What I Learned (and Re-Learned) When I Ran for Local Office

Extract

As political scientists, many of us encourage our students to get involved in community activities and local politics; and in fact many of our political science colleagues have run for state and local (and, less frequently, national) office. While the literature on parties, elections, and voting behavior may help provide us with some context when we (or our students) enter the political arena, there is a striking dearth of literature on voting behavior (and candidate behavior) in local elections. What Herson (1957) referred to as “the lost world of municipal government” can still be so characterized today, though a few recent studies have attempted to predict winners of municipal races (for example, McGleneghan and Ragland 2002; Lieske 1989). This article analyzes my own education in local politics, which resulted from my candidacy for the Town Council of Cazenovia, New York in November, 2005. I came to the experience of participating in a local campaign with expectations shaped by my teaching and research in American politics at the national level, and found that these expectations often gave way to the specifics of context. Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist running for Congress in 2006, expressed this sentiment as: “Political science is all generalities. Politics is all individual circumstances” (Fischer 2006).