Stephen Skowronek, Pelatiah Perit Professor at Yale University and an expert in American political development, discusses his book on constitutional resilience. He argues that while American democracy has evolved through adaptability, this has created a paradox where greater inclusion can undermine constitutional stability. Skowronek explores historical governance shifts, the role of auxiliary institutions, and the intensified political conflicts stemming from these changes. He emphasizes the need for new unifying mechanisms to address ongoing societal challenges.
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insights INSIGHT
Adaptation As Stabilizing Reset
Adaptations reset and stabilize the political system rather than overturn it entirely.
The Constitution is adaptive only when participants accept a new arrangement and buy into it.
insights INSIGHT
Democratization’s Paradoxical Strain
Democratization expanded constitutional scope but eroded its capacity to reestablish firm footing.
Full inclusion paradoxically makes institutional settlement and stabilization harder to achieve.
insights INSIGHT
Auxiliaries Kept Democracy Workable
Auxiliaries like parties and administration managed conflicts created by expanding inclusion.
These extra-constitutional devices compensated for relaxed formal constraints and preserved governability.
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Has American democracy outstripped its constitutional accommodations? Faith in the resilience and adaptability of the US Constitution rests on a long history of finding new ways to make the system work. In The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience(University of Chicago Press, 2025), political scientist Stephen Skowronek examines the rearrangements that regenerated the American government in the past and brings that experience to bear on our current predicament. He shows how a constitution framed in writing some 230 years ago can run into serious difficulties directly related to its long and impressive history of adaptation. Skowronek connects questions about the Constitution’s adaptability to the challenges of democratization. For most of American history, serial rearrangements of constitutional relationships widened the government’s purview as a national democracy without giving either nationalism or democracy free rein. Skowronek argues that the politics of adaptation shifted fundamentally with the “Rights Revolution” of the 1960s and `70s when American national democracy approached the inclusion of all its citizens on equal footing. Since then, power and authority have been reconfigured in ways that have steadily magnified conflicts over the essentials of good order. Conservatives aim to dismantle a Constitution that progressives are intent on building upon, and the consensus necessary for a constitutional democracy to function effectively has all but evaporated. No longer a socially bound framework for national action, the Constitution has become an abstract matrix of possibilities, a disembodied opportunity structure open to starkly different, mutually unacceptable futures. Rather than being liberated by this unbound Constitution, the American people now appear entrapped by it. Is it possible that the development of American democracy has exhausted the adaptive capacities of the Constitution? A timely reminder that constitutional democracies do not survive on faith alone, The Adaptability Paradox is a sober appraisal of the unfamiliar ground on which we now tread.
Professor Stephen Skowronek is Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political Science and Professor in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. He is the author of many books on American Political Development, the presidency, and the administrative state.
Dr Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
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