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The Anc and the Liberation Struggle
A Critical Political Biography
Dale T. McKinley
Pluto Press, 1997

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Succession to High Office in Botswana
Three Case Studies
Jack Parson
Ohio University Press, 1990
This book examines the process through which the mantle of leadership passed from one leader to another in Botswana. It concerns the succession to high office in Botswana over the course of more than half a century from the colonial time to the present. Three case studies explore the relationship between the British colonial authorities and the tribal leaders in affirming the legitimacy of the tribal chiefs of the Bangwato tribe in the former Bechuanaland protectorate. The studies examine the succession crises of the Bangwato first in 1925 and again between 1948 to 1953 and the political changes from the Botswana National Archives contained in the appendices fully support the text.
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Developing States, Shaping Citizenship
Service Delivery and Political Participation in Zambia
Erin Accampo Hern
University of Michigan Press, 2019
At the nexus of political science, development studies, and public policy, Developing States, Shaping Citizenship analyzes an overlooked driver of political behavior: citizens’ past experience with the government through service provision. Using evidence from Zambia, this book demonstrates that the quality of citizens’ interactions with the government through service provision sends them important signals about what they can hope to gain from political action. These interactions influence not only formal political behaviors like voting, but also collective behavior, political engagement, and subversive behaviors like tax evasion. Lack of capacity for service delivery not only undermines economic growth and human development, but also citizens’ confidence in the responsiveness of the political system. Absent this confidence, citizens are much less likely to participate in democratic processes, express their preferences, or comply with state revenue collection. Economic development and political development in low-capacity states, Hern argues, are concurrent processes.
 
Erin Accampo Hern draws on original data from an original large-N survey, interviews, Afrobarometer data, and archival materials collected over 12 months in Zambia. The theory underlying this book’s framework is that of policy feedback, which argues that policies, once in place, influence the subsequent political participation of the affected population. This theory has predominantly been applied to advanced industrial democracies, and this book is the first explicit effort to adapt the theory to the developing country context.
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The Dance of Politics
Gender, Performance, and Democratization in Malawi
Lisa Gilman
Temple University Press, 2011

Election campaigns, political events, and national celebration days in Malawi usually feature groups of women who dance and perform songs of praise for politicians and political parties. These lively performances help to attract and energize throngs of prospective voters. However, as Lisa Gilman explains, “praise performing” is one of the only ways that women are allowed to participate in a male-dominated political system.

Although political performances by women are not unique to Malawi, the case in Malawi is complicated by the fact that until 1994 all Malawianwomen were required to perform on behalf of the long-reigning political party and its self-declared “President for Life,” Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda+. This is the first book to examine the present-day situation, where issues of gender, economics and politics collide in surprising ways. Along with its solid grounding in the relevant literature, The Dance of Politics draws strength from Gilman’s first-hand observations and her interviews with a range of participants in the political process, from dancers to politicians.

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Unhappy Valley, Book Two
Conflict in Kenya & Africa
Bruce Berman
Ohio University Press, 1992
This long-awaited book is a considerable revision in the understanding of the history of colonial Kenya and, more widely, colonialism in Africa. There is a substantial amount of new work and this is interlocked with shared areas of concern that the authors have been exploring since 1976.

The authors investigate major themes. These include the conquest origins and subsequent development of the colonial state, the contradictory social forces that articulated African societies to European capitalism, and the creation of new political communities and changing meanings of ethnicity in Africa, in the context of social differentiation and class formation. There is substantial new work on the problems of Mau Mau and of wealth, poverty and civic virtue in Kikuyu political thought.

The authors make a fresh contribution to a deeper historical understanding of the development of contemporary Kenyan society and, in particular, of the British and Kukuyu origins of Mau Mau and the emergency of the 1950s.

They also highlight some of the shortcomings of ideas about development, explore the limitations of narrowly structuralist Marxist theory of the state, and reflect on the role of history in the future of Africa.

Book Two on Violence and Ethnicity gives new insights into popular consciousness, into revolutionary change and into the subtle realities of ethnicity; it will be of particular value to readers of Ngugi.
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Unhappy Valley
Clan, Class & State In Colonial Kenya
Bruce Berman
Ohio University Press, 1991

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Unhappy Valley, Book One
Conflict in Kenya & Africa
Bruce Berman
Ohio University Press, 1992
This long-awaited book is a considerable revision in the understanding of the history of colonial Kenya and, more widely, colonialism in Africa. There is a substantial amount of new work and this is interlocked with shared areas of concern that the authors have been exploring since 1976.

The authors investigate major themes. These include the conquest origins and subsequent development of the colonial state, the contradictory social forces that articulated African societies to European capitalism, and the creation of new political communities and changing meanings of ethnicity in Africa, in the context of social differentiation and class formation. There is substantial new work on the problems of Mau Mau and of wealth, poverty and civic virtue in Kikuyu political thought.

The authors make a fresh contribution to a deeper historical understanding of the development of contemporary Kenyan society and, in particular, of the British and Kukuyu origins of Mau Mau and the emergency of the 1950s.

They also highlight some of the shortcomings of ideas about development, explore the limitations of narrowly structuralist Marxist theory of the state, and reflect on the role of history in the future of Africa.

Book One on State and Class will be used by students of African history as well as of colonial Kenya; it is also concerned with the theory of history and of political science.
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Multi-Party Politics In Kenya
The Kenyatta and Moi States and the Triumph of the System in the 1992 Election
David Throup
Ohio University Press, 1997

This book uses the Kenyan political system to address issues relevant to recent political developments throughout Africa.

The authors analyze the construction of the Moi state since 1978. They show the marginalization of Kikuyu interests as the political economy of Kenya has been reconstructed to benefit President Moi’s Kalenjin people and their allies. Mounting Kikuyu dissatisfaction led to the growth of demands for multi-party democracy.

The book places contemporary Kenyan politics and the 1992 election in their historical context, contrasting the present multi-party era with the previous one during the sixties.

The authors question the hopes for a “second independence” in Africa by demonstrating the problems faced by fledgling opposition parties in weak civil societies.

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Talkative Polity
Radio, Domination, and Citizenship in Uganda
Florence Brisset-Foucault
Ohio University Press, 2019

For the first decade of the twenty-first century, every weekend, people throughout Uganda converged to participate in ebimeeza, open debates that invited common citizens to share their political and social views. These debates, also called “People’s Parliaments,” were broadcast live on private radio stations until the government banned them in 2009. In Talkative Polity, Florence Brisset-Foucault offers the first major study of ebimeeza, which complicate our understandings of political speech in restrictive contexts and force us to move away from the simplistic binary of an authoritarian state and a liberal civil society.

Brisset-Foucault conducted fieldwork from 2005 to 2013, primarily in Kampala, interviewing some 150 orators, spectators, politicians, state officials, journalists, and NGO staff. The resulting ethnography invigorates the study of political domination and documents a short-lived but highly original sphere of political expression. Brisset-Foucault thus does justice to the richness and depth of Uganda’s complex political and radio culture as well as to the story of ambitious young people who didn’t want to behave the way the state expected them to. Positioned at the intersection of media studies and political science, Talkative Polity will help us all rethink the way in which public life works.

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Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda
Economy, Society, and Warfare in the Nineteenth Century
Richard Reid
Ohio University Press, 2002

Blessed with fertile and well-watered soil, East Africa’s kingdom of Buganda supported a relatively dense population and became a major regional power by the mid-nineteenth century. This complex and fascinating state has also long been in need of a thorough study that cuts through the image of autocracy and military might.

Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda explores the material basis of Ganda political power, gives us a new understanding of what Ganda power meant in real terms, and relates the story of how the kingdom used the resources at its disposal to meet the challenges that confronted it. Reid further explains how these same challenges ultimately limited Buganda’s dominance of the East African great lakes region.

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Moral Economies of Corruption
State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria
Steven Pierce
Duke University Press, 2016
Nigeria is famous for "419" e-mails asking recipients for bank account information and for scandals involving the disappearance of billions of dollars from government coffers. Corruption permeates even minor official interactions, from traffic control to university admissions. In Moral Economies of Corruption Steven Pierce provides a cultural history of the last 150 years of corruption in Nigeria as a case study for considering how corruption plays an important role in the processes of political change in all states. He suggests that corruption is best understood in Nigeria, as well as in all other nations, as a culturally contingent set of political discourses and historically embedded practices. The best solution to combatting Nigerian government corruption, Pierce contends, is not through attempts to prevent officials from diverting public revenue to self-interested ends, but to ask how public ends can be served by accommodating Nigeria's history of patronage as a fundamental political principle.
 
 
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Muslim Brotherhoods and Politics in Senegal
Lucy C. Behrman
Harvard University Press, 1970

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Garbage Citizenship
Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal
Rosalind Fredericks
Duke University Press, 2018
Over the last twenty-five years, garbage infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal, has taken center stage in the struggles over government, the value of labor, and the dignity of the working poor. Through strikes and public dumping, Dakar's streets have been periodically inundated with household garbage as the city's trash collectors and ordinary residents protest urban austerity. Often drawing on discourses of Islamic piety, garbage activists have provided a powerful language to critique a neoliberal mode of governing-through-disposability and assert rights to fair labor. In Garbage Citizenship Rosalind Fredericks traces Dakar's volatile trash politics to recalibrate how we understand urban infrastructure by emphasizing its material, social, and affective elements. She shows how labor is a key component of infrastructural systems and how Dakar's residents use infrastructures as a vital tool for forging collective identities and mobilizing political action. Fleshing out the materiality of trash and degraded labor, Fredericks illuminates the myriad ways waste can be a potent tool of urban control and rebellion.
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The Struggling State
Nationalism, Mass Militarization, and the Education of Eritrea
Jennifer Riggan
Temple University Press, 2016
A 2003 law in Eritrea—a notoriously closed-off, heavily militarized, and authoritarian country—mandated an additional year of school for all children and stipulated that the classes be held at Sawa, the nation’s military training center. As a result, educational institutions were directly implicated in the making of soldiers, putting Eritrean teachers in the untenable position of having to navigate between their devotion to educating the nation and their discontent with their role in the government program of mass militarization.
 
In her provocative ethnography, The Struggling State, Jennifer Riggan examines the contradictions of state power as simultaneously oppressive to and enacted by teachers. Riggan, who conducted participant observation with teachers in and out of schools, explores the tenuous hyphen between nation and state under lived conditions of everyday authoritarianism.
 
The Struggling State shows how the hopes of Eritrean teachers and students for the future of their nation have turned to a hopelessness in which they cannot imagine a future at all.
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Politics, Language, and Thought
The Somali Experience
David D. Laitin
University of Chicago Press, 1977
When the Somali Republic received independence, its parliamentary government decided to adopt three official languages: English, Italian, and Arabic—all languages of foreign contact. Since the vast majority of the nation's citizens spoke a single language, Somali, which then had no written form, this decision made governing exceedingly difficult. Selecting any one language was equally problematic, however, because those who spoke the official language would automatically become the privileged class.

Twelve years after independence, a military government was able to settle the acrimonious controversy by announcing that Somali would be the official language and Latin the basic script. It was hoped that this choice would foster political equality and strengthen the national culture. Politics, Language, and Thought is an exploration of how language and politics interrelate in the Somali Republic. Using both historical and experimental evidence, David D. Laitin demonstrates that the choice of an official language may significantly affect the course of a country's political development.

Part I of Laitin's study is an attempt to explain why the parliamentary government was incapable of reaching agreement on a national script and to assess the social and political consequences of the years of nondecision. Laitin shows how the imposition of nonindigenous languages produced inequalities which eroded the country's natural social basis of democracy.

Part 2 attempts to relate language to political thought and political culture. Analyzing interviews and role-playing sessions among Somali bilingual students, Laitin demonstrates that the impact of certain political concepts is quite different when expressed in different languages. He concludes that the implications of choosing a language are far more complex than previously thought, because to change the language of a people is to change the ways they think and act politically.
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Lineages Of State Fragility
Rural Civil Society In Guinea-Bissau
Joshua B. Forrest
Ohio University Press, 2003

In Guinea-Bissau, as elsewhere in Africa, there is a disjuncture between the central state and rural civil society. It is this significant and overlooked aspect of Guinea-Bissau’s political evolution—the continuing ability of civil society to evade and thwart state power—that is at the heart of Joshua B. Forrest’s Lineages of State Fragility.

Professor Forrest argues that despite European influences, the contemporary fragility of African states can be fully appreciated only by examining the indigenous social context in which these states evolved. Focusing on Guinea-Bissau, Forrest exposes the emergence of a strong and adaptable “rural civil society” that can be traced back to precolonial times.

Lineages of State Fragility analyzes the social, political, and military experiences of this rural civil society to account for the origins of Guinea-Bissau’s soft state. For example, Forrest identifies interethnic social and military practices that became entrenched in rural social structures and continued to evolve through the colonial period, enabling Guinea-Bissauans to resist state predation.

Lineages of State Fragility offers an unorthodox explanation of African politics by tracing the direct social links among the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods and affirms the role of rural actors in determining present-day political outcomes.

Based on remarkably extensive research conducted in archives in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, and Portugal, Lineages of State Fragility represents both a new approach to the region’s past and present and an important synthesis of the political analysis that has come before.

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Ethnic Federalism
The Ethiopian Experience in Comparative Perspective
David Turton
Ohio University Press, 2006

Since 1991, Ethiopia has gone further than any other country in using ethnicity as the fundamental organizing principle of a federal system of government. And yet this pioneering experiment in “ethnic federalism” has been largely ignored in the growing literature on democratization and ethnicity in Africa and on the accommodation of ethnic diversity in democratic states. Ethnic Federalism brings a much-needed comparative dimension to the discussion of this experiment in Ethiopia.

Ethnic Federalism closely examines aspects of the Ethiopean case and asks why the use of territorial decentralism to accommodate ethnic differences has been generally unpopular in Africa, while it is growing in popularity in the West.

The book includes case studies of Nigerian and Indian federalism and suggests how Ethiopia might learn from both the failures and successes of these older federations. In the light of these broader issues and cases, it identifies the main challenges facing Ethiopia in the next few years, as it struggles to bring political practice into line with constitutional theory and thereby achieve a genuinely federal division of powers.

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Master and Disciple
The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism
Abdellah Hammoudi
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In the postcolonial era, Arab societies have been ruled by a variety of authoritarian regimes. Focusing on his native Morocco, Abdellah Hammoudi explores the ideological and cultural foundations of this persistent authoritarianism.

Building on the work of Foucault, Hammoudi argues that at the heart of Moroccan culture lies a paradigm of authority that juxtaposes absolute authority against absolute submission. Rooted in Islamic mysticism, this paradigm can be observed in the drama of mystic initiation, with its fundamental dialectic between Master and Disciple; in conflict with other cultural forms, and reelaborated in colonial and postcolonial circumstances, it informs all major aspects of Moroccan personal, political, and gender relations. Its influence is so pervasive and so firmly embedded that it ultimately legitimizes the authoritarian structure of power. Hammoudi contends that as long as the Master-Disciple dialectic remains the dominant paradigm of power relations, male authoritarianism will prevail as the dominant political form.

"Connecting political domination to gift exchange, ritual initiation, social loyalty, and gender reversals, Master and Disciple is nothing less than a thoroughgoing revision of our understanding of authoritarian rule in Morocco and in the Arab world in general."—Clifford Geertz, Institute for Advanced Study
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Politics and Administration at the Top
Lessons from Down Under
Delmer Dunn
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997

Winner of the 1998 Charles Levine Award for best book on administration and policy

Dunn focuses on two levers of power in modern democracies, the elected party politician and the professional state bureaucrat, using Australia as his example. Dunn uses interviews with Cabinet ministers, members of their staffs, and department heads of two governments in Australia to see how ministers seek to provide political direction to the bureaucracy. He examines the extent to which they succeed and how their direction is both influenced by and acted on by the departments.
    Dunn's analysis provides a rare look at high-level relationships between politicians and executive departments in one democratic government and offers insights into issues of accountability and responsibility in democratic governments. His findings, based on his in-depth look at a government that blends many features of both U.S. and British governments, reveal the fundamentals that are necessary to make this key relationship work well and are thus pertinent to public administration in all democracies.
 

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Nation Making
Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia
Robert J. Foster, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1997


In this theoretically sophisticated volume, contributors examine the process of nation making in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu- states that attained formal political independence between 1970 and 1980. The remarkable cultural diversity within these states demands close ethnographic study of different groups and their contesting definitions of nationhood and leads to highly original approaches.

The essays explore the political conditions and cultural assumptions that inform how Melanesians variously imagine a national community. The authors interpret a wide range of materials, from political speeches and official ceremonies of state to newspaper advertisements and life crisis rites. They demonstrate both how the legacies of divisive colonial rule, the weakness of the postcolonial state, and the exigencies of capitalist markets undermine the processes of nation making in contemporary Melanesia and how new forms of popular and consumer culture potentially shape an emergent national consciousness.

Comparative and historical in its orientation, this book will appeal to readers not only in anthropology but in political science, social history, and cultural studies. It will be of special value to those interested in comparative politics and history, Pacific studies, ethnicity and nationalism, and colonial and postcolonial studies.

Robert J. Foster is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Rochester.

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The Voluntary City
Choice, Community, and Civil Society
David T. Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alexander Tabarrok, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
The rise and decline of American civic life has provoked wide-ranging responses from all quarters of society. Unfortunately, many proposals for improving our communities rely on renewed governmental efforts without a similar recognition that the inflexibility and poor accountability of governments have often worsened society's ills. The Voluntary City investigates the history of large-scale, private provision of social services, the for-profit provision of urban infrastructure and community governance, and the growing privatization of residential life in the United States to argue that most decentralized, competitive markets can contribute greatly to community renewal.
Among the fascinating topics covered are: how mutual-aid societies in America, Great Britain, and Australia provided their members with medical care, unemployment insurance, sickness insurance, and other social services before the welfare state; how private law, known historically as the law merchant, is returning in the form of arbitration; and why the rise of neighborhood associations represents the most comprehensive privatization occurring in the United States today.
The volume concludes with an epilogue that places the discoveries of The Voluntary City within the theory of market and government failure and discusses the implications of these discoveries for theories about the private provision of public goods. A refreshing challenge to the position that insists government alone can improve community life, The Voluntary City will be of special interest to students of history, law, urban life, economics, and government.
David T. Beito is Associate Professor of History, University of Alabama. Peter Gordon is Professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development and Department of Economics, University of Southern California. Alexander Tabarrok is Vice President and Research Director, the Independent Institute.
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Leadership At The Apex
Politicians and Administrators in Western Local Governments
Poul Erik Mouritzen
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002

Although the relationship between elected officials and appointed executives has often been viewed as a struggle between master and servant—with disagreements as to which individuals occupy which roles—Poul Erik Mouritzen’s and James Svara’s comparison of city governments in fourteen countries reveals more interdependence and shared influence than conflict over control.

Mouritzen and Svara bring local government to the forefront, emphasizing the sophisticated level of city management in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Their findings lead to a revision of the general view concerning the boundaries of public administration. <I>Leadership at the Apex</I> illustrates in practical ways how the democratic control of government and professional administration can coexist without undermining the logic or integrity of each other.

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Metropolitan Governance
Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation
Richard C. Feiock, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2004

Metropolitan Governance is the first book to bring together competing perspectives on the question and consequences of centralized vs. decentralized regional government. Presenting original contributions by some of the most notable names in the field of urban politics, this volume examines the organization of governments in metropolitan areas, and how that has an effect on both politics and policy.

Existing work on metropolitan governments debates the consequences of interjurisdictional competition, but neglects the role of cooperation in a decentralized system. Feiock and his contributors provide evidence that local governments successfully cooperate through a web of voluntary agreements and associations, and through collective choices of citizens. This kind of "institutional collective action" is the glue that holds institutionally fragmented communities together.

The theory of institutional collective action developed here illustrates the dynamics of decentralized governance and identifies the various ways governments cooperate and compete. Metropolitan Governance provides insight into the central role that municipal governments play in the governance of metropolitan areas. It explores the theory of institutional collective action through empirical studies of land use decisions, economic development, regional partnerships, school choice, morality issues, and boundary change—among other issues.

A one-of-a-kind, comprehensive analytical inquiry invaluable for students of political science, urban and regional planning, and public administration—as well as for scholars of urban affairs and urban politics and policymakers—Metropolitan Governance blazes new territory in the urban landscape.

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Local Interests
Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments
Sarah F. Anzia
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A policy-focused approach to understanding the role of interest groups in US municipal governments.

Local politics in the United States once seemed tranquil compared to the divisiveness and dysfunction of the country’s national politics. Those days have passed. As multiple wide-ranging crises have thrust America’s local governments into the spotlight, they have also exposed policy failures and systemic problems that have mounted for years. While issues such as policing and the cost of housing are debated nationally, much of the policymaking surrounding these issues occurs locally. In Local Interests, Sarah F. Anzia explores how local governments—and the interest groups that try to influence them—create the policies that drive the national conversation: policing, economic development, housing, and challenges of taxing and spending. 

Anzia examines local interest groups in terms of the specific policies they pursue, including how these groups get active in politics and what impact they have. By offering new perspectives on these issues, Anzia contributes to our knowledge of how interest groups function and the significant role they play in shaping broader social outcomes.
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Governing American Cities
Inter-Ethnic Coalitions, Competition, and Conflict
Michael Jones-Correa
Russell Sage Foundation, 2001
The new immigrants who have poured into the United States over the past thirty years are rapidly changing the political landscape of American cities. Like their predecessors at the turn of the century, recent immigrants have settled overwhelmingly in a few large urban areas, where they receive their first sustained experience with government in this country, including its role in policing, housing, health care, education, and the job market. Governing American Cities brings together the best research from both established and rising scholars to examine the changing demographics of America's cities, the experience of these new immigrants, and their impact on urban politics. Building on the experiences of such large ports of entry as Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston, Chicago, and Washington D.C., Governing American Cities addresses important questions about the incorporation of the newest immigrants into American political life. Are the new arrivals joining existing political coalitions or forming new ones? Where competition exists among new and old ethnic and racial groups, what are its characteristics and how can it be harnessed to meet the needs of each group? How do the answers to these questions vary across cities and regions? In one chapter, Peter Kwong uses New York's Chinatown to demonstrate how divisions within immigrant communities can cripple efforts to mobilize immigrants politically. Sociologist Guillermo Grenier uses the relationship between blacks and Latinos in Cuban-American dominated Miami to examine the nature of competition in a city largely controlled by a single ethnic group. And Matthew McKeever takes the 1997 mayoral race in Houston as an example of the importance of inter-ethnic relations in forging a successful political consensus. Other contributors compare the response of cities with different institutional set-ups; some cities have turned to the private sector to help incorporate the new arrivals, while others rely on traditional political channels. Governing American Cities crosses geographic and disciplinary borders to provide an illuminating review of the complex political negotiations taking place between new immigrants and previous residents as cities adjust to the newest ethnic succession. A solution-oriented book, the authors use concrete case studies to help formulate suggestions and strategies, and to highlight the importance of reframing urban issues away from the zero-sum battles of the past.
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Black Representation and Urban Policy
Albert Karnig and Susan Welch
University of Chicago Press, 1981
Recent years have witnessed a dramatic growth in the number of black elected officials. Although blacks still constitute barely 1 percent of elected officeholders in the nation, their increasing political power cannot be denied. In Black Representation and Urban Policy, Albert K. Karnig and Susan Welch focus on the election of blacks to mayoral and city council seats, using the most current data available on more than 250 cities. They address two major questions: What conditions promote blacks' chances of winning election to public office? Does the election of blacks to municipal office have an effect on urban policy?

In exploring the factors that underlie the election of blacks to public office, the authors found that the resources of the black community itself—the size as well as the education and income of the black population—are the best predictors of blacks' winning political office. The authors' assessment of the impact of black elected officials on urban policy constitutes perhaps their most profoundly important finding. Cities with black mayors have had greater increases in social welfare expenditures than have similar communities without black mayors. The authors point out that election of blacks to mayoral posts, then, can have more than symbolic consequences for public policy.
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Majoritarian Cities
Policy Making and Inequality in Urban Politics
Neil Kraus
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Neil Kraus evaluates both the influence of public opinion on local policy-making and the extent to which public policy addresses economic and social inequalities. Drawing on several years of fieldwork and multiple sources of data, including surveys and polls; initiatives, referenda, and election results; government documents; focus groups; interviews; and a wide assortment of secondary sources, Kraus presents case studies of two Midwestern cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Gary, Indiana. Specifically, he focuses on several major policy decisions in recent decades concerning education, law enforcement, and affordable housing in Minneapolis; and education and riverboat casino development in Gary.

Kraus finds that, on these issues, local officials frequently take action that reflects public opinion, yet the resulting policies often fail to meet the needs of the disadvantaged or ameliorate the effects of concentrated poverty. In light of citizens’ current attitudes, he concludes that if patterns of inequality are to be more effectively addressed, scholars and policymakers must transform the debate about the causes and effects of inequality in urban and metropolitan settings.

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Implementing City Sustainability
Overcoming Administrative Silos to Achieve Functional Collective Action
Rachel M. Krause and Christopher V. Hawkins
Temple University Press, 2021

Implementing City Sustainability examines the structures and processes that city governments employ to pursue environmental, social, and economic well-being within their communities. As American cities adopt sustainability objectives, they are faced with the need to overcome fuzzy-boundary, coordination, and collective action challenges to achieve successful implementation.

Sustainability goals often do not fit neatly into traditional city government structures, which tend to be organized around specific functional responsibilities, such as planning, public works, parks and recreation, and community development. The authors advance a theory of Functional Collective Action and apply it to local sustainability to explain how cities can—and in some cases do—organize to successfully administer changes to achieve complex objectives that transcend these organizational separations. Implementing City Sustainability uses a mixed-method research design and original data to provide a national overview of cities’ sustainability arrangements, as well as eight city case studies highlighting different means of organizing to achieve functional collective action.

By focusing not just on what cities are doing to further sustainability, but also on how they are doing it, the authors show how administrative structure enables—or inhibits—cities to overcome functional divides and achieve successful outcomes.

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More than Mayor or Manager
Campaigns to Change Form of Government in America's Large Cities
James H. Svara and Douglas J. Watson, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2010

Different forms of city government are in widespread use across the United States. The two most common structures are the mayor-council form and the council-manager form. In many large U.S. cities, there have been passionate movements to change the structure of city governments and equally intense efforts to defend an existing structure. Charter change (or preservation) is supported to solve problems such as legislative gridlock, corruption, weak executive leadership, short-range policies, or ineffective delivery of services. Some of these cities changed their form of government through referendum while other cities chose to retain the form in use.

More than Mayor or Manager offers in-depth case studies of fourteen large U.S. cities that have considered changing their form of government over the past two decades: St. Petersburg, Florida; Spokane, Washington; Hartford, Connecticut; Richmond, Virginia; San Diego, California; Oakland, California; Kansas City, Missouri; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Dallas, Texas; Cincinnati, Ohio; El Paso, Texas; Topeka, Kansas; St. Louis, Missouri; and Portland, Oregon. The case studies shed light on what these constitutional contests teach us about different forms of government—the causes that support movements for change, what the advocates of change promised, what is at stake for the nature of elected and professional leadership and the relationship between leaders, and why some referendums succeeded while others failed. This insightful volume will be of special interest to leaders and interest groups currently considering or facing efforts to change the form of government as well as scholars in the field of urban studies.

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Does Local Government Matter?
How Urban Policies Shape Civic Engagement
Elaine B. Sharp
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Until recently, policy evaluation has mostly meant assessing whether government programs raise reading levels, decrease teen pregnancy rates, improve air quality levels, lower drunk-driving rates, or achieve any of the other goals that government programs are ostensibly created to do. Whether or not such programs also have consequences with respect to future demands for government action and whether government programs can heighten—or dampen—citizen involvement in civic activities are questions that are typically overlooked.

This book applies such questions to local government. Employing policy feedback theory to a series of local government programs, Elaine B. Sharp shows that these programs do have consequences with respect to citizens’ political participation. Unlike other feedback theory investigations, which tend to focus on federal government programs, Sharp’s looks at a broad range of policy at the local level, including community policing programs, economic development for businesses, and neighborhood empowerment programs.

With this clear-eyed analysis, Sharp finds that local governments’ social program activities actually dampen participation of the have-nots, while cities’ development programs reinforce the political involvement of already-privileged business interests. Meanwhile, iconic urban programs such as community policing and broader programs of neighborhood empowerment fail to enhance civic engagement or build social capital at the neighborhood level; at worst, they have the potential to deepen divisions—especially racial divisions—that undercut urban neighborhoods.

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The Progressive City
Planning and Participation, 1969-1984
Clavel, Pierre
Rutgers University Press, 1986
Planning and Participation
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City and Regime in the American Republic
Stephen L. Elkin
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Stephen L. Elkin deftly combines the empirical and normative strands of political science to make a powerfully original statement about what cities are, can, and should be. Rejecting the idea that two goals of city politics—equality and efficiency—are opposed to one another, Elkin argues that a commercial republic could achieve both. He then takes the unusual step of addressing how the political institutions of the city can help to form the kind of citizenry such a republic needs.

The present workings of American urban political institutions are, Elkin maintains, characterized by a close relationship between politicians and businessmen, a relationship that promotes neither political equality nor effective social problem-solving. Elkin pays particular attention to the issue of land-use in his analysis of these failures of popular control in traditional city politics. Urban political institutions, however, are not just instruments for the dispensing of valued outcomes or devices for social problem-solving—they help to form the citizenry. Our present institutions largely define citizens as interest group adversaries and do little to encourage them to focus on the commercial public interest of the city. Elkin concludes by proposing new institutional arrangements that would be better able to harness the self-interested behavior of individuals for the common good of a commercial republic.
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City Limits
Paul E. Peterson
University of Chicago Press, 1981
Winner of the 1981 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book published in the United States on government, politics, or international affairs.

"City Limits radically reinterprets urban politics by deriving its dominant forces from the logic of the American federal structure. It is thereby able to explain some pervasive tendencies of urban political outcomes that are puzzling or scarcely noticed at all when cities are viewed as autonomous units, outside the federal framework. Professor Peterson's analysis is imaginativelyfor conceived and skillfully carried through. His beautifully finished volume will lastingly alter our understanding of urban affairs in America."—from the citation by the selection committee for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award
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Progressive Cities
The Commission Government Movement in America, 1901–1920
By Bradley Robert Rice
University of Texas Press, 1977

Although the commission government movement is often treated by historians as an element of the reform surge of the Progressive Era, this is the first full-scale study of the origins, spread, and decline of the commission idea.

Commission government originated in Galveston, Texas, where business leaders conceived the plan as a temporary measure to speed recovery from the great hurricane of 1900. Other cities in Texas and across the nation soon followed; by 1920, about 500 municipalities had adopted the plan in which elected representatives serve as heads of city departments and, collectively, as a policy-making body.

Beginning with Galveston and Houston and Des Moines, Iowa, Bradley Robert Rice presents detailed case studies of the earliest commission cities and shows how the plan was developed and modified to suit each community’s needs. He goes on to chronicle the adoption of the commission plan by other cities across the country that strove for “businesslike efficiency” as a reaction against corruption and machine politics in urban government. Most commission charters included a wide-ranging package of municipal reforms, such as the short ballot, at-large representation, nonpartisanship, civil service, and direct legislation. Yet Rice shows that the commission plan generally offered little in the way of social reform to accompany its reorganization of municipal government.

Applying a model of innovation diffusion, the author analyzes how and why the new form of city government spread across Progressive Era America. He also thoroughly explores the relationship between the commission plan and other Progressive Era reforms and reports on the reasons for its decline from both a social and a practical perspective.

Progressive Cities is described by Professor Bruce M. Stave, editor of the Journal of Urban History, as “a sound piece of work which should make a useful and worthwhile contribution to the existing scholarship on urban reform and should appeal to an audience which cuts across disciplines: history, political science, urban studies and urban planning.”

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The State and the City
Ted Robert Gurr and Desmond King
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Many of the oldest and largest Western cities today are undergoing massive economic decline. The State and the City deals with a key issue in the political economy of cities—the role of the state. Ted Robert Gurr and Desmond S. King argue that theoreticians from both the left and the right have underestimated the significance of state action for cities. Grounding theory in empirical evidence, they argue that policies of the local and national state have a major impact on urban well-being.

Gurr and King's analysis assumes modern states have their own interests, institutional momentum, and the capacity to act with relative autonomy. Their historically based analysis begins with an account of the evolution of the Western state's interest in the viability of cities since the industrial revolution. Their agument extends to the local level, examining the nature of the local state and its autonomy from national political and economic forces.

Using cross-national evidence, Gurr and King examine specific problems of urban policy in the United States and Britain. In the United States, for example, they show how the dramatic increases in federal assistance to cities in the 1930s and the 1960s were made in response to urban crises, which simultaneously threatened national interests and offered opportunities for federal expansion of power. As a result, national and local states now play significant material and regulatory roles that can have as much impact on cities as all private economic activities.

A comparative analysis of thirteen American cities reflects the range and impact of the state's activities at the urban level. Boston, they argue, has become the archetypical postindustrial public city: half of its population and personal income are directly dependent on government spending. While Gurr and King are careful to delineate the limits to the extent and effectiveness of state intervention, they conclude that these limits are much broader than formerly thought. Ultimately, their evidence suggests that the continued decline of most of the old industrial cities is the result of public decisions to allow their economic fate to be determined in the private sector.
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Latino Mayors
Political Change in the Postindustrial City
Marion Orr
Temple University Press, 2018

As recently as the early 1960s, Latinos were almost totally excluded from city politics. This makes the rise of Latino mayors in the past three decades a remarkable American story—one that explains ethnic succession, changing urban demography, and political contexts. The vibrant collection Latino Mayors features case studies of eleven Latino mayors in six American cities: San Antonio, Los Angeles, Denver, Hartford, Miami, and Providence.

The editors and contributors analyze Latino mayors for their governing styles and policies. They describe how candidates shaped race, class, and economic issues—particularly in deracialized campaigns. Latino Mayors also addresses coalition politics, political incorporation, and how community groups operate, as well as the challenges these pioneers have faced in office from political tensions and governance issues that sometimes even harm Latinos. 

Ultimately, Latino Mayors charts the performances, successes, and failures of these elected officials to represent their constituents in a changing economic and urban environment.

Contributors include: Stefanie Chambers, Carlos E. Cuéllar, Emily M. Farris, Maria Ilcheva, Robert Preuhs, Heywood T. Sanders, Ellen Shiau, and the editors.

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Careers in City Politics
The Case for Urban Democracy
Timothy Bledsoe
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993
Careers in City Politics provides an in-depth view of the vital aspects of local politics-access to political office, individual office holder's accountability to the public, the performance of councils as collective political bodies, and the often high turnover of personnel.

Timothy Bledsoe bases his findings on the political careers of more than eight-hundred city council members representing cities with large and medium populations. Tracing how some officials' careers unfolded over five years, Bledsoe studies their reasons for seeking office and examines how successful they were in adapting to their jobs. He evaluates office-holders whose council careers were cut short and those whose lengthy service qualified them as “careerists,” paying special attention to first-term officials and to those who used their seats as stepping-stones to higher political offices. In this first-of-its-kind study, Bledsoe offers specific recommendations for restoring some of the lost vigor to local politics.
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The Homevoter Hypothesis
How Home Values Influence Local Government Taxation, School Finance, and Land-Use Policies
William A. Fischel
Harvard University Press, 2004

Just as investors want the companies they hold equity in to do well, homeowners have a financial interest in the success of their communities. If neighborhood schools are good, if property taxes and crime rates are low, then the value of the homeowner’s principal asset—his home—will rise. Thus, as William Fischel shows, homeowners become watchful citizens of local government, not merely to improve their quality of life, but also to counteract the risk to their largest asset, a risk that cannot be diversified. Meanwhile, their vigilance promotes a municipal governance that provides services more efficiently than do the state or national government.

Fischel has coined the portmanteau word “homevoter” to crystallize the connection between homeownership and political involvement. The link neatly explains several vexing puzzles, such as why displacement of local taxation by state funds reduces school quality and why local governments are more likely to be efficient providers of environmental amenities. The Homevoter Hypothesis thereby makes a strong case for decentralization of the fiscal and regulatory functions of government.

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The Urban Voter
Group Conflict and Mayoral Voting Behavior in American Cities
Karen M. Kaufmann
University of Michigan Press, 2004

Karen Kaufmann's groundbreaking study shows that perceptions of interracial conflict can cause voters in local elections to focus on race, rather than party attachments or political ideologies. Using public opinion data to examine mayoral elections in New York and Los Angeles over the past 35 years, Kaufmann develops a contextual theory of local voting behavior that accounts for the Republican victories of the 1990s in these overwhelmingly Democratic cities and the "liberal revivals" that followed. Her conclusions cast new light on the interactions between government institutions, local economies, and social diversity. The Urban Voter offers a critical analysis of urban America's changing demographics and the ramifications of these changes for the future of American politics.
This book will interest scholars and students of urban politics, racial politics, and voting behavior; the author's interdisciplinary approach also incorporates theoretical insights from sociology and social psychology. The Urban Voter is appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate level courses.
Karen Kaufmann is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park.
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Political Monopolies in American Cities
The Rise and Fall of Bosses and Reformers
Jessica Trounstine
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Around the same time that Richard J. Daley governed Chicago, greasing the wheels of his notorious political machine during a tenure that lasted from 1955 to his death in 1976, Anthony “Dutch” Hamann’s “reform” government centralized authority to similar effect in San Jose. In light of their equally exclusive governing arrangements—a similarity that seems to defy their reputations—Jessica Trounstine asks whether so-called bosses and reformers are more alike than we might have realized.

Situating her in-depth studies of Chicago and San Jose in the broad context of data drawn from more than 240 cities over the course of a century, she finds that the answer—a resounding yes—illuminates the nature of political power. Both political machines and reform governments, she reveals, bias the system in favor of incumbents, effectively establishing monopolies that free governing coalitions from dependence on the support of their broader communities. Ironically, Trounstine goes on to show, the resulting loss of democratic responsiveness eventually mobilizes residents to vote monopolistic regimes out of office. Envisioning an alternative future for American cities, Trounstine concludes by suggesting solutions designed to free urban politics from this damaging cycle.
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