What is the Canon in American Politics? Analyses of Core Graduate Syllabi

Many core graduate-level seminars claim to expose students to their discipline’s “canon.” The contents of this canon, however, can and do differ across departments and instructors. This project employs a survey of core American politics PhD seminar syllabi at highly ranked universities to construct a systematic account of the American politics canon. Our results offer valuable insights into the topics and literature that political scientists consider important and on which future scholars base their work. Our article breaks down the literature into a comprehensive list of topics and subtopics, which allows us to identify both an overall field canon and one for each topic, to assess whether some topics receive more attention than others, and to identify which topics are most clearly defined. We explore the extent to which diverse perspectives and methods are (or are not) taught to young scholars, and, although we identify sets of frequently assigned readings and authors within each topic, we also find considerable variation between seminars.     

Factors Underlying the Growth of Local Government in the 19th Century United States

Early in the 19th century local governmentsspent less than either the federal or stategovernments. By the end of the 19thcentury local governments spent more thanthe federal and state governments combined. This growth is obviously related to thegrowth of cities, but cities continued togrow in the 20th century, while the localgovernment share of total governmentexpenditures fell, so the growth of citiescannot be the complete answer. Anexamination of expenditures and revenues intwo cities – Boston and Baltimore –suggests that no one component ofexpenditures was responsible for increasesin total spending. Rather, it appears thatthe primary causal factor was revenuegrowth. Cities rely heavily on propertytaxes, and the increasing value of taxableproperty allowed cities to raise increasingamounts of revenue, leading to increasedgovernment spending.     

The Role of Gender in Adolescent Identity and Intimacy Decisions

This study explored the relative importance of identity and intimacy in male and female adolescent decisions. One hundred twenty adolescents responded to 16 identity/intimacy dilemmas. Females had higher identity (and lower intimacy) scores than males. Identity scores were higher in scenarios with female protagonists. A content analysis of decision explanations showed females gave more explanations than males with identity and intimacy fused. Implications for theories of psychosocial development are discussed.