This article examines Jim Bulpitt's seminal work on UK territorial politics within the American context. We approach territorial politics by examining the ebbs and flows of American urban policy during the period 1964 to 2008. In doing so, our analysis explores changes in presidential approaches towards urban policy, and thus center–periphery relations, based on the outcomes of electoral politics. We find that conditions specific to the USA cause American territorial politics to be continually fluid, often erratic and highly differentiated by party affiliation.

The article offers an interpretive approach to understanding Jim Bulpitt's Territory and Power in the United Kingdom. The first two parts interpret Bulpitt's text by locating it respectively in its historical and contemporaneous contexts. It argues that Territory and Power belongs in a broader movement to rethink the state in a way that accommodates the rise of new behavioural topics. Territory and Power also defends modernist empiricist approaches to institutions and other mid-level topics against the positivism and general theories of behaviouralism. The final part points to an interpretive approach to the state as an alternative to the behaviouralism and institutionalism that lurk behind Bulpitt's ideas. A thoroughly interpretive approach would decentre territory and power, revealing them to be contingent and shifting products of struggles over meanings.