| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer, editors. The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 421. Cloth $65.00, paper $19.95.
Even in the marketplace of ideas, products sell better when they are "new" and "improved." With essays by emerging and established academic stars and a helping of hyperbole, the editors of this book declare that a revitalized political history, equipped with analytical tools from the social sciences, is taking the field in new directions. More interested in politics than presidents, in contingency and conflict than consensus, and in voters, interest groups, and institutions than elites, political historians in this volume range across two centuries, focusing on the nature of political participation and suspicion of the state.	1
Most of the contributors are "new institutionalists." Events, they argue, are not always driven by underlying socioeconomic forces or external crises. Institutions, which have considerable autonomy, can bring about or subvert change. This approach can illuminate the past. But as they swing the pendulum, the "new institutionalists" also exhibit a tendency to discount or ignore the capacity of those forces to push and pinch, to blow around or through things that get in their way.	. . .

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