Abstract
Scholarship on path dependence, policy feedback, timing and sequence, and punctuated versus incremental change has fueled new debates and produced new theoretical insights into how time and history factor into political and social outcomes. This work has done much to clarify why history matters in social scientific investigation. However, it appears to have gone largely unnoticed by most contemporary urban political scientists and sociologists, who are far more likely to focus on the present or the recent past than to pursue genuinely historical approaches. This article examines certain causal mechanisms that operate in time and shows how their application to the study of urban settings can enhance what scholars know about urban political processes.
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