Politics as a Process Structured in Space and Time

Abstract

This paper argues for the value of seeing politics as a process that is structured across space and time. A brief review of recent debates about redistribution illustrates the importance of structural features of politics but the limits of Schumpeterian models based on cross-sectional time series estimations that ascribe major outcomes to a small number of variables operating seamlessly across space and time. As an alternative, the viability of historical institutionalism is challenged by a second wave of work that sees institutions as instruments in the hands of actors and institutional transformation as the consequence of continuous incremental change. However, I argue that the core insight of this second wave, which is to see institutions as the product of social coalitions, is compatible with the view that history is structured into critical junctures and periods of stability, characterized by different types of politics, and opens up significant issues about how the politics of these periods are related. In addition to forming lists of causal variables, there is much to be gained by refining our overarching models of politics that focus on interactions among those variables and how they are structured over space and time.