On Restoring Politics to Political History

Abstract

Social, and to a lesser extent, economic history have recently become so professionally popular and have made such inroads into political history that political history has not only been dethroned as the center of the discipline, but has had its very existence as a subject of independent inquiry threatened. Seeking to extend the range of political history to include the connection between electoral behavior and governmental policy by importing the "policy outputs" approach from political science, several recent works have accentuated this nonpolitical trend in political history. Reviewing the policy outputs literature and relating it to the sub-field of "spatial modeling" in political science, I attempt to point the way to a more complex and theoretical approach to the electorate-policy relationship, and by emphasizing the importance of institutional rules and candidate strategies, to inject politics back into political history. The approach is briefly applied to the politics of education in turn-of-the-century North Carolina.