10.6092/issn.2611-2752/14599
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2611-2752
14599
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Marta Gara
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USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics
Social Change and Political Representation in the Long Cycles of American History
Text.Serial.Journal
https://usabroad.unibo.it/
5
Editorial
2022-04-07
2022-03-18
2022-04-07
2022-04-07
I-III
USAbroad
Marta Gara
2022/04/07
10.6092/issn.2611-2752/14599
I
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano
2611-2752
en
III
Social Change and Political Representation in the Long Cycles of American History
https://usabroad.unibo.it/article/download/14599/14071
5
Essays                                                      USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics. Vol. 5 (2022)
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/14599                                                                    ISSN 2611-2752




                     Social Change and Political Representation
                         in the Long Cycles of American History

                                                        Marta Gara*

                                                    Published: April 7, 2022




    In an op-ed article published in the New York Times in January 2021, opinion columnist Michelle
Goldberg wondered whether Joe Biden’s presidency would be the first post-Reagan presidency. Ac-
cording to a theory that divides American political history into cycles or “political times,” long-term
political regimes in the United States are based on shared beliefs that change over time after exhausting
their strength.1 In this theoretical approach, presidents can either shape their action to “reconstruct”
a political order or be “preemptive” of a new one. Even though the answer is still premature, in the
wake of the Biden-Harris Administration several aspects concurred to the idea that a new political
regime was already under construction, such as seismic economic changes due to the Covid-19 pan-
demic, realignments in the country’s political map, cultural and social clashes over the racial, gender
and class makeup of the country and the potential impact of huge federal relief programs, in antithe-
sis with Reagan’s small-government mantra. Drawing upon these critical adjustments, the call for
our fifth monographic issue invites reflection on the “long cycles” of American history from a broad
perspective. What can we learn about the next chapter of American history by looking back at past
developments and conflicts in US society, culture, and politics?
    The result is a multidisciplinary canvas, offering scholars in the humanities and social sciences
many interconnected issues to be further developed, both in terms of research topics and method-
ologies. It is worthwhile to draw two relevant trajectories here. First, as the present issue shows, the
paradigm of “long cycles” has proved to be a significant model for questioning the key features of
American democracy, such as citizenship, presidential leadership, populism and religious engage-
ment in politics. In particular, because of their normative and comparative approach, theories based
on political time periods are likely to disclose their analytical potential when used to investigate frac-
tures in the democratic consensus. Indeed, these theories put forward long-standing projections and
also feed the analysis with a number of variables over time to be taken into account, encouraging a
change of perspective. This permits an explanation of the second instance the articles in this issue
point to, that is, the need for interdisciplinarity in approaching democratic challenges. The question


*    Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano (Italy);  marta.gara@unicatt.it

1.   Stephen Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal (Lawrence, KS: Kansas University Press,
     2008).



Copyright © 2022 Marta Gara                                                                                                      I
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.
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Social Change and Political Representation                                                             USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




goes far beyond the cross-disciplinarity inherent in the methodology of American Political Develop-
ment, the subfield of political science to which Skowronek’s seminal work belongs. As Bevitori and
Marchi’s essay demonstrates, the theoretical framework of historical cycles may even be an effective
instrument in investigating political discourse through a proper linguistic approach that is based on
quantitative and qualitative analysis. Moreover, the other essays assert that models of political times
can enhance research in the fields and subfields of Cultural Studies, Comparative Politics, Public Law
and Presidential Studies.
    The study of social change and political representation in the “long cycles” of American history
confirms that historiographical research and methodology can be flexible enough to open up a sub-
stantial dialogue with other fields in the humanities, as well as social and political sciences. Moreover,
our fifth issue provides evidence that a historical perspective can fruitfully address the current cru-
cibles of the American democracy. In this regard, we join the international scholarly endeavor which
is attempting to tackle the most recent disruptive novelties concerning political language, electoral
representation and illiberal politics, in the United States and beyond. In response to the twenty-first
century’s democratic crisis around the world, the scientific community has been strongly commit-
ted to multidisciplinary research regarding democratic innovations, civil society organization and
electoral behavior. These topics have mainly attracted the interest of political scientists and sociol-
ogists who frequently integrate their findings in collaborative projects.2 Nonetheless, we contend
that this research could also benefit from an analysis of the past provided by historical scholarship
since it allows grounding inferences into a specific socio-political context, considering the impact of
the historical thickness. Essentially, that’s what Historical sociology has already pursued for decades,
especially when dealing with democratic innovations such as participatory and deliberative democ-
racy.3 To mention another exemplary field, a similar research design is also well-established in Social
Movement Studies, including archival inquiry along with sociological and political analysis of ongoing
collective actions.4 Against the background of this wide academic debate, we believe that the essays
collected in this issue hint at the expanding efficacy of historiography in cross-fertilization with other
disciplines, based on a common interest in the past and present of US democracy.
    Cinzia Bevitori and Anna Marchi’s “Representations of citizens/hip in 230 years of American his-
tory. A diachronic corpus-assisted approach” uses” the computational and qualitative analysis of The
State of the Union Diachronic Corpus (1790–2020) in order to track the pace of change in presidential
discourse on national citizenship. In addition, the aggregation of the authors’ findings in historical
cycles offers a deeper interpretation of the main trends of social change and stability in American
history. Therefore, the corpus-assisted inquiry into presidential language highlights rhetorical con-
structs that are hidden to the naked-eye, which could respond to non-linguistic research focused on
the relationship between citizenship and political discourse.
    The theory of cyclical times elaborated by Philippe S. Gorsky in order to describe the political
engagement of Christian conservatives in American history is applied in Chiara Migliori’s analysis of
the political stance of the 46th US President as a Christian leader. In “ ‘A Robin Hood Taking Over the
Empire’: Donald Trump’s Revival Introduction,” Migliori explores the strong alliance between Trump
and his constituency of white Christian conservatives, looking at past and present dynamics. As the
evangelical involvement in politics has followed recurrent cycles of growth and decline, especially
during the twentieth century, Trump’s figure not only led the last revival but was also able to drastically
reshape the relationship between religion and politics.
    In “The ‘Second Wave’ of Political Time Scholarship—and Beyond!,” Curt Nichols offers a criti-
cal review of the literature influenced by Skowronek’s book, The Politics that Presidents Make. Nichols
finds out that the innovative model of political regimes has recently affected very different spheres of


2.   See, for instance, Laurence Bherer, José Luis Fernández-Martínez, Patricia García Espín and Manuel Jiménez Sánchez,
     “The promise for democratic deepening: the effects of participatory processes in the interaction between civil society and
     local governments,” Journal of Civil Society, 12(2016): 344–363.

3.   Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society, trans.
     Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1989).

4.   For a broad systematization of this approach, see Sidney G. Tarrow, Power in Movement. Social Movements and Contentious
     Politics (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011).



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/14599                                                                                   II
Social Change and Political Representation                                                  USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




interest as well as international studies, including the comparative research of institutionalized lead-
ership in non-Western countries, the analysis of judicial power and the development of presidential
discourse. Furthermore, the application of Skowronek’s theory across different areas has led to en-
large and modify the theoretical implications of the theory itself.
    In the column Bringing History Back into Social and Political Sciences, Mattia Diletti supports the use
of historical perspective in inquiring populism and citizens’ disengagement in Western democracies.
After evaluating some popular stances in the academic and public debate, Diletti argues that it is time
for political and social sciences to consider a comparative approach in American and European history
in order to identify the uniqueness of each democratic system and its specific issues.
    Through the broad scope of this issue, we can observe that by looking back at the past politi-
cal regimes in the United States we have been led to foster inquiries far beyond American history.
Once again, the present-day global ecosystem requires that scholars in humanities and social sciences
reimagine area studies and research questions.




Marta Gara – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano (Italy)
 marta.gara@unicatt.it
Marta Gara holds a Ph.D. in Institutions and Politics from Catholic University of Sacred Heart of Milan, Italy. She
was William P. Heidrich Fellow at University of Michigan and Visiting Research Scholar at Georgetown University
in Washington, DC. Her main research interests are theory and practice of participatory democracy, American
political development and post-1945 social movements.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/14599                                                                     III
