ABSTRACT
Political science would benefit from a more systematic study of the politics of space, analogous to recent work on the politics of time. Consider a few analyses of time: Stephen Skowroneck, like Samuel Huntington and Albert Hirschmann, has written on “the tendency for politics to cycle over broad spans of time.” Paul Pierson and Kathleen Thelen, in contrast, both analyze the linear projection of time through history, such that sequences of events, conditions at starting points or crucial junctures, and slow-moving but powerful trajectories all shape political structures and possibilities. David Mayhew, however, declares a pox on all their houses. In deconstructing the best-known Americanist claim about political change over time, electoral realignment theory, he insists that “any partitioning of electoral history into regular spans of time is likely to rub up against reality and fail” in the face of contingency, short-term strategies, and opportunistic valence issues.
