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Urban Politics in the State Arena

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2009

Nancy Burns ,
Laura Evans ,
Gerald Gamm  and
Corrine McConnaughy
Nancy Burns
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
Laura Evans
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Harvard University
Gerald Gamm
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
Corrine McConnaughy
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Abstract

We seek to explain how states govern big cities. Political scientists' accounts of urban politics either fail to treat the state systematically or place state hostility at the center of such an account. Accounts by historians, by contrast, offer tools political scientists can use to theorize urban politics in the state arena. We use those tools, and we find that cities can manage the legislative process. This power starts with bill introduction and carries through to the vote on the floor. This ability results from a central feature of American state politics: on bills about big cities, state legislators now and in the past find their primary voting cues in the unity of local delegations. The city delegation, then, has tremendous power to manage the state's involvement in city affairs. In many respects, ours is an account of a special kind of divided government, with two institutional arenas where urban government is carried out.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , April 2009 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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46. Alabama data are from 1880, 1900, 1919, 1939, 1961, 1981, and 1997. To draw our bill samples, we first combed through every bill introduced into the legislature in a given year to develop the universe of bills about local government introduced into these legislatures. From these universes, we drew our random samples.

47. We also traveled to the largest cities in each of these states; we worked in their archives and in their clerks' offices to collect city documents and city council minutes. We read local newspapers as well.

48. There were no big-city bills introduced into the Texas legislature in the early years considered in this paper.

49. There is only one instance in our sample where a bill that was supported unanimously by the big-city delegation failed to pass, but this bill failed for procedural reasons. In Illinois in 1941, one bill affecting Chicago enjoyed unanimous support from all members who were voting that day, but it did not pass, since only 62 of the 153 members of the legislature are present for the vote. We found no discussion or complaints about this bill in city council minutes or in The Chicago Tribune, even though both sources had extensive commentary on other state legislative matters.

50. Detroit is not unique, of course. We found strikingly similar, regular patterns, for example, in our reading of Boston papers and council minutes of local “outrage” over “interference” when the state legislature acted on matters where local politicians escalated the conflict. Indeed, Thomas N. Hart, the Republican mayor of Boston, asserted in his 1901 annual address that “whenever and wherever we fail to satisfy the reasonable requirements of the city, the Commonwealth is pretty sure to be called upon for interference, and generally responds.” Boston City Council, 1901 Minutes, 2. In places like San Francisco and Seattle, with generous home-rule provisions, we found less expressed anxiety about interactions with the state. Home rule, of course, granted fewer opportunities to carry out local politics in the state arena.

51. Detroit Common Council, 1902 Minutes, 2.

52. Detroit Free Press, February 17, 1901, 4.

53. Detroit Free Press, March 23, 1901, 1; March 24, 1901, 1.

54. Detroit Evening News, February 20, 1901, 1.

55. Detroit Evening News, May 3, 1901, 1.

56. Detroit Free Press, March 25, 1901, 2.

57. Detroit Evening News, May 3, 1901, 3.

58. Ibid.

59. Detroit Free Press, February 15, 1901.

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72. Note that we used 1896 returns to measure party differences in 1880. We have been unable to locate county-level returns prior to 1896.

73. That is, a proportionately larger nonwhite population in the city indicates that it needs to protect its racial interests, which it does in part by presenting a united front. The effect we might find here is, we believe, representative of two distinct racial effects. The first effect, dominant in the years prior to the civil rights movement, is unification on the part of white legislators worried about the threat posed to their white constituents by a large African American population. The second effect is the unification of African American legislators in efforts to serve the distinct needs of their nonwhite constituents.

74. Homogeneous racial composition in the city refers to less than 10 percent black population; homogeneous immigrant composition is less than 20 percent immigrant. State immigrant measure is percent of state population.

75. After Baker v. Carr (1962), states were required to address malapportionment in their legislatures and to distribute seats evenly across the state population. As a result, urban delegations in state legislatures grew and rural delegations shrunk.

76. Carey, John, Niemi, Richard G., and Powell, Lynda W., Term Limits in the State Legislatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000)Google Scholar. Data on legislative pay for 1941–1997 come from the Council of State Governments' Book of the States and from the Michigan Official Directory and Legislative Manual for 1881–1921 (1895 data are used for 1881). Our measure of the state's per capita income comes from the U.S. Bureau of the Census's Statistical Abstract for 1921–1997 and from Easterlin (1957) for earlier years. Easterlin, Richard M., “State Income Estimates,” in Population Redistribution and Economic Growth: United States, 1870–1950, vol.1 (Philadelphia, PA: The American Philosophical Society, 1957)Google Scholar. We incorporated per diem pay and pay to defray living expenses into our measure. Initially, we used a more continuous version of this measure, but use this threshold measure for ease of interpretation. We also considered a measure of actual days in session. Although this measure is correlated with our measure of legislator pay at 0.60, it had a systematic coefficient of 0 in all of our models.

77. Browning, Rufus P., Marshall, Dale Rogers, and Tabb, David H., Protest is Not Enough (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

78. Kantor, The Dependent City, 10.

79. The sample size declines considerably between Table 5 and Table 6 because only a minority of bills makes it to a floor vote. In the early years of the sample, many cities did not yet have suburbs, so the sample size is even smaller for urban-suburban vote splits.

80. We estimated bivariate regressions of the percentage of rural support on united big-city delegations, and the percentage of suburban support on united big-city delegations. The coefficients in all of these cases were nearly identical, and they were always statistically significant.

81. We also find a remarkable lack of division when looking at party breakdowns in voting. In state legislatures where members have partisan identification, the median party difference in voting is 2 percent. The difference in party support is 50 percent or greater for only 8 percent of big-city bills and 6 percent of general bills about localities.

82. We estimated more elaborate multivariate models as well. The results were the same, and so we report these simpler statistics here.

83. Of course, keep in mind that we expect one out of twenty of these robustness tests to be significant due simply to random chance.

84. Allard, Burns, and Gamm, “Representing Urban Interests.”

85. This result is exactly as Kingdon (Congressmen's Voting Decisions) would have predicted.

86. When the sample is limited to nonunanimous votes, the p-value for the estimate of unity's effect is .08 for the urban-suburban vote split and .13 for the urban-rural vote split.

87. Of course, the smaller magnitudes—relative to Table 6—for the models examining near unanimity are to be expected. When votes are nearly unanimous, there is less room for variation between urban and nonurban votes, so the impact of unity will by necessity be smaller. In contrast, the estimates for more contentious votes are not similarly constrained.

88. Specifically, we reviewed bill descriptions and identified bills that seemed especially important and especially trivial for a subsample: bills from 1901 to 1997 from California, Illinois, Michigan, and Montana. We flagged thirty bills that were especially important and twenty-seven bills that were remarkably trivial. Important bills included legislation “to abolish the Chicago Transit Board and to establish the Board of Directors of the Regional Transportation Authority as the governing body of the Chicago Transit Authority” in Illinois in 1981 and “to submit to the electors of Wayne County the question of detaching certain territory and organizing a new county therefrom” in Michigan in 1881. Trivial bills included legislation that proposed to “appropriate $15,000 for a national encampment” of the Veterans of Foreign Wars to be held in Detroit, Michigan, in 1941 and to “provide for the erection of a shaft to the memory of Nathanial Pope,” in Lincoln Park, Chicago, in Illinois in 1921. Remarkably, the outcomes for these trivial and important bills were not notably different. Sixty-two percent of the very important bills came to vote on the floor; 60 percent of the trivial bills made it to a vote. The trivial bills passed with 98 percent support; the important bills passed with 86 percent support. For the very important bills, the average absolute difference between urban and rural votes was 8 percent, and the average absolute difference between urban and suburban votes was 9 percent. For the very trivial bills, the urban-rural and urban-suburban divides in voting averaged 4 percent and 2 percent, respectively.

89. “Young Goes for Broke with Save-The-City Plan,” Detroit Free Press, March 23, 1981, A1; “Bigwigs Plead City's Tax-Hike Case,” Detroit Free Press, May 27, 1981, A3.

90. Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Michigan, 1981, 1346.

91. Jewell, The State Legislature, 33. Later, Hamm, Harmel, and Thompson offered evidence consistent with Jewell's argument: at least in South Carolina and Texas, and at least in the 1960s and 1970s, “additional ethnic representation, as well as additional minority party representation … may lead to a significant decline in delegation cohesion.” “Impacts of Districting Change,” 555.

92. Derge, “Metropolitan and Out-State Alignments,” 1062.

93. Ibid., 1065.

94. Baker, The Reapportionment Revolution, 29.