From a New York Times obit by Sam Roberts headlined “Walter Dean Burnham, Who Traced Political Parties’ Shifts, Dies at 93”:

Walter Dean Burnham, a political scientist who theorized that political parties realign periodically in tectonic shifts that he called “America’s surrogate for revolution,” died in San Antonio.

Professor Burnham, who taught most recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas, Austin, suggested that realignments of political parties had occurred roughly every three to four decades since 1896.