60.3
Issue 3 of our anniversary volume features an introductory essay by managing editors Christina Greer (Fordham University) and Tim Weaver (University at Albany). We revisit Elinor Ostrom’s“The Social Stratification-Government Inequality Thesis Explored,” which was published in Urban Affairs Review in 1983.
Landscapes of Remunicipalization
After four decades of stalemated debates about privatization there is a newer and more refreshing conversation on the block: remunicipalization. Also known as “reverse privatization” and “insourcing,” remunicipalization refers to a process of returning services back to state ownership and management after a period of private sector control.
60.2
Issue 2 of our anniversary volume features an introductory essay by managing editors Richardson Dilworth (Drexel University) and Mara Sidney (Rutgers University-Newark). We revisit Michael Lipsky’s “Street-Level Bureaucracy and the Analysis of Urban Reform” published in Urban Affairs Quarterly in 1971.
Women’s Representation in Canadian Municipal Politics
The share of women in Canadian municipal politics is just thirty-one percent—far from parity. Yet it varies widely across municipalities. What explains why sixteen percent of councils have no women on them while another sixteen percent have achieved gender parity? Such differences matter because research shows that elected women tend to prioritize issues that are distinct from men, contributing to better representation of many social issues. And young women who see themselves reflected on their councils are more likely to consider running for office themselves someday.
Defying Stereotypes, Populism and Neoliberal Discourse
Our paper describes and records some of the innovative ways municipalities in Québec reacted to the COVID pandemic. It is probable that many other municipalities and local authorities reacted in similar ways in other jurisdictions. The paper also provides some elements to help understand and describe in what way municipalities are being innovative, and how this compares to, and differs from, private-sector innovation.
Partisanship and Professionalization
Since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, school board operations - and the elections to those positions - have received increased attention nationally and locally. As we realized the central role school boards were playing in the political landscape, we wanted to better understand how school boards were responding to both the pandemic and being increasingly in the political spotlight. We conducted a large-scale survey of school board members in multiple states during the summer of 2021. In open-ended responses on the survey, school board members highlighted their frustration with the politicization of the pandemic.
Political Underrepresentation Among Public Benefits Recipients
In November 2020, all eyes were on Pennsylvania in the lead-up to the hotly-contested presidential election. Four years prior, Donald Trump had carried the state by under 45,000 votes, out of more than six million ballots cast. Given its pivotal position as a presidential swing state, campaigns and grassroots groups blanketed the state to register and then turn out people to vote. Turnout in that election broke modern records.
But one key group of eligible voters was underrepresented among the record-high electorate: people receiving means-tested public benefits. Studying voter registration and voting in a large county in Pennsylvania, we found that people enrolled in means-tested public benefits programs register to vote and vote much less often than non-recipients.
Towards a Measure of Local Legislative Professionalism
Local legislatures are not, on average, poorly resourced institutions that are staffed by citizen legislatures, nor are they professional bodies more akin to Congress. Instead, much like state legislatures, they tend to fall somewhere in the middle, with most municipalities taking on some characteristics of each type. In the end, we hope this measure will help scholars and practitioners of urban politics better understand how institutional structures, like professionalism affect outcomes.
Using the Urban Regime Framework to Learn from Urban Challenges
In recent decades, developments related to globalization, immigration, the emergence of the post-industrial city, climate change, and the environment have posed challenges for cities all over the world. Scientists try to make sense of these developments and help cities cope with them. An increasingly appealing framework employed to understand and explain these challenges falls under the broad heading of “urban governance.”
The Emergence of Environmental Justice in General Plans
Urban planning has an uneasy relationship with environmental justice. Poor planning decisions and discriminatory practices have historically heightened the burdens of environmental contamination in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, in comparison to white, wealthy populations. Since the 1980s, activists have garnered some regulatory and scholarly support for changes to policy and planning processes, but urban planners have been slow to adopt an explicit EJ framework in land use policies. The planning profession, however, has the capacity to help ensure that future development does not repeat the unjust environmental outcomes of the past.
Producing and Contesting Meanings of Participation in Planning
When Sherry Arnstein published the seminal article “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” in 1969, she conceptualized participation in terms of varying rungs of power – the power to make planning decisions. In her worldview, participation was inherently political. Today, public participation is part and parcel of many planning and development processes and can be used in conflicting ways, subverting existing power structures and relations in some instances, while affirming them in others. The question then is, what does it mean to “participate”? What and whose objectives and interests does participation serve? What are the democratic principles guiding participation?
The Echoes of Echo Park
Despite continued growth in unsheltered homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers continue to implement and enforce quality-of-life ordinances that criminalize the everyday spatial practices of houseless people. These laws are enforced through police sweeps and target necessary life-sustaining tactics associated with one’s status as unhoused, including camping, loitering, panhandling, and cooking food on public sidewalks and in parks. Their material impacts can be illustrated by expanding anti-homeless strategies like the March 24, 2021 displacement of an autonomous encampment in Echo Park Lake, which resulted in the displacement of 193 individuals and demolition of a community kitchen, garden, and semi-permanent structures, as well as the February 14th, 2023 demolition of a woman’s do-it-yourself semi-permanent structure in Skid Row.
“I Can’t Vote if I Don’t Leave My Apartment”
Black women are more likely to be victims of violence than any other group. As a result, research has consistently shown that Black women who experience violence encounter a number of negative outcomes (in physiological health, incarceration, happiness, educational, psycho-emotional wellness, and even the economic), in their present and futures. As a student of politics, I wanted to understand whether firsthand experiences of violence impact the politics and political identity development of Black women. Since research has found Black women living in poverty to be the more vulnerable to violence, I focus on my analysis on adult Black women who live under the poverty-line in Chicago public housing, and have firsthand experiences with residential violence
From Rejection to Legitimation
In April 2021, the City of Portland, Oregon legalized sanctioned, self-managed houseless encampments. It did so in a very pedestrian manner, by amending its land use ordinances that regulate houseless camping in order to make encampments amenable with the city code. This is a big deal! Currently, the regulatory responses by municipalities experiencing high numbers of unsheltered houselessness is quite varied.
Why Political Scientists Should Study Smaller Cities
The United Nations estimates more than half of the global population currently lives in cities, and 68% of the world’s population is projected to live in urban areas by 2050 (United Nations 2018). A large portion of this growing urban population lives outside of major metropolitan areas. Yet much of our knowledge about urban politics comes from studying the largest cities, and smaller cities are systematically understudied relative to their share of the population.
The Role of Women in Local Governments
In recent years, the reduction of available resources, increased debt and the decentralisation of services have placed many governments in precarious situations. If we focus on the local public sector, municipalities are increasingly challenged to present balanced budgets without raising taxes or reducing vital services for their citizens. Thus, it is essential for local governments (LGs) to provide their services in the most efficient way, which would allow them to provide more services with fewer resources or the same services at a lower cost. The term “efficiency” refers to the level of performance of an organization (Farrell 1957). It represents the level of output that can be obtained by a level of input, in comparison with the optimal combination input-output.
Understanding the Adoption and Implementation of Body-Worn Cameras among U.S. Local Police Departments
Police use of deadly force against racial minority residents is a major concern of U.S. policing. The several high-profile police-involved deaths of racial minority residents, such as the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson and the death of Eric Garner in New York City, along with the acquittal of police officers involved in those incidents, led to minority residents’ riots and looting in protest of police brutality. These incidents and the resulting public outcry brought major national debate on officers’ discriminatory treatment toward Black people and pressured the governments to devise a way to control officers’ discretionary decision to use of deadly force.
Political Consequences of the Endangered Local Watchdog
The prolonged and ongoing struggle of city newspapers to stay afloat and maintain full newsrooms made us curious about potential fallout for local politics. Our new article in UAR leverages 20 years of data to examine the relationship between newspaper staffing cuts and measures of political competition and voter engagement in mayoral elections.
Culture Wars and City Politics, Revisited
The so-called ‘culture wars’ – conflicts between progressives and conservatives over morality, values and identity – are often considered purely national in scope. When James Davison Hunter first popularized the concept in the early 1990s, he had in mind a clear vision of an all-encompassing conflict between the forces of orthodoxy and progressivism over the ‘meaning of America’. Yet the fiercest manifestations of culture war conflicts very often occur in localities, turning ostensibly national debates into issues that cities and towns have to deal with. Indeed, recent events – the murder of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests, the COVID-19 pandemic – have only served to underscore the increasingly localized dimensions of culture war skirmishes and the challenges they present for local and municipal governance.