Political Science, Geography,
and the Spatial Dimension of Politics
Daniel J. Elazar
The Importance of Location Proper Understood
A popular story tells about a man who returned to his home to find an intruder hiding in his closet. Turning to the intruder in outrage, the householder bellowed, "What are you doing here?" The intruder, a meek little man, replied, "Everybody has to be somewhere." The point of this truism should be so obvious that it need hardly be stated. Recent efforts to explain human behavior, however, have too often neglected or overlooked the factor of location. Everybody does, indeed, have to be somewhere, and where one is plays a crucial role in determining who and what one is and what one does (or, in other words, how one behaves). What is true of individuals is equally true of groups, societies, peoples, and nations.
Alexis de Tocqueville begins his great book Democracy in America with a chapter entitled "Physical Configuration of North America," a description of the geographic situation of the Western Hemisphere north of the Rio Grande. In this eminently appropriate way, the great French political thinker, who is increasingly being recognized as an intellectual alternative to Marx, begins his work on the culture and institutions of the United States.1
By and large, twentieth century political scientists have taken the spatial dimension of politics more or less for granted, more so among those who have followed the trends in the sciences to focus on ever more narrow segments of their subject matter. This is true whether their focus has been formal, institutional, behavioral, or theoretical. It is only now, towards the end of the century, at a time when those narrower research agendas have engendered a new cross-disciplinary interest that political science again is beginning to consider the implications of spatial location and relationships.
The truth is even when we do think of location, we tend to think of it simply as a spatial matter -- as a matter of being some place. In fact, location has three critical dimensions: spatial, temporal, and cultural. All human beings and groups are located in a particular space, in a particular time, and in a particular culture. It is necessary to understand all three facets of location in order to understand how people behave and why they behave as they do. Take the United States. It is not sufficient to think of the United States as being geographically located between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, bounded by Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico on the South and Canada on the north. Rather, one must also understand that the United States is historically located in the modern epoch that opened at the beginning of the seventeenth century and culturally located within what we generally term Western civilization. As a result of the first dimension, this nation has no premodern history of political consequence, which does much to explain its difficulty in understanding the driving forces behind "Old World" societies that have had to modernize. As a result of the second, the United States has been able to focus on a cultural inheritance particularly conducive to the development of an energetic, even aggressive, competitive entrepreneurial society. All of these are crucial benchmarks not only for focusing in upon the location of any particular element in the Untied States but also for understanding the behavior of its people and its political system.
Understanding the Dimensions of Location
Tocqueville understood the multi-dimensionality of location. After beginning his work by describing the location of the United States in space, his second chapter, "Concerning Their Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of the Anglo-Americans," locates the settlers of that part of British North America that became the United States in time through a judicious emphasis on what he sees as the salient points in the history of their founding and settlement of the American colonies.2 In his third chapter, "Social State of the Anglo-Americans," Tocqueville locates the Americans in culture.3 Thus, in the first approximately 10 percent of Democracy in America, Tocqueville implicitly advances a theory of the relationship between political science and geography based upon the fundamental geographic concept of location that I would recommend to us all.
In the structure of his book, as in so many other ways, Tocqueville provides us with a model of how to do political and social science. A discussion of the relationship of political science and geography should begin with consideration of location. Geographers study and map spatial location, adding system to the structure that human give to space. less frequently do we think of the other two dimensions of location -- time and culture -- although both are as integral to location as is space. It is my thesis that location in time and culture have structure to no less a degree than does location in space, and that their structures can be understood to be systematic or at least sufficiently systematic to be mapped. In all three cases their structures are a result of human artifice but based upon nature and what nature has given humans to work with. Thus, nature determines continents and the natural features of land formations and bodies of water, while humans develop settlements and boundaries in relation to those natural features. By nature, time passes and humans structure the passage of time into seconds, minutes, hours, months, and years through the development and organization of the calendar. Culture emerges from or fades into biology but specific cultures are the products of human endeavor.
For example, the cultures of most peoples emphasize the structure of space. Judaism, on the other hand, the product of the culture of the Jewish people, emphasizes the structuring of time even more than space, no doubt because the situation of the Jews both as nomads before settling the Land of Israel in ancient times and in exile subsequent to the destruction of the Jewish state, have had to live primarily in a Jewish world structured according to the calendar with set time for prayer, set holy days and festivals, and set acts of social justice such as the sabbatical and jubilee years. Jewish theologians have written extensively about this, especially in our times, and about how it enabled Jews to survive wherever they happened to be.4
Political boundaries represent one major way in which people seek to organize space for their use. Territorial boundaries, whether national borders or household property lines, sort people out in space so as to minimize conflict and aggression and organize competition and cooperation among people. The political importance of territory is heightened by the universal tendency of like-minded individuals to differentiate themselves from others. Territory helps to provide individuals and groups with a sense of security and with a place in which they can work out their own identities and destinies. We might also keep in mind the fact that individuals occupy multiple territories -- from personal space, to household, neighborhood, village or city, county, state, region, section, nation, continent, hemisphere, and perhaps even planet. Each of these "places" has specific meanings and purposes for people. In at least one respect, then, politics can be understood as the means by which humans impose their own order upon both space and time, which are otherwise differentiated only by natural processes or characteristics. That order is imposed, first and foremost, through human culture.
There seem to be two principal ways in which people approach the study of the organization of space, either by examining cores and their peripheries or by examining boundaries and what is included within them. Significantly, there also seem to be two ways in which cultures look at the world, particularly but not exclusively at space. One looks at cores and their peripheries and the other looks at boundaries and what is contained within them. While the two ways may overlap under a variety of circumstances and so blur the distinction between them, the differences between the two are really quite significant.
Both approaches have been noted by analysts of the human condition at least since biblical times and probably long before. Take, for example, the differences between Middle Eastern and Western conceptions of space. In the West, particularly in the English-speaking world, one looks at spaces first by determining how they are bounded and then by examining what is inside of those boundaries. This reflects the existence of a well-watered world where people working the land could and needed to draw boundaries dividing all of it among themselves so that all of it could be used.
In the Middle East, on the other hand, a desert area punctuated by oases, civilization began by the settlement of those oases where the water and the shade derived from growing things was to be found, and expanded settlement only insofar as water and shade could be extended outward from the core of the oasis into the desert. Much of the land was not amenable to settlement or cultivation and, indeed, the outward movement often ebbed and flowed with the amount of water available at any given time (wet years and dry years). Thus, looking at the core became critical so that one could understand the periphery.
These sharp divisions s always were modified by the complexities of reality such as the distribution of power within bounded areas between cores and peripheries or the establishment of jurisdictional limits between oases, but the basic patterns of thought, once established, usually survived as the most critical ones. Thus, two very different mental sets developed. While science attempts to become conscious of and thereby able to transcend such preexistent mental sets, the human sciences also must take them into account when understanding how people behave in different cultures at different times and in different places. Here, too, geographers and political scientists often overlap in their work and can beneficially come together.
Most people have no difficulty perceiving differences among locations in space. Especially in our rapidly changing times, many people have come to understand how location in time changes meaningfully as well. In principle, differences in cultural location are also becoming more easily perceived; however, recognition of cultural location is sometimes difficult, in two ways. First, there is the problem of understanding that such differences exist; and second, even if this intellectual understanding is achieved, there is the problem of understanding what they mean in real life. Thus many of our contemporaries believe that "deep down all people are really alike," even if they speak different languages or wear "exotic" dress, meaning that they are really like themselves except in outward appearance. This optimistic note is touching in its hopefulness, but it has led to some drastic mistakes -- especially those resulting in misassessments of evil and deviousness among others.
What is Gained by a Proper Understanding
Why should we bother with location -- particularly such a complex understanding of it? From time immemorial, people have puzzled over the causes and effects of human events. The problem of establishing cause and effect is an extraordinarily difficult one, as a substantial literature attests. Less obscure is the fact that what we here refer to as location has a major impact on what happens and why. Without suggesting that understanding location is a solution to the problem of understanding cause and effect which may be insoluble -- perhaps the best we can do is to understand what is a function of what and that only in rank of probability -- I submit that it is a necessary ingredient in trying to achieve casual explanation. At the same time, it is worth significant study in its own right. What follows should be considered as an introduction to and the guidelines for such a study.
My remarks are the outgrowth of more than fifty years of exploration. An outline of that exploration is provided in the Appendix for this article.
Biologically, humans are tied to all three locational dimensions. People, in common with all other animals, are severely bounded by time, which, like space, they can manipulate only to a certain degree. People live in particular times, and each person is allotted a particular measure of time. Living in particular times means that people begin their lives with an inheritance of times gone by and must maneuver within their own times in light of the limitations and possibilities imposed by what has gone before. A person's own life span may to some degree be extended or contracted through his or her efforts (e.g., by eating or smoking habits), and certainly a person may determine how his or her available time is used within very real limits.
In any given period, people are constrained by the limits of knowledge and the habitual practices available at that particular time. There is also a sense in which time runs out before people become aware of potential dangers, before new knowledge can be developed to meet new problems, or before individuals, political leaders, and societies can complete new projects. We do not, for example, have sufficient knowledge to make solar energy economically viable now or enough technical skill to make nuclear energy comfortably safe, especially with regard to radioactive wastes. Yet the "spirit of our time" calls for a continuing increase in the use of energy in order to maintain the style of life to which people have become culturally accustomed. The domestic and international political problems raised by worldwide energy needs became apparent during the 1970s. Although that immediate crisis was overcome, the larger issue remains with the world moving toward the twenty-first century.
In another vein, we often speak of the frustrations and opportunities that arise for individuals or groups who are "behind the times" or "ahead of their time." Political reformers, especially, experience the latter feeling, while regarding others as being "behind the time." Finally, in terms of day-to-day political life, the timing of action is one of the most important skills of a successful political leader.
In recent years, intensive investigations have been made into human territoriality (the human need to have ties to a particular place). They have demonstrated that all living beings have such a need, and that it shapes their orientations toward space. Although humans have greater opportunities to maneuver than do animals, there are limits to the degree to which they can manipulate their territorial instincts, even as they organize and reorganize space to meet their needs with varying degrees of effectiveness.
In its simplest sense, culture may be regarded as the "way of life" of a people. The concept of culture refers to the explicit or implicit or overt and covert patterns of shared beliefs, values, and traditions about life held by a particular people. It consists of a set of rules, common symbols, and common sentiments that are learned by individuals as they grow up within the group. In this way culture tends to become "second nature," affecting behavior without self-conscious reflection. Culture separates humans from animals. Anthropologists have taught us that all people, groups, and societies are located within particular cultures whose own basis is so intertwined with the biological base of humans that it is impossible to draw any precise or even imprecise line separating the two. We are all inheritors of a culture that, to some degree, we can continue to shape but which in some respects is as much beyond the reach of our influence as the land forms upon which we live or the inexorable march of time from the beginning to the end of our lives.
Political culture can best be understood in terms of the framework it sets for individual and group political behavior -- in terms of the political thoughts, attitudes, assumptions, and values of individuals and groups and in the range of permissible or acceptable action that flows from them. Political culture, as such, directly determines behavior within relatively few situations or in response to relatively few particular issues. Instead its influence lies in its power to set reasonably fixed limits on political behavior and to provide subliminal direction for political action in particular political systems. These limits and direction are all the more effective because of their antiquity and subtlety, whereby those limited are often unaware of the limitations placed upon them.
In my work I have suggested that political studies must be embedded in a multi-dimensional locational matrix based on location in space, location in time, and location in culture. More specifically, spatial location for political scientists is always geohistorical location, because the passage of time changes the relationship of political matters to the space where they take place.
The forty year "Cities of the Prairie" study which I have directed and that now is being concluded has focused on this three-dimensional theory of location. In that study and in my work of political culture that grew out of it I have been greatly indebted to the works of major historical and contemporary geographers in both their social scientific and theoretical dimensions. Moreover, I have found that political geographers have been among my most attentive audiences. Hence, I would argue both theoretically and from experience that closer collaboration between political science and geography is important for each discipline in its continuing studies.
I have tried to make my own work Tocquevillian in this sense. I have been influenced by his work, which begins from the political science perspective, and simultaneously by that of Frederick Jackson Turner, who reaches very similar conclusions from the historian's perspective. It is difficult for me to name all of the geographers who have influenced my work in the same spirit. To mention only four, from Jean Gottman to Richard Meir to Harvey Perloff to David Meinig. I have learned from so many others. For example, the study of local government in Israel has been a special province of Israeli geographers beginning with David Amiran and continuing through David Newman. One need only think of the leading names in the field -- Shahar, Gonen, Hasson, Reichman, Shilhav -- and I know I have left out many.
As many of us who work in an interdisciplinary manner often discover, we have more in common with those colleagues in sister disciplines -- in this case history, geography, and anthropology, who share our substantive and methodological interests -- than with many of our own disciplinary colleagues.
The Transformation of the State System
For nearly 200 years, geographers and political scientists both have accepted the state system as providing the definitive set of political boundaries and organized polities. Those who have looked at other polities or boundaries have referred to them as "substate" or where they extend beyond state boundaries as "trans-state" or "multi-state." Until very recently, the conventional wisdom in both disciplines has served to prevent any intellectual challenge to the state system even where such challenges existed in reality. Thus, political scientists have defined the state using legal definitions and geographers have bounded it by accepting boundaries established by others.
One consequence of this is that federalism and federal arrangements which, in his prescience, Tocqueville found so important not only in the case of the United States but in other cases as well, tended to be ignored or downplayed in both disciplines. Here I must confess that political science has been particularly difficult. To a great extent the discipline still stays with the conventional statist wisdom on this subject or, if it has departed, it has been only to develop a behavioral sociological methodology that looks to all polities or political organizations as placed on the same continuum, not distinguishing between the matrix-type framework of federalism and the more unitary hierarchical or centralized model emphasized by modern statism. In this respect geographers have been more open than political scientists, less bound by convention and more willing to look at reality. Thus I have often felt that my work and that of my fellow students of federalism was better appreciated by leading geographers than by many leading political scientists.
Nevertheless, it is rapidly becoming unavoidable for both disciplines to consider the fact that modern statism is dead and that postmodern states are and will increasingly be embedded in arrangements which can best be described as federal, not in the conventional sense of modern federations but through various kinds of federal arrangements reflecting patterns that I have described and hopefully sharpened in Exploring Federalism5 and Federal Systems of the World.6 These phenomena, precisely because they are new, require identification and exploration, something which both disciplines are in a position to do and could gain by doing so cooperatively.
Part of the transition from modern to postmodern statism and federalism has to be the shift of the defining characteristic of political boundaries from issues of sovereignty to issues of jurisdiction. Sovereignty, at least in its modern meaning of exclusive authority, power, and control, no longer exists for states or anything else human in this world. Statehood is a status and certainly still a very important one. Nor is it likely to cease being an important one, but it is a statehood that represents a kind of a grant of jurisdiction by the people living within a state's boundaries as ratified by the powerholders of the larger world.
It is the fact of the second part of the definition as much as of the first that makes state authority and power a matter of jurisdiction rather than sovereignty in the old sense. Modern federalism discovered this at its very beginning in the sense that from the beginnings of the American experiment sovereignty was vested in the people who could delegate powers, i.e., establish jurisdictions, including overlapping ones, as they willed. This view, considered outrageous at that time when kings still were sovereign by Divine right or has been replaced by reified states as sovereigns, now has become well-nigh universal, although not always recognized as such and sometimes manipulated so that it is no more than a facade.
Federalism early on became the vehicle for replacing old ideas of sovereignty with new ideas of jurisdiction and continues to serve that function.7 This does not mean that states disappear, but they become, in effect, federated states with sovereignty taking on a different meaning having to do with the right of and necessity for their people to take initiatory steps in matters of authority, power, and jurisdiction. Both geographers and political scientists need to explore jurisdiction, each with the tools of their own discipline, but they should at the same time at the very least share their findings if not conduct their work jointly.
Using jurisdictions and their boundaries as the benchmarks of such studies, it is possible to examine regional arrangements that have much more limited jurisdictions as well as stronger state arrangements. It also becomes possible to study the constitutionalization of globalization, that is to say, how arrangements linking states or parts of states that are the principal political features of globalization become constitutionalized -- where, how, and to what extent -- since globalization is bringing jurisdiction in new forms, especially when combined with cyberspace. The old territorial bases of both geography and political science have to be reexamined and to some extent expanded or redefined.
Cyberspace as a New Locational Dimension
Both political science and geography now are faced with a new spatial challenge, introduced by one of the principal clauses of globalization, namely cybernetics. Cybernetics has given space a new dimension, now referred to as cyberspace. Cyberspace affects both political and geographic concerns and understandings as we have heard at this conference. Old notions of the territorially contiguous nation-state as the center of political life are no more valid in the postmodern epoch than are notions of geography without appropriate considerations of this new spatial dimension.
Understanding of cyberspace is complicated not only by its violation of the familiar conventional rules of spatial organization in the pre-cybernetic world, but it has the additional complication of generating both reality and virtual reality. For example, the new reality is that people in the "global village" are likely to feel closer to an earthquake in Kyoto or a volcanic eruption in Sicily lavishly covered on television, at least on CNN, in real time, than to a fire or crime two blocks away in their own neighborhoods. At the same time, the consequences of the neighborhood event are likely to be far more real than those of the distant events whose presence is magnified because the magnification makes it a part of virtual reality rather than "real" reality. The matter is not so simple with regard to the political consequences and perhaps the geographic ones as well. Truth to tell, we know very little about either.
In my opinion, it would be good if both disciplines undertook the exploration and cultivation of the new frontier which it opens together. The development of strategies for dealing with location in cyberspace which in a very real way is a fourth dimension of location should be a priority task for all social scientists but especially for political scientists and geographers whose work is so directly affected by these phenomena. Developing ways to do so would also be useful in overcoming the gaps between two disciplines which need to know one another better.
Some have asked why we must do this through existing disciplines rather than reforming around interests or tasks. Since an increasing share of science, including social and human sciences, has become and will continue to become interdisciplinary, if any scientific progress is to be made, this question is likely to arise again and again. My response to it is that of a simple empiricist, which is what I am.
The disciplines we have have been forged over the past centuries around questions common yet distinctive and methods distinctive yet common to most within a particular discipline. While one can see in disciplines in general and at any given time cores and peripheries, as one can in territorial, cultural, or temporal studies, the cores of the present disciplines seem to be strong enough to hold each separate in their language (jargon), methodologies, and discourse even as they meet on the peripheries. It is where disciplines/peripheries overlap that interdisciplinary studies flourish. The empirical reality is that all efforts to do away with the present disciplines for other than specific task-oriented reasons have been less than successful.
Geographers have complained that political scientists are hegemonic, at least vis-�-vis geography. That may be. Political science is a relatively large discipline, given the number of political scientists in the world today. Its core is built around such vital fields as politics, government, and administration. Also, most political scientists are quite conscious that their discipline begins as a discipline with Aristotle, if not earlier. This may make them assume hegemonic attitudes, especially in relation to smaller (in terms of numbers) and weaker (in terms of political power) disciplines. I have no other answer for that except to say that we need to be told when we act hegemonically.
For me a more difficult question is how research topics get chosen. Here, too, the limits of human interest and imagine come strongly into play. There are always a few people who choose topics that may be outside of the mainstream but which appeal to them as scientists or as people for one reason or another. Some of them are even good enough to secure funding for their non-mainstream topics. For most academics, however, their interest in advancing academically and the limits of their imaginations to what is conventional at any given time, either dictate the topics they choose or set relatively narrow parameters within which they look for topics.
In the social sciences, this usually means that researchers, who are supposed to be explorers out in front of the pack, usually become responders; that is to say, only after reality has visibly changed do they attempt to study it instead of noting the beginnings of changes and studying them before realities have been substantially altered. I have no solution for this problem because it is so human. Here, too, it may be that the best we can do is to be aware of it and hope that by noting it our actions will be guided accordingly.
Appendix: The Sources of this Discussion
I initially formulated the basic questions addressed here and the theses presented in answer to them in 1954-1956, while a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Since then I have undertaken several major projects to explore them. The first was a major study of the workings of the American federal system in which I joined with the late Morton Grodzins, my mentor, to investigate the practice of American federalism, past and present. This study led to the publication of The American Partnership: Federal-State Cooperation in the Nineteenth Century United States (1962),8 American Federalism: A View from the States (1966, 1971, 1984)9 and Cooperation and Conflict: A Reader in American Federalism (1969) (with R. Bruce Carroll, Kenneth E. Gray, E. Lester Levine, and Douglas St. Angelo).10 I also completed and edited Grodzin's major work, The American System: A New View of Government in the United States (1966).11
A second major project was my study of medium-sized metropolitan areas in Illinois and other states of the Mississippi Valley in the context of American political, economic, social, and cultural development. I began this, the "Cities of the Prairie" project, in 1959, at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs of the University of Illinois. When I inaugurated the project I promised myself that I would conduct several rounds of studies of the selected metropolitan areas over a period of one generation. This project is now in its fortieth year and its third round of research. From it have emerged my books Cities of the Prairie: The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics (1970),12 Cities of the Prairie Revisited (1986),13 The Politics of Bellville (1971),14 and Building Cities in America (1987). Cities of the Prairie: The Next Generation15 has been submitted for publishing. Another book produced by the is Rozann Rothman, The Great Society at the Grass Roots: Local Adaptation to Federal Initiatives of the 1960's (1984),16
Growing out of these two projects was what became a separate effort to explore American political culture and the three subcultures that I identified early on in my research. The principal statements of that thesis are found in American Federalism: A View from the states and Cities of the Prairie. This project, too, has led to several books, including The Ecology of American Political Culture edited by Joseph Zikmund III(1975).17 My summary statement linking all of these themes appeared in 1994 as The American Mosaic (Boulder: Westview, 1994).18
I then moved on to examine federalism, federal systems, and arrangements around the world, both empirically and theoretically. My principal books on the subject include Exploring Federalism, Federal Systems of the World, Federalism and the Way to Peace,19 Federalism and Political Integration,20 and Governing Peoples and Territories.21
Most recently, I and my colleagues at the Center for the Study of Federalism have inaugurated a series of books on politics and government in each of the fifty states. In these volumes we are exploring the themes presented here state by state. Books published to date include studies of the states of Arizona, Arkansas, West Virginia, Michigan, Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, Illinois, South Carolina, Mississippi, New York, Alaska, Nebraska, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Maine, Hawaii, New Jersey, and Alabama.
Almost simultaneously, I began a major study of Jewish political and communal organization which ultimately covered every contemporary organized Jewish community, the State of Israel, and a mapping of major or significant Jewish communities in the past. These appeared in some ten additional books, including Israel: Building a New Society (1986),22 The Jewish Polity23 (1985), People and Polity (1989),24 Community and Polity (1976, 1996),25 and Jewish Communities in Frontier Societies (1985 ),26 among others.
In all of these project, as a political scientist I was greatly assisted by my contact with geographers and the literature of geography in understanding the larger context of my research.
Notes
This article originally was prepared as a paper for the Conference on Geopolitics and Globalization in a Post-Modern World, 25-30 January 1998, Haifa University, Haifa, and Ben-Gurion University, Beersheva, Israel.
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, edited by J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner, translated by George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), Vol. 1, Part 1, Chapter 1, pp. 17-24.
2. Ibid., Vol. 1, Part 1, Chapter 2, pp. 25-40.
3. Ibid., Vol. 1, Part 1, Chapter 3, pp. 41-42.
4. See, e.g. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth is the Lord's: The Inner World of the Jew in East Europe (New York: H. Schuman, 1950); Mordecai Menahem Kaplan, The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (New York: Behrman's Jewish Book House, 1937); and Eliezer Schweid, The Cycle of the Jewish Year (New York: Jason Aranson Publishing, forthcoming).
5. Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tusculoosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1987).
6. Daniel J. Elazar, Federal Systems of the World, editor and contributor (London: Longman Group UK Limited and JCPA, 1994).
7. Daniel J. Elazar, Constitutionalizing Globalization: The Post Modern Revival of Confederal Arraignments, (Lanham, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998).
8. Daniel J. Elazar, The American Partnership: Federal-State Cooperation in the Nineteenth Century United States (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
9. Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States (New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1966), Second Edition (New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1972), and Third Edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
10. Daniel J. Elazar, editor and contributor with R. Bruce Carroll, Kenneth E. Gray, E. Lester Levine, and Douglas St. Angelo, Cooperation and Conflict: A Reader in American Federalism (New York: Peacock, 1969).
11. Daniel J. Elazar, edited for Morton Grodzins, The American System: A New View of Government in the United States (New York: Rand McNally, 1966).
12. Daniel J. Elazar, Cities of the Prairie: The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
13 Daniel J. Elazar, editor and contributor with with Rozann Rothman, Stephen L. Schechter, Maren Allan Stein, Joseph Zikmund II, Cities of the Prairie Revisited (Omaha, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
14. Daniel J. Elazar, The Politics of Bellville (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1971).
15. Daniel J. Elazar, editor and contributor, Cities of the Prairie: The Next Generation (forthcoming).
16. Rozann Rothman, The Great Society at the Grass Roots: Local Adaptation to Federal Initiatives of the 1960's - Champaign-Urbana (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984).
17. Daniel J. Elazar, editor with Joseph Zikmund III, The Ecology of American Political Culture (New York: Crowell, 1975).
18. Daniel J. Elazar, The American Mosaic (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994).
19. Daniel J. Elazar, Federalism and the Way to Peace (Kingston, Ontario: Queen's University).
20. Daniel J. Elazar, Federalism and Political Integration (New York: Turtledove Publishing, 1979).
21. Daniel J. Elazar, editor and contributor, Governing Peoples and Territories (Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982).
22. Daniel J. Elazar, Israel: Building a New Society (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986).
23. Daniel J. Elazar, editor and contribution with Stuart A. Cohen, The Jewish Polity: Jewish Political Organization From Biblical Times to the Present (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985).
24. Daniel J. Elazar, People and Polity: The Organizational Dynamics of World Jewry (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1989).
25. Daniel J. Elazar, The Organizational Dynamics of American Jewry (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1976, second edition 1995).
26. Daniel J. Elazar with Peter Medding, Jewish Communities in Frontier Societies: Argentina, Australia and South Africa (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983 ).