Local government is the hidden leviathan of American politics: it accounts for nearly a tenth of gross domestic product, it collects nearly as much in taxes as the federal government, and its decisions have an enormous impact on Americans' daily lives. Yet political scientists have few explanations for how people vote in local elections, particularly in the smaller cities, towns, and suburbs where most Americans live. Drawing on a wide variety of data sources and case studies, this book offers the first comprehensive analysis of electoral politics in America's municipalities. Arguing that current explanations of voting behavior are ill suited for most local contests, the book puts forward a new theory that highlights the crucial differences between local, state, and national democracies. Being small in size, limited in power, and largely unbiased in distributing their resources, local governments are “managerial democracies” with a distinct style of electoral politics. Instead of hinging on the partisanship, ideology, and group appeals that define national and state elections, local elections are based on the custodial performance of civic-oriented leaders and on their personal connections to voters with similarly deep community ties. Explaining not only the dynamics of local elections, Oliver's findings also upend many long-held assumptions about community power and local governance, including the importance of voter turnout and the possibilities for grassroots political change.
This chapter considers the managerial character of local democracy. It asks: Does managerial democracy inhibit or enhance the capacity of most Americans for meaningful self-governance? Who governs in a managerial democracy? In most places, local democracy is less about coalitions of property speculators and machine politicians establishing local fiefdoms or about marginalized groups, such as minorities or the poor, empowering themselves through civic activism. Rather, it is more about large portions of the electorate attaining relatively easy consensus over the general management of a limited number of government services and a greater stratification of different groups across municipal boundaries. Local democracy in suburban America is less about intramunicipal political struggle than it is about intermunicipal political exclusion. This situation creates a much more complicated picture of “who governs” America than what most existing research suggests.
This chapter examines who votes in local elections and whether their low electoral turnout is problematic for the legitimacy of their local democracies. The evidence suggests that, for the overwhelming number of American municipalities, low turnout is not a problem because of the types of people who vote in local contests: educated homeowners who are long-term residents of their communities. These “homevoters” are not only more committed to their communities but are also more likely to be politically engaged and informed about local affairs. Although they tend to be more fiscally conservative than renters, they do not systematically differ in their opinions about all political and social issues. Whatever biases do exist as a result of low turnout in local elections are tilted toward policies that protect property values and suppress property taxes. However, given the difference in political knowledge and interest between voters and nonvoters, it is not clear that higher turnout would change this, largely because nonvoters would probably have less clearly informed preferences.
This chapter considers the types of people who run for office and the types of campaigns they run. It examines the impact of factors such as personal ambition, civic responsibility, mobilizing issues, personal gain, and political indignation by looking at a large sample of local politicians (i.e., unsuccessful candidates and elected officials) from the greater Chicago metropolitan area. The small size, limited scope, and low bias of most Chicago-area municipal governments mean that these local politicians, like local voters, tend to be stakeholders in their communities. They are very concerned with issues of economic development and quality of life, yet are drawn into public affairs primarily from a sense of civic duty and an attachment to their towns. They are motivated less by ideology, partisanship, or even personal ambition, than by a public-spirited commitment to sustaining the quality of their communities.
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