Urban Politics Midterm Flashcards
All Politics is Local(Trounstine Reading)
“ In many places local jurisdictions also hold elections more frequently than states or the federal government. This means that most elections in the United State are local elections, most campaigns are local campaigns and in some cases, most votes are local votes”
What is the local level charged with?(Trounstine Reading)
“Additionally, as a result of the decentralized structure of American government, the local level is charged with implementing many federal and state policies”
When are Republicans likely to vote?(Trounstine Reading)
“On another topic, Gimpel, Dyck, and Shaw find that Republicans are less likely to vote when they live in Democratic neighborhoods even when controlling for individual socioeconomic characteristics. Thus, the local context is likely to shape political outcomes in a variety of ways”
Regime Theory(Trounstine Reading)
“A large body of urban scholar-ship pioneered by Clarence Stone, referred to as regime theory, analyzes how informal power plays a role in the development and implementation of policy.
Political Homophily (Gerber Reading)
- The tendency to form connections with others who are politically similar
- “We find that local governments whose constituents are similar politically, in terms of partisanship and voting behavior, are more likely to collaborate with one another in regional planning efforts than those whose constituents are politically diverse. We conclude that political homophily reduces the transaction costs associated with institutional collective action, even in settings where we expect political considerations to be minimal”
Land use-planning (Gerber Reading)
- “Land-use planning is arguably one of the most important functions of local governments as it fundamentally shapes a community’s physical development, social structure, tax base, and quality of life”
- “Land-use planning involves the creation of land-use plans and zoning ordinances that specify the kinds of development and redevelopment allowed in specific areas, as well as plans for transportation systems, public facilities, physical infrastructure, open space, and environmental amenity”
Regional Planning Benefits (Gerber Reading)
- “Regional planning produces more efficient, effective, and equitable decisions about how to share the cost and benefits of development across regions”
- Institutional Collective Action (ICA) argues that collaboration will emerge when benefits of collective action outweighs the transaction cost of searching for mutually beneficial solutions”
Overspending Bias (Berry Reading)
- “A central theme in the recent literature on distributive politics is that an overspending bias emerges when authority over fiscal policy is shared by multiple officials or jurisdictions serving different constituencies”
- “A key prediction from such models is that the size of government increases with the number of spending authorities”
- “The many layers of government in the local public sector provide an ideal testing ground for the prediction that tax rates increase with the number of tax authorities. I find that aggregate taxes and spending are higher in U.S. counties where there are more overlapping jurisdictions”
- “If district officials set budgets independently and overvalue the services they provide, relative to the social valuation of the services, an upward spending bias will emerge. In a general-purpose government, on the other hand, high demanders of different services must compete with one another for a share of the general fund”
Special Districts (Berry Reading)
- “The reform tradition in public administration (e.g., ACIR 1964; Bollens 1957) contends that special districts are a source of wasteful duplication in the administration of public services, that special districts suffer from diseconomies of scale, and that their low visibility makes these jurisdictions politically unaccountable. Proponents of this view argue for metropolitan-wide government and promote consolidation of existing jurisdictions”
- “On the other hand, scholars of the public choice school (e.g., Schneider 1989) and proponents of “polycentricity” (Ostrom, Bish, and Ostrom 1988) argue that special district governments enhance desirable inter jurisdictional competition, increase the number of public service bundles available for local citizens to choose from, and allow jurisdictional boundaries to be tailored to the geographic scope of specific public problems”
Special Function Jurisdiction (Berry Reading )
- “Most [Special Function Jurisdiction] (SFJs) perform a single function, although some provide a few related services. Almost any service provided by a municipality can be provided by an SFJ. School districts are the most common type of SFJ. Among the 35,000 non-school SFJs, some of the most common functions include fire protection, water, sanitation, parks, and libraries”
- SFJs are autonomous and territorially overlapping”
- “According to Census Bureau criteria for defining special districts, “Fiscal independence generally derives from the power of an entity to determine its budget without review and detailed modification by other local officials or governments, to determine taxes to be levied for its support, to fix and collect charges for its services, or to issue debt without review by another local government”
- “In practice, most non taxing districts have appointed boards, whereas taxing districts are typically governed by an elected board”
The Common Pool Problem (Berry Reading)
- “Governments that cover the same territory cannot attract residents away from each other. Instead of competing with each other, overlapping governments share the authority to tax and provide services to the same residence” This sets the condition for a fiscal common pool problem.
- “The combination of selective political participation by policy-specific interest groups and the institutional capacity of SFJs to deliver concentrated benefits with diffuse costs is a recipe for a fiscal common-pool problem”
Samuelsonian Optimum(Berry Reading)
The point at which the sum of marginal benefits equal marginal cost.
Problems with SFJs(Berry Reading)
- “Local governments are seldom run by benevolent dictators. Sfjs are particularly vulnerable to capture by interest groups operating in their policy domain”
- “Because sfj’s elections are held off-year and off cycle from more prominent national and state races , the cost to the average voter of participating in all of these elections are relatively high - in both time and information gathering.” Thus, turn out for sfj elections are notoriously low
Participants of Single Function Elections (Berry Reading)
“The people who participate in single-function elections are likely to differ from those who participate in general-purpose elections; specifically, high demands of single-function services. i.e., interest groups? are more likely to participate.” As a result, policies that please single-function voters will involve higher spending than policies that please the general purpose voters.
SFJ Budget Proposal (Berry Reading)
“Because she does not internalize the full tax burden of additional spending, each minister proposes a budget that is larger than what is socially optimal”
Who becomes involved in special function politics? (Berry Reading)
“A related possibility is that special-function politics involves self-selection by politicians rather than (or in addition to) voters. In other words, SFJs, like congressional committees, may attract “preference outliers” with respect to the relevant service.13 For instance, it is not hard to imagine that individuals who place an especially high value on parks will be more likely to want to serve on a park board/committee”
Fiscal Illusion (Berry Reading)
Voters may not perceive the full costs of taxation when taxes are levied in smaller amounts by a larger number of less prominent governments
What is the potential for jurisdictional overlap? (Berry Reading)
“The potential for jurisdictional overlap is a function of the number of SFJs Relative to municipalities, all else equal”
Own Source Revenue (Berry Reading)
- Refers to all locally raised revenue and excludes intergovernmental transfers
- “The share of adults with a college degree is also positively related to local own-source revenue, suggesting that more highly educated voters demand more government services, all else equal”
Wagner Law (Berry Reading)
The expectation is that demand for government services increases with income
Municipality (Berry Reading)
- A city or town that is incorporated and can elect its own government
- “My expectation is that where it is easier to form new municipalities, there should be less jurisdictional overlap”
Benefits of SFJs (Berry Reading)
- “Another explanation for higher spending where there are more overlapping jurisdictions is that counties with more jurisdictions simply provide a broader array of government services”
Common Function (Berry Reading)
The idea is to restrict the analysis to a core set of functions provided in nearly every county and ask whether more is spent on those functions when they are provided by a larger number of overlapping governments. Common functions are services provided in at least 90% of counties.
Why the overspending by SFJs (Berry Reading)
- “If special districts are used to expand the variety of local public services, this alone cannot explain the increase in spending associated with jurisdictional overlap”
- “In states where municipalities are subject to debt, tax, or expenditure limitations, it may be the case that special districts, which are not commonly subject to such restriction are formed to evade the ceilings on municipal budgets”
Optimum Size? (Peterson Reading)
“Local governments must concern themselves with operating local services as efficiently as possible in order to protect the city’s economic interest. But there is little evidence that there is an optimum size at which services can be delivered with the greatest efficiency”
The Interest of Cities (Peterson Reading)
- “The interest of cities is neither a summation of individual interest nor the pursuit of optimum size. instead, policies and programs can be said to be in the interest of cities whenever the policies maintain or enhance the economic position, social prestige, or political power of the city, taken as a whole”
- “Cities have these interests because cities consist of a set of social interactions structured by their location in a particular territorial space”
How to know whether a policy is within a city’s interest? (Peterson Reading)
- “In determining whether a policy is in the interest of a city, therefore, one does not consider whether it has a positive or negative effect on the total range of social interactions of each and every individual. That is an impossible task.
- To know whether a policy is in a cities interest, one has to consider only the impact on social relationships and so far as they are structured by their taking place within the city’s boundaries”
How do cities seek to improve their position? (Peterson Reading)
“Cities, like all structured social systems, seek to improve their position in all three of the systems of stratification - economic, social, and protocol - characteristics of industrial societies. In most cases, improving standing in any one of these systems helps enhance a city’s position in the other two. In the short run to be sure, cities may have to choose among economic gains, social prestige, and political weight.
- However, economics does seem to be a pretty important objective for most cities.
Export is important to cities (Peterson Reading)
- “Export is of great importance to the well-being of a city”
- “To export successfully, cities must make efficient use of the three main factors of production: land, labor, and capital”
- “Land is the factor to which cities are bound. Cities remain wedded to the land area in which it is blessed or cursed”
- “Historically the most important variable affecting urban growth has been an area’s relationship to land and water routes”
Climate, Land and Location - Cities (Peterson Reading)
- “Climate also determine the cost and desirability of habitation; Soil affects food production in surrounding areas; Terrain affects drainage, rates of air pollution and scenic beauty”
- “Cities intersection of land and location with the larger national and world economy is crucial to the city’s fate”
Land Use and Cities (Peterson Reading)
“The discretion available to a local government in determining its land use remains the greatest arena for the exercise of local autonomy”
Labor and Cities (Peterson Reading)
- “Cities must also attract productive labor. However local governments in the United States are limited in their capacity to control the flow of labor”
- “Unlike Nation States cities cannot control movement across their boundaries”
- “Competition among cities are now for highly skilled workers and professional and managerial talents like doctors”
- “Through zoning laws, cities can ensure that adequate land is available for middle class residences. They can provide parks, recreation areas, and good qualities schools in areas where the economically most productive live”
Capital and Cities (Peterson Reading)
- “Capital is the second factor of production that must be attracted to an economically productive territory”
- “At the local level in the United States cities are much less able to control the flow of capital”
- “Local governments cannot spend more than they receive in tax revenue without damaging their credit or even running the risk of bankruptcy”
- “Local governments can entice the capital in their area by minimizing the tax on capital and on profit from capital investment”
- “Cities can discourage labor from unionizing so as to keep industrial labor cost competitive”
Horizontal Contraints
Constraints that are imposed on cities and towns by other surrounding governments
Local governments are highly variable
Local government institutional structure (and variation!)
- Strong mayor vs. city manager/council (and variations w/in these systems)
- Electoral timing
Regional fragmentation
- Competition from surrounding local governments
- Overlapping jurisdiction
- Regional governments can help to solve coordination challenges
restricted by powers/regulations from state and federal governments
Strong mayor city
- Cities where the mayor wields a lot of power.
- In some cities, the mayor is a ceremonial figurehead and doesn’t have a lot of power. The electorate has an easier way of knowing who to hold accountable for anything(the mayor)
Town Meeting
Many new england towns are governed by this system.
- Creates a legislative body.
- Everyone in the town is a member of the legislative body.
- This can get messy and unpredictable. They are voting on zoning laws.
- There is an executive branch: the select board(4-5 people) holds authority over appointing people to boards and committees.
School Committee
Elected separately and the rest of the local government does not have a lot of say in educational policy.
Role of Unelected Boards(unelected boards with lots of policymaking authority)
- Housing development approval
- People on these boards are usually volunteers
Different modes of accountability
- Elected officials - Often represents a fairly represent subset of the electorate
- Appointed officials
Electoral Timing
Local elections can happen at very different times(Presidential, Midterm, Off-cycle)
When local elections happen at off-cycle times there is less turnout than when they coincide with presidential and/or midterm elections
Many local elections are nonpartisan
Reasons people participate in politics(vote)
- You have to be interested in what’s going on
- Personal stake
- Partisanship
- Time
- Access to the franchise(polling place proximity/wait times)(knowledge about election timing)
- recruitment/engagement (whether politicians/political parties actually reach out to electorates)
Electoral demographics
- People likely to turnout in off-cycle elections - White, old, homeowners
- Senior homeowners are overrepresented in every city
Fragmentation
People get to self-select into the types of communities that best fit their needs
This could lead to segregation(communities of people who want good schools)
People can get services that are more narrowly tailored to them
Promotes self-governance: people get a more direct say
Summary of Peterson Reading
Goal of cities overall is to maximize economic position, prosperity.
The more places you have to compete with, the more pressure
People are going to go to place that offer them the optimal bundle of goods and services
Balancing act of figuring out the optimal tax rate and bundle of social goods
Peterson focus on economics and not politics
Universities and hospitals are not TAX payers
Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) - negotiated payments, a voluntary payment - so institutions pay it to keep up their reputation and also if they don’t pay it, the city could make for example BU’s life harder. To build the CDS required a lot of permits from the city of Boston. Also paying the PILOT is also about the institution’s ability to pay. BU is a very wealthy institution so it can offered to pay the PILOT
Vote-With-Your-Feet
well off individuals usually gets to vote with their feet
Anchor Institutions
Strong physical infrastructure that bases an institution in a certain community.
Anchor institutions challenge the framework that Peterson introduced because places like Boston that have so many anchor institutions(universities, hospitals) that are huge and always hiring people.
So Boston does not have the problem of needing highly skilled talent because they already have those people and the demand for those people in Boston remains constant.
Boston is not in competition for talent. They don’t need to pursue these developmental opportunities because they already have guaranteed institutions that attract capital.
Ambulances
The allocation of ambulances is based on the senior population.
Ways to get around the problems of fragmentation?
Regional cooperation
Important variations!
- Voluntary agreements between local governments
- Imposed top-down from state/federal government (Can mandate certain regional protections)
Why might local governments choose to give up some of their autonomy and cooperate with one another?(And why might they choose not to cooperate?)
Internal capacity - smaller local governments have
less capacity because they have less staff capacity so they might want to cooperate with some of the bigger cities to pool resources. They might also cooperate with other small local governments to apply for federal grants together.
Mutual benefits - transportation(subways, trains) across different cities. Regional cooperation can help cities address negative externalities
Basic technical assistance
NOT
Cities don’t want to act in their own interest (Don’t want to lose autonomy)
Cities don’t want to share a tax base and resources (Don’t want to lose autonomy)
Wealthy neighborhoods wouldn’t want to cooperate do to transportation and racial biases
Political similarities can make cities want to cooperate with each other
Why create government(SPDs) for specific policies
Specialization and expertise
Drawbacks
- Whether SPD’s are efficiency enhancing
- It’s hard to hold them accountable
- There is not a lot of contested SPD elections(people who own more property have greater voting powers)
Summary of the Berry Reading
Overfishing - when multiple local governments are taxing the same tax base, this result in a problem where more taxes are being levied without an improvement in government services
Strong relationship between having lot of different special purpose governments and greater taxation
gas prices and rural communities (Cramer Reading)
“Few people like raising gas prices, but to people in rural communities-who typically drive long distances to everything-gas prices are a major source of concern”
“There concerns are also farming, schools and property taxes”
The identity of rural communities (Cramer Reading)
“As the population in rural places dwindles, the possibility of school consolidation increases, and the identity of the town-it’s schools-dry up and blow away”
Rural Consciousness (Cramer Reading)
“For many people in rural communities, people understand public issues through a lens of rural consciousness. This is a perspective that encompasses a strong identity as a rural resident, resentment toward the cities, and a belief that rural communities are not given their fair share of resources or respect”
Rural Consciousness has three main elements: first rural Consciousness was about perceptions of power, or who makes decisions and who decides what to even discuss. Second it showed up with respect to perceptions of values and lifestyles. Third it involved perceptions of resources or who gets what”
McCarthyism(Cramer Reading)
The post World War II anti-communist scare”. Joe McCarthy was a US senator that is responsible for McCarthyism
Bob la Follette
Father of progressivism
Urban vs. Rural (Cramer Reading)
“People in rural areas often perceived that government was particularly dismissive of the concerns of people in rural communities”
“The urban versus rural divide is undoubtedly in part about race”
When Democrats suffer (Rodden Reading)
“The Democrats suffer in the transformation of votes seats most clearly in states that are hotly contested, like Pennsylvania, as well as in states where they typically expect to win majorities, like New York”
Where do Democrats and Republicans live (Rodden Reading)
“Democrats are more likely to live in homogeneous Democratic neighborhoods, whereas Republicans are more likely to live in mixed neighborhoods
“Democrats are usually in urban districts”
Hope for minority parties (Rodden Reading)
“In some places the minority parties only hope for legislative representation is If it’s supporters are clustered so that they form majorities in one or more district”
Vote to Seat shares (Rodden Reading)
“Because of the way voters are typically distributed across districts, the winning party typically receives a seat share that is substantially higher than its votes shares”
“Within region city populations are often arranged in hierarchies, such that the largest city is twice as large as a second largest city, and so on”
Gerrymandering (Rodden Reading)
In representative electoral systems, gerrymandering is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage for a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency
“Gerrymandering often makes things worse for the Democrats when Republicans have drawn the districts, and a Democrats improve their seat shares when they have the opportunity to draw the district”
Possible campaign tactic for local low-profile elections (Hopkins Reading)
“On their own, low-profile elections like a state supreme court retention election rarely attract much voter interest, so tying opponents to divisive national issue is a common campaign tactic”
“From the candidates’ vantagepoint, the rationale behind such attacks seems obvious. National politics is rife with people and issues that are evocative to voters. To say “Obamacare” or “Mitt Romney” is to cue a set of meaningful associations with the national parties, the social groups that support them, and the positions that they take. Contemporary state and local politics are presumed to be mostly devoid of such symbols, meaning that national politics can serve as a ready benchmark against which to understand otherwise unknown state and local candidates”
How Democrats and Republicans are perceived (Hopkins Reading)
“Just as an Egg McMuffin is the same in every McDonald’s, America’s two major political parties are increasingly perceived to offer the same choices throughout the country”
“To ignore state and local politics is a costly omission, as it means ignoring the politics that elect the vast majority of officials in the U.S. as well as the policy areas where states and localities hold sway”
How to stop taking nationalization of contemporary politics for granted (Hopkins Reading)
“One way to stop taking the nationalization of contemporary politics for granted— and to recognize the importance of studying nationalization—is to think back to America’s earliest days as a nation. For the framers of the U.S. Constitution, citizens’ state-level loyalties were expected to be far stronger than those to the newborn nation”
“Citizens were also more likely to encounter state employees than employees of a distant federal government”
The difference in American communities is important (Hopkins Reading)
“It is not just partisan leanings that differ across American communities. Political mobilization and political behavior do, too. Since many political activities require face-to-face interactions, people who live in certain places are more likely to be asked to sign a petition, attend a campaign event, donate to a candidate, or vote than people living elsewhere”
Nationalized Political Behavior (Hopkins Reading)
“One feature of nationalized political behavior is that it is oriented toward the national level of government and its divisions, to the near-exclusion of the state or local levels. Still, how people engage in national politics is known to be related to various individual-level factors, from their social class and racial and ethnic background to their religious backgrounds and engagement, age cohort, and other characteristics”
“But those differences are primarily due to compositional differences in who lives where rather than the contextual effect of living in a specific place. When political attitudes and behavior are nationalized, similar people subject to similar information environments and mobilization efforts should respond in similar ways”
Geography and American Political Behavior (Hopkins Reading)
“To contend that American political behavior is nationalizing is not to argue for the death of distance or the irrelevance of geography. To the contrary, this book is motivated precisely by the fact that geography remains a powerful determinant of so many aspects of Americans’ social and economic lives. The quality of schools, the danger of crime, the availability of jobs, the presence of pollution—all of these concerns affect some neighborhoods, municipalities, and regions far more than others”
The Transformation of U.S. media market (Hopkins Reading)
“One proximate cause emphasized here is the transformation of the U.S. media market. As Americans switch from reading print newspapers and watching local TV news to online news sources and cable television, they are moving away from news sources that provide significant information about state and local politics”
“People think about themselves as members of varying social groups, and those attachments prove critical in explaining how they handle new information, the attitudes they adopt, and the actions they take. Two people might be categorized as identical based on demographic categories, for instance, and yet they may differ dramatically in what they understand those categories to mean for their lives”
“Overwhelming media attention on the U.S. presidency might be one factor behind the disproportionate interest in national politics”
Why do voters care more about national politics? (Hopkins Reading)
Basically since authority seemingly has shifted from state and local governments to the federal government voters care more about national politics
The economy and nationalization (Hopkins Reading)
The observation that the American economy has grown more nationally integrated over the same period gives reason to think that economic factors might play an important role as well. During its history as an agricultural and then industrial country, America’s economies were very distinctive regionally: cotton was the product of south and later the southwest, cars were made in the midwest, and potatoes came from Idaho and other northern and western states. But the service-oriented economy of recent decades has reduced regional economic distinctiveness”
“These economic shifts remain a valuable backdrop that might help explain the nationalizing political parties”
Partisan Identification (Hopkins Reading)
“Few voters have different partisan identifications at different levels of government, further undermining the capacity of state or local politics to sustain divisions that are not animated nationally”
Funding - where do local governments get their money from?
Revenue from taxes
Intergovernmental transfers
charges/fines
Parking tickets and speeding tickets
Forms of Taxation
Property
Sales tax
Individual income tax
If you’re a city that’s highly reliant on property tax base, what kinds of projects/policies will you be more interested in?
Public services (Public transportation)
Higher value housing
Cities vulnerability to competition from surrounding local governments
Physical location(less vulnerable)
- Being close to a beach
- Having anchor institutions
- Having lots of land area for development
Demographics of community
- Having lots of school age children will put a lot of fiscal pressure on the school system
- Having an aging population are less expensive for a city than school age children
- Having a lot of people with college degrees is attractive to businesses
Property tax rates
Access to amenities
Urban/rural divide
Cost of housing
Crime
Funding requirements
State/federal funding can come with strings attached!
Ex. cities have to engage in Regional planning to get the funds
Funding Process
Most large investments in cities are structured as block grants, which means you have to apply for the $$$
Lots of paperwork
And you have to wait for a bit for the $$$
Many cities don’t have great grant writing ability: like they don’t have the staff that know how to apply for the grants
Bigger richer cities are the ones that have the capability to apply for grants
Regulations(Local governments are highly regulated)
Preemption law - the state government taking away power from the local government
Ex. states banning local governments from banning plastic bags
Why do states do preemption law?
- Symbolic partisan politics
- To get headlines
- Businesses lobby the state
- Like a grocery store might find it annoying to just use reusable bags in one local government district and plastic bag everywhere else in the state, so the grocery store lobbies to the state to get that local government to not ban plastic bags
Tax and expenditure limits(TEL)
- State governments can limit how much a local government can spend or raise or both.
What is the rationale behind setting these limits?
- To limit taxation at the local level
So what do local governments do if their community needs more $$?
You can vote on it!
Budget override = a community asses a specific amount of property taxes in addition to it levy limit
(The general budget of a community and a budget override is just asking for more money for the general budget)
Debt exclusion = a community can assess additional taxes to pay their debt services(principal + interest) for a specific capital project (ex. a new school building)
(Debt exclusion is used to fund specific projects like building a new school)
These types of votes usually have low turnout
If you are in a community that is less diverse than budget overrides and debt exclusion are less likely to pass
Summary fo Rodden Reading
Political geography
How democrats are distributed may be a disadvantage for them and this happens in 50/50 split states
Democrats tend to be more spatially clustered than republicans particularly in more dense and urban areas.
If we were in a proportional representation system, it would not matter where democrats live
Rodden runs thousands of simulations
Districts get drawn every 10 years for the census; the party in charge gets to draw the districts in some places; in other states districts are drawn by bipartisan commission
Legislative districts have to be equal in population
Incumbents prefer to have districts drawn these ways so that they can get re-elected
This pattern is seen in the industrial core
In contrast in a red state the clustering of democrats might be the only way that democrats gets legislative seats
Summary of Cramer Reading
Cramer’s argument: Living in a rural area has a causal effect on your political views
Where I live shapes my values and thus will determine who I vote for
What are things in rural places that people are concerned about?
- Gas prices because things are so spread out so people have to drive a longer distance
- People in rural areas are looking around them and they are not liking what they see and that is what shapes there politics
- Hard work vs. the social safety net (Poor rural people don’t want welfare and a safety net due to their pride. So when they vote for people like Trump they are not voting against their interest because they aren’t interested in things like welfare which is not something that Trump is offering)
- Race
- They are concerned that cities make decisions that affect the rural areas but the cities don’t listen to what the rural areas want
- They aren’t fans of public sector or university employees (In rural areas the people who are working in the public sector usually make the most money; so like school teachers which is not the case in cities where public school teachers don’t make that much money)
- The tourist economy (People buying there very expensive 2nd homes; this drives up urban resentment; also creates this perception of urban areas being richer than they might actually be)
- That they have different lifestyles than people who live in urban areas
Summary of Hopkins Reading
People use their views on national politics to make their judgements on local politics
What is the nationalization of state and local politics?
- The rise of cable news and the internet news is focused on national news
- Massive decline in local media providers
- Big growth in polarization and partisanship
- We as voting citizens are holding politicians accountable for the stances they are taking on national issues and these are things that they have no control over
Segregation due to zoning laws (Trounstine Reading)
“Political leaders often use threats to public safety as a rationale for legislating segregation with zoning laws for example”
“As zoning practice is spread through the 1920s, emphasis on the enhancement of property values became the dominant argument; almost universally, it was believed that the wrong sorts of people’s residing, or even working, in an area could negatively impact property values”
Why city governments protect property values? (Trounstine Reading)
“Aside from adding wealth to property owning and voting residence, city governments had a separate reason to protect and enhance property values - taxes”
“When property values declined, municipal officials face the unwelcome task of raising taxes or cutting the budget”
“As Municipal governments began to spend vast sums on improving the lives and environments of residence, ensuring that white, wealthy residents benefit from the new city services became a utmost importance”
“As a result, in many cities, black areas lacked municipal services such as paving, water, sewage, lighting and garbage removal”
Racial zoning (Trounstine Reading)
“Fighting racial zoning was one of the early nationwide causes to be adopted by the NAACP, and due to the organization’s work in 1917, the Supreme Court ruled as racial zoning unconstitutional and Buchanan versus Warley”
