Municipal takeovers are a state policy ostensibly designed to address urban fiscal crises by “temporarily” taking over local government, suspending local control, and implementing sweeping austerity measures. Although framed as “apolitical,” takeovers have the capacity to reshape local democracy. These changes radically rearrange how decisions are made, who has access to decision makers, and, ultimately, who is in power. Using a policy-centered approach, we compare the cases of Camden, New Jersey and Flint, Michigan, illustrating how variations in policy design and localized implementation reshaped the local political landscape in different ways. While the Camden takeover institutionalized the emergent “community development regime,” Flints’ grassroots activists and community-based organizations destabilized the emergent regime.
In this paper, we argue natural disasters have a positive association with the likelihood of internal or domestic trafficking. Trafficking is a function of individual vulnerability and subsequent criminal agency. Economic scarcity and lack of government protection are conditions of vulnerability that are exploited by criminal agents and networks in recruiting and transporting victims. The advent of natural disasters exacerbates these conditions and provides an opportunity for criminals. We argue that internal trafficking is more likely in the wake of disasters as routes to transnational trafficking may be inaccessible. Employing generalized estimation equations on a unique cross-section, time-series dataset of 158 countries, between 2001 and 2011, we find a consistent positive link between natural disasters and the likelihood of internal trafficking. The internal trafficking angle is under-studied, and our findings point at the need for further exploration of the topic.
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