The development of social history shifted the emphasis away from the study of leaders and national decisions, and towards the role of ordinary people, especially outsiders and minorities.
Traditional political history focused on major leaders and had long played a dominant role beyond academic historians in the United States.
Patterson argued that contemporary events, especially the Vietnam War and Watergate, alienated younger scholars away from the study of politicians and their deeds.
"[9] Others were more analytical, as when Hugh Davis Graham observed: Readman (2009) discusses the historiography of British political history in the 20th century.
He describes how British political scholarship mostly ignored 20th century history due to temporal proximity to the recent past, the unavailability of primary sources, and the potential for bias.
The Annales were broadly influential, leading to a turning away from political history towards an emphasis on broader trends of economic and environmental change.
Leff noted how social historians, "disdained political history as elitist, shallow, altogether passe, and irrelevant to the drama of everyday lives.
"[12] MaxRange is a dataset defining level of democracy and institutional structure (regime-type) on a 100-graded scale where every value represents a unique regimetype.