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.