Political History

Political History: A Summary

• Political history is a field of history that analyzes political events, ideas, movements, organs of government, voters, parties, and leaders.
• It is closely related to other fields of history, including diplomatic history, constitutional history, social history, people's history, and public history.
• Political history studies the organization and operation of power in large societies.
• From the 1960s onwards, the rise of competing subdisciplines, particularly social history and cultural history, led to a decline in the prominence of "traditional" political history.
• Political history typically centers around a single nation and its political change and development.
• The new political history saw young scholars put much more emphasis on the voters' behavior and motivation, rather than just the politicians, and relied heavily on quantitative methods to integrate social themes, especially regarding ethnicity and religion.
• British political scholarship mostly ignored 20th-century history due to temporal proximity to the recent past, the unavailability of primary sources, and the potential for bias.
• Some German historians began to rebel against the idea of the "Primacy of Foreign Policy," suggesting instead a "Primacy of Domestic Politics."
• The French Annales School put an emphasis on the role of geography and economics in history, and of the importance of broad, slow cycles rather than the constant apparent movement of the "history of events" of high politics.
• Social historians undermined the centrality of politics to the historical discipline.
• MaxRange is a dataset defining the level of democracy and institutional structure (regime-type) on a 100-graded scale where every value represents a unique regimetype.
• Political history is still popular among the reading public, but it never recovered its dominance among scholars.