Although low voter turnout in national elections has garnered considerable attention and concern, much lower turnout in municipal elections has often been largely ignored. Using a survey of cities in California, this article examines a series of institutional remedies to low turnout in mayoral and city council elections. Moving local elections to coincide with the dates of national elections would have by far the largest impact on voter turnout, but other institutional changes that tend to raise the stakes of local elections also increase turnout. Specifically, less outsourcing of city services, the use of direct democracy, and more control in the hands of elected rather than appointed officials all tend to increase turnout.Observers of American politics have repeatedly expressed concern about low voter participation in federal elections (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995;Lijphart 1997;Bennett and Resnick 1990). The fact that almost half of all eligible voters do not vote in presidential elections has been cited repeatedly as evidence of an ongoing crisis in American democracy. Declining voter participation over time in these national elections has also been highlighted by a host of scholars who have raised questions about the health of American politics (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993;Teixeira 1992).Yet for all of the attention garnered by national elections, turnout in these elections is comparatively high. Nowhere is the turnout problem worse than at the local level. Although few studies have looked comprehensively at municipal-level turnout in recent decades, the existing evidence suggests that 645
This paper focuses on the immigration-related demands currently being placed on local police in the United States, and the emergence of what we call a "multilayered jurisdictional patchwork" (MJP) of immigration enforcement. We report results from nationwide surveys of city police chiefs and county sheriffs and intensive fieldwork in three jurisdictions. The enforcement landscape we describe is complicated by the varying and overlapping responsibilities of sheriffs and city police, and by the tendency for sheriffs to maintain closer relationships with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of the MJP-for immigrants, for their communities, and for the evolving relationship between levels of government in the federal system. 2
In 1996, Congress created a new way to enforce national immigration laws, inviting state and local law enforcement personnel to become formally involved in the effort. Why have police departments in some communities embraced increased involvement in immigration enforcement, whereas others have shunned this role? Do local elected officials typically determine the contours of police practice in this area or do police departments act with considerable autonomy in deciding how much to become involved in immigration enforcement? We examine these issues by analyzing data from a national survey of police chiefs in municipalities with populations of 65,000 or more. Our analysis takes account of the possibly endogenous relationship between the policies of city government and the practices of police departments. We find that immigrant-supportive city policy commitments and the presence of a Hispanic police chief are associated with less intensive immigration enforcement by local police. Voter partisanship is also related to police practices, but only in cities with an unreformed form of government.With levels of human migration around the world at historic highs in recent decades, national governments have tightened immigration policies and expanded efforts to enforce them in unprecedented ways. These efforts have notably included the devolution of enforcement responsibility to local governments, social service agencies, and private actors (Guiraudon and Lahav 2000). In the United States, this trend has entailed a reconceptualization of traditional relationships between national and local governments. From its first systematic engagement with immigration legislation in the 1880s, the federal government had asserted essentially sole responsibility for ArtICles JPART 23:1-25
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.