Searching for a Politics of Space

SEARCHING FOR A
POLITICS OF SPACE
Jennifer Hochschild,
Harvard University

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.
This is a fascinating and useful debate; we need an analogous consideration
of the politics of space. A few elements could include:
• “Attention to the politics of scale — the processes by which scale is
constructed,” in the words of Susan Clarke. How are boundaries around
small, medium-sized, and large entities created and changed? When,
how, and why do large entities (say, a country) subdivide? When do
small entities (city states or European countries) get absorbed into a
larger unit (national state or European Union)? How does politics
change in a location when it subdivides or gets absorbed? What sorts
of politics do changes in boundaries permit, encourage, and forbid?
Samuel Beer’s analysis of the invention of American federalism, and
Alberto Alesina’s and Enrico Spolaore’s dissection of “the size of
nations,” provide a fine start here.
• Attention to relations between units of different size. Larger units
usually dominate smaller ones and use their scale to extract resources.
But when, how, and why do smaller units occasionally exercise power
over larger ones? What is the appropriate division of labor among units
of different scales? Scholars such as Robert Dahl and Peter Katzenstein
have written elegant books on size and democratic governance or trade
policy, and the concepts of subsidiarity or localism frame useful
analyses. But we lack a systematic theory to tie together research on
links among large and small political units.
• Attention to the scale of political activity. Political calculations and
interactions presumably change as actors move from direct engagement
in small groups to communication with millions of citizens through
the media or some other aggregative mechanism. How are concepts of
democracy, participation, or authority rethought as one moves from a
room to a community to a country to an international organization? Do
small cities or states conduct political business differently from large
ones, or does institutional structure override size? Scholars ranging
from Jane Mansbridge and Diana Mutz on face-to-face interactions to
Larry Bartels and Robert Hackett on national and international
political communications provide a wealth of material for developing
a theory of political scale.
• Attention to interactions among units close to or far from one another.
Poverty in cities is intimately, perhaps causally, connected to
inequalities between cities and suburbs; as Douglas Rae argues, “Being
able to choose where is a more powerful instrument for deciding what
and how one’s family will live than anything else.” Immigration from
a neighboring nation generates a different commitment to and from the
host country, and a different form of nativism, than does immigration
from a distant nation, as Christian Joppke and Gallya Lahav have
shown. A collapsing regime near one’s own country might generate a
different sort of political response than a regime collapse on the other
side of the globe.
• Attention to political strategies that revolve around scale. When and
why do activists seek to expand the scope of conflict, as E.E.
Schattschneider advised; when do they prefer subsidiarity or localism?
Who promotes federalism and decentralization, or national oversight
and centralized governance? Does the slogan, “think global and act
local” have any real political content? Compare, for example, the
activities of environmental movements seeking to clean up the local
park with those focused on a nation’s nuclear testing or the world’s
global warming; are there general lessons to be derived therefrom?
• Attention to the imperatives of space. Rae argues that American cities
developed as they did not only because they were near good harbors or
navigable rivers, but also because AC electric currents worked better
over wide areas than did DC currents and because inventors developed
trains on fixed rails before cars that could choose their path. David