Rethinking Local Democracy

Abstract

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.

Women and Local Politics: How Different Offices Affect Female Candidacies

“…The strategic entry hypothesis may operate somewhat differently at the local level. Although incumbents are difficult to defeat in city council races in larger places (Krebs 1998; Trounstine 2011), the presence of smaller and highly informed electorates in suburban areas may work to lessen the deterrent effect of the incumbent advantage (Oliver 2012). On balance, though, especially given the nature of California’s highly urbanized, and fragmented metropolitan populations, we anticipate that women will seek open seats more readily than men.…”

The Ideological Structure of Municipal Non-Ideology

“…These debates are also active among political scientists, and play out in both empirical and normative registers. In one classic argument, the pressures of inter-municipal competition for businesses and residents, combined with the restrained fiscal and policy authority of municipal governments, gives municipal politics a distinctly nonideological flavor, particularly outside very large cities (Oliver 2012; Peterson 1981). Others find clear evidence of ideological structure in local voting behavior (Holman and Lay 2020; Lucas and McGregor 2020; Sances 2018) and in patterns of municipal representation and responsiveness (Benedictis-Kessner and Warshaw 2016; Einstein and Kogan 2016; Lucas 2020a; Tausanovitch and Warshaw 2014).…”

Conceptualizing Municipal Elections: The Case of Toronto 2018

“…A debate over the fundamental nature of local elections, or, more specifically, the importance of ideological considerations, exists. On one hand, scholars have argued that ideological considerations are significantly less important in the municipal setting than they are in national (or even provincial/state) contests (see Oliver 2012 ; Peterson 1981 ). The general argument is that local elections are more about managerial competence than ideology: as many of the issues that municipalities are responsible for have no obvious ideological implications, voters base their decisions upon their expectations of who will perform best, placing particular emphasis upon the performance of incumbents.…”