Beyond core and periphery: the myth of regional political-economic restructuring and sectionalism in contemporary American politics

Abstract

The central thesis of this paper is that the geographical restructuring of the United States economy and polity of the past 20 years has taken a localized form. Consequently, thinking in terms of interregional competition and restructuring, such as evidenced by much of the social science literature, is intellectually and politically misleading. The concepts of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ or ‘sunbelt’ and ‘snowbelt’ and associated claims for a continuing or revived political sectionalism will no longer bear the intellectual traffic that has been imposed upon them.