Is Urban Politics a Black Hole? Analyzing the Boundary Between Political Science and Urban Politics

Abstract

For many years, the scholarship of urban politics has drifted away from political science, both theoretically and methodologically. In this article, we systematically examine the boundary between urban political studies and the broader discipline of political science through an analysis of journal citations. We find that the analogy of a “black hole” is apt: No ideas escape the event horizon surrounding urban politics; furthermore, ideas from outside rarely penetrate the subfield's borders. Our evidence suggests that this is mostly due to a stunted solipsism that has engulfed too much of urban politics, but some of the blame must rest with the increasing insularity of political science. We suggest a research agenda that highlights the inherent dynamism in urban politics, and conclude with an endorsement of framework-driven citation analysis as a method of examining the flow of ideas across scholarly boundaries.

Religion and regionalism : congregants, culture and city-county consolidation in Louisville, Kentucky.

“…This rejection of religion's importance was engrained in urban studies, perhaps most of all, as the field embraced structural Marxism and Kotkin's other urban functions-known collectively as political economy (Swanstrom, 1993;Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe, 2007). Even theologians began to speak of the "secular city" (Cox, 1965).…”

“…While sociologists of religion, for example, employ urban theory to explain the distribution of religion across neighborhoods and the metropolitan region-a concept known as religious ecology-urbanists largely tend to ignore other bodies of work outside the limited urban field (Form andDubrow, 2005, 2008;Eiesland, 2000;McRoberts, 2003;Sapotichne, et al, 2007). This includes work on religion and politics by scholars of American national politics (Sharp, 2007).…”

“…What of Peterson's (1981) City Limits, a book inspired by Tiebout's (1956) public choice model that strikes fear in the hearts of urbanists (Sapotichne, et al, 2007)?…”

“…Pratt (2004) takes the lack of religious references in the major texts of urban politics as a possible sign that religious influence has waned in American cities (citing Djupe, 1996), a conclusion he himself finds surprising given the increasing evidence of religious influence at the national level. Other scholars have attributed, directly or indirectly, the lack of religious and other cultural research among urbanists to peculiarities of the field: the influence of structural Marxism, an overreliance on political economy, or even a pronounced academic prejudice in the subfield (Ambrosius, 2008a, that urbanists' neglect of the social scientific study of religion is due to urban politics' isolation from mainstream political science (MPS); and both MPS and sociology of religion's reliance on a rival theoretical framework, Rational Choice, which is labeled "pathological" by urbanists (Ambrosius, 2008a;Imbroscio, 2007;McKinnon, 2005;Sapotichne, et al, 2007). Ramsay (1998, 597) argues that the reliance on scientific positivism is waning and giving way to a "growing appreciation for the importance of culture," including religion, among urbanists.…”

What Happens at the Journal Office Stays at the Journal Office: Assessing Journal Transparency and Record-Keeping Practices

“…Moreover, editorial bias may spread beyond matters of methodology to include the exclusion of scholarship based on the submitting author(s)' personal characteristics or scholarly topic. Political scientists have selfpoliced the discipline's journals to determine whether the work published represents the profession's true diversity of scholarship on, for example, Asian-Pacific Americans (Aoki and Takeda 2004), pedagogy (Orr 2004), human rights (Cardenas 2009), Latin America (Martz 1990), urban politics (Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe 2007), and comparative politics (Munck and Snyder 2007). Other research (Breuning and Sanders 2007;Young 1995) has studied whether the work of female political scientists is adequately represented in the discipline's journals.…”