Read the docs:

The OrderedDict constructor and update() method both accept keyword arguments, but their order is lost because Python’s function call semantics pass-in keyword arguments using a regular unordered dictionary.

You must pass the input as a sequence of tuples (or an existing ordered dict type) to preserve ordering.

That is because the keyword arguments (variable = value, ) that you pass will be consolidated into a Python dictionary first. And Python dictionaries are unordered. kwds will be that dictionary as you can see in the Init signature.

Init signature: OrderedDict(self, *args, **kwds)

This is how the OrderedDict will be initialized internally when you pass the keyword arguments:

for key, value in kwds.items():
   self[key] = value

Since kwds is unordered, you will get an unordered OrderedDict.

You may create the ordered dict like so:

from collections import OrderedDict
from string import ascii_lowercase

d = OrderedDict()
for a,b in enumerate(ascii_lowercase[:3], 1):
    d[b] = a

Or:

n=3
d = OrderedDict(zip(ascii_lowercase[:n], range(1,n+1))) 
print d 

Output:

OrderedDict([('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3)])

It's weird that it hasn't been mentioned already but the representation of OrderedDict shows you how to create it so that the order is kept:

OrderedDict([('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3)])

it's not meant as an obstacle that the representation is like that - it's because that representation can be used to create an identical ordered OrderedDict.

Just for completeness (it has been mentioned already), the order is lost because OrderedDict(a=1, b=2, c=3) catches these arguments as **kwargs, which is a normal unordered-dict. At least until python 3.6 came along and made the promise that the order of the kwargs will be kept when you pass it in as you did:

What’s New In Python 3.6

PEP 468: Preserving Keyword Argument Order

**kwargs in a function signature is now guaranteed to be an insertion-order-preserving mapping.

You can create the desired mapping by using sorted():

dict = {"a":"some_value", "b":"other_value", "c":"foo"}
ordered = OrderedDict(sorted(dict.items(), key=lambda t: t[0]))

This sorts the items prior to passing them to the OrderedDict constructor.

The key= section sets the sorting, and t[0] sorts by the dictionary key.