealth. Its nonproportional electoral system,
strong presidency, extensive checks and balances, powerful Senate, and
property-protecting Supreme Court make it exceptionally difficult for
redistributive coalitions to translate popular support into policy outcomes.
Yet this alone cannot explain American exceptionalism: in 1890 most
European countries had political institutions that were far more
conservative than those of the United States. The question, therefore, is
why American conservatives were able to preserve eighteenth-century
institutions while their European counterparts were not.
Glaeser (2004) argues geography provides the answer. America's
geographic isolation insulated it from existential foreign threats and
devastating wars on its own soil. In Europe, mass warfare – especially
after WWI – generated grievances, poverty, and a fertile ground for
Socialist and Communist parties to establish themselves. This led to
constitutional rewriting under the influence of a powerful left, with
proportional representation widely adopted. American eighteenth-century
institutions, by contrast, survived intact. Glaeser finds a strong correlation
between the age of a country's political institutions and its level of social
welfare spending, making the United States an outlier precisely because
its eighteenth-century institutions survived.
Institutional explanations are reinforced by America's exceptionally high
ethnic and racial diversity, which is known to reduce support for
redistribution. Individuals are more willing to support transfers to those
they perceive as similar to themselves (Glaeser, 2004). Thus, ethnic and
racial fractionalization – due to high immigration and the legacy of slavery
- has hampered the development of a more rigorous welfare state. Welfare
states began earlier and are more extensive in nations that were most
ethnically, religiously, and socially uniform (Baldwin, 2009).
These dynamics are reinforced by distinctive beliefs about poverty.
Americans, believing they live in a socially mobile society, tend to view
the poor as lazy; Europeans are far more likely to attribute poverty to
structural forces beyond individual control (60% of Americans attribute
poverty to laziness, versus 26% of Europeans). Glaeser suggests these
beliefs are not grounded in economic reality but are themselves the
product of political outcomes: in Europe, a century of socialist influence
embedded structural explanations of inequality into education, media, and
political culture, while in the US the suppression of socialist parties
allowed an ideology of individual effort and moral responsibility to
dominate.
, Crime
American society is exceptional relative to the rest of the developed world
when it comes to the murder rate: almost twice the number of murders
per capita are committed compared to the nearest European competitors.
The United States also locks into prison a far higher percentage of its
population than any of its peers and is unrivalled among industrialized
nations when it comes to police lethality.
Underclass
Many absolute differences between the United States and Europe are
merely artefacts of aggregation that conceal the effects of a concentrated
underclass. For example, while the robbery rate in the US is relatively
high, the proportion of citizens who are victims is far lower. These
statistics reflect a violent underclass largely preying on itself, leaving the
average citizen no more likely to be robbed than in Europe. Indeed, once
America’s black underclass is removed, the US murder rate falls to
European levels. (Of course, rather than a racial marker, “black” functions
here as a proxy for the poverty and unemployment of big-city ghettos).
Looking at social outcomes more broadly, child poverty rates, though
exceptionally high in the aggregate, fall below British, Italian, and Spanish
levels when figures for whites alone are considered. For Baldwin (2009),
the presence of this ethnically distinct underclass is arguably the main
difference between the United States and Europe. What most clearly sets
America apart is not an inherent aversion to equality or social provision,
but the unresolved legacy of slavery and its tragic modern consequence of
a ghettoized and racially identifiable underclass.
Religion
The United States is a clear statistical outlier among advanced industrial
societies in the salience of religious belief. Comparative evidence from the
World Values Survey shows that while advanced industrial societies
typically experience declining religiosity and increasing secular-rational
values, the United States has not followed this trajectory (Inglehart and
Baker 2000). In fact, since the 1981 survey, the US showed a slight
decrease in these secular-rational values.
Furthermore, what is more remarkable, is how religion play such a role in
shaping cultural issue attitudes. In most affluent democracies, value
conflict takes the form predicted by postmaterialist theory: middle-class
citizens move left on cultural issues such as environmentalism and gender
equality, while working-class voters retain more materialist priorities. In
the United States, by contrast, progressive postmaterialist influences have
triggered a countermovement not from working-class materialists but
