Urban Policy Entrepreneurship: Activist Networks, Minimum Wage Campaigns and Municipal Action Against Inequality

Abstract

Why are cities acting against inequality? We attribute the growth of municipal economic policy to multi-city urban policy entrepreneurship networks. These networks combine activists who create pressure to address inequality with policy experts who supply the legislative means to do so. We illustrate the concept through the Fight for $15 campaign in Seattle and Chicago. Drawing on more than 100 interviews, participant observation and secondary documents, we show that advocates for municipal policy reform use national policy entrepreneurship networks to develop policy-specific and generalized policy advocacy techniques. Centering urban policy entrepreneurship brings into focus three important aspects of current municipal public policy: 1) The two-way interaction between national and local policy campaigns. 2) Partnerships between activists who set the political agenda and policy entrepreneurs who act on political opportunity. 3) The role of national advocacy and policy entrepreneurship networks in converting new policy ideas into routine, off-the-shelf policy solutions.

An Introduction to Volume 59, Issue 4

“…By contrast, in Munich, such “horizontal” insurgent coalition building was less necessary because the nation was more supportive—there was, in other words, more “vertical” integration. This MLG distinction between horizontal and vertical integration has some clear connections to the distinction between city-level and larger entrepreneurial networks that underwrote the “Fight for 15” campaigns described by Doussard and Schrock (2023).…”

“…The authors focus in particular on the idea of the urban policy entrepreneur and "multi-city policy entrepreneurship networks" (p. 1122) to challenge existing models of urban politics that often assume that the politics of any given city are determined by the politics endogenous to that city. Doussard and Schrock (2023) focus instead on cities as venues for larger policy networks that seek to use specific cities as test grounds for larger campaigns. As they put it, "while… policy entrepreneurship networks often move policy to higher scales of government, they depend on cities to organize their work and set the agenda" (p. 1104).…”

“…While Doussard and Schrock (2023) examine policy entrepreneurs in the context of the multiple streams approach, Ramírez, Castillo, and Sanchez (2022) examine the role of policy entrepreneurs in large-scale infrastructure projects in Mexico City, in the context of the political market framework (PMF). The authors argue that the PMF framework is useful for "highlighting local institutions as the field where political negotiations and agreements occur.…”

“…Doussard and Schrock (2023) also examine local fights for labor rights but in a comparative study that considers the multi-scale strategies of advocates. Their analysis of the “Fight for 15” minimum wage campaigns focuses on two of the earliest adopters, Seattle and Chicago.…”

Encountering weak signals: Economic development practitioners’ perceptions of remote work arrangements

“…“Policy” or “bureaucratic” entrepreneurs leverage alternative sources of knowledge or non-traditional institutional arrangements to facilitate the identification and diffusion of problem understandings and alternative policy approaches in anticipation of future policy windows (Kingdon, 1995; Cairney and Zahariadis, 2016; Marcy and Berze, 2016; Gunn, 2017). The effectiveness of policy entrepreneurs is related to their embeddedness in multiscalar policy networks and their ability to translate policy innovations to local contexts (Mintrom and Norman, 2009; Doussard and Schrock, 2022). A critical source of learning is through mimetic factors, namely, the awareness of policies adopted by other policy actors (Phan et al, 2020).…”