The Formation of the American Political Field, 1872-1928

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Sociology and Computational Social Science

Abstract

This article maps the formation of the American political field in the critical period between 1872 and 1928 in a field theoretic political economy perspective. We first elaborate a Bourdieusian conception of the political field as a social space formed linguistically via “officialization.” We then locate the political field relative to its counterparts, with emphasis on Bourdieu’s gravitational conception of the economic field. We put the resulting field-theoretic political economy perspective to work in a computational analysis of American political field formation between 1872 and 1928. Using samples drawn from over 20 million pages of historical newspapers we analyze partisan-political language in presidential election years in a topographical, historical, relational, and person-centered mode. The analysis moves in two steps. First, we develop a measure of semantic breadth and contraction of the American political field over the whole period that suggests a general pattern of field expansion, and then contraction or consolidation, after 1916. After considering interpretive problems raised by semantic analysis, we present a second analysis that inductively identifies clusters of person-years and topics. Using multiple correspondence analysis, we map the structure, boundaries, directions, and centers of gravity in officialized political language, and interpret our results by drawing on extant historical scholarship. Taken together, the analytical picture is one of a consolidating political field that entered into a period of heightened volatility in the late 1910s, and picked up steam in the 1920s. Patterns are consistent with Bourdieu’s conception of capitalism as a gravitational field.

Authors

• Stephanie L. Mudge, University of California-Davis

• Shahar Zach, University of California-Davis