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Micropolitics in Macro Perspective: The Political History of Walter Dean Burnham

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Paul Allen Beck
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Extract

It has now been over twenty years since The American Political Science Review published “The Changing Shape of the American Political Universe” by Walter Dean Burnham (1965). This remarkably rich work is at once a study of historical variations in citizen electoral behavior, of the partisan realignment of 1896 and the realignment process in general, and of the connections between voter behavior and the patterns of American politics and public policy. It also raises fundamental epistemological issues about the relationship of micro-level and macro-level phenomena in politics—especially the inherent limitations of single-shot public opinion surveys or of a focus on a single political period in understanding the full range of possibilities for citizen involvement in a democratic political order. Unlike many scholarly works which rise meteor-like to prominence then rapidly vanish, “Changing Shape” remains at least as influential today as it was twenty years ago.

Type
Walter Dean Burnham and the Dynamics of American Politics
Information
Social Science History , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , Fall 1986 , pp. 221 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1986 

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