ABSTRACT
Revisionism' over the nationalization thesis began in the late 1960s. In the United States this was associated with the work of Burnham, who argued for the importance of the time dimension and social contexts in explaining political participation and partisan support. This chapter is intended to fulfill three objectives: first, it describes the nationalization thesis, secondly, it reviews the evidence from studies in Europe and North America against nationalization, and thirdly, it describes and evaluates various approaches to explain geographical variation in political behavior. There are several problems with this approach. The first is that dealignment presupposes that there was a set of national partisan alignments based on national class division that could be dealigned. They all fail to meet the criteria of conceptual adequacy and the empirical requirements demonstrated in the chapter. It also discusses the depth of prejudice against the concept of place in modern social science.
