Representation in American Cities: Who Runs for Mayor and Who Wins?

Business leaders emerge as key players in canonical accounts of urban politics, but data limitations have hampered efforts to quantify their role in city politics. Drawing on an original dataset that includes gender, race, occupational, and political experience for over 3,500 mayoral candidates from 259 cities over fifty years, I document who runs for office and who serves as mayor, with a focus on candidates who are business owners and executives. Overall, the data indicate that mayors tend to be White and male with prior political experience and white-collar careers. Business owners and executives account for nearly one-third of the candidates in the sample, but I find no indication that they win elections at higher rates than other candidates overall. However, my results do suggest that business owners and executives have better electoral prospects in more conservative cities, especially those that hold nonpartisan elections.

Stare Decisis and the Electoral Connection: Do Retention Systems Affect Judges’ Deference to Precedent?

Using data from nearly 5,000 votes cast by more than 400 judges in courts of last resort from all 50 states, we investigate whether there is a relationship between a state’s judicial retention method and the likelihood that a judge votes to join a precedent-overturning majority. We find that relative to judges retained by institutions such as judicial commissions or state legislatures, those retained via either partisan or retention elections are significantly more likely to join majorities that overturn precedent. Most of this effect is due to behavior in high-profile cases that garner media attention. We find little evidence that an impending election moderates these effects. Finally, we find no evidence that judges retained via nonpartisan elections treat precedent differently than their institutionally retained colleagues.

The effect of district magnitude on turnout: Quasi-experimental evidence from nonpartisan elections under SNTV

The relationship between district magnitude and turnout remains hotly debated, and previous studies suggest positive, negative, and nonlinear effects depending on other institutional characteristics. This article contributes to the empirical literature by conducting a quasi-experimental test on the effect of district magnitude in a context of a single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system with weak partisan ties: municipal council elections in Japan. Exploiting a credible source of exogenous variation in district magnitude and using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we reveal that a 5-seat increase in an average-magnitude district reduces turnout by 4 percentage points, which accounts for a 6.9% drop in the size of the electorate. We reason that, in the context of SNTV with weak parties, higher district magnitude leads to information overload, which may lower voters’ incentives to turn out.

Parties as an organizational force on nonpartisan city councils

Canonical models of urban politics have often treated political parties as clientelistic patrons rather than ideological entities. I argue that parties play an important role in organizing local legislatures at the microlevel. I examine the influence of political parties in local legislatures by systematically analyzing elected officials’ behavior. By examining roll call votes cast by city council members in San Diego, I conclude that partisan coalitions play an important role in structuring local politics. My results suggest that elite party membership predicts legislative behavior—even in nonpartisan legislatures—which may help explain why partisan versus nonpartisan elections do not produce divergent policy outcomes at the macrolevel.

The Effect of Political Institutions on the Use of Citizen Participation Programs

Local governments` use of citizen participation programs is influenced by external environments, especially in the form of political institutions. Local governments decide to expand or limit citizen participation in administrative decision-making processes in response to political uncertainties created by different types of political institutions. Despite the importance of institutional contexts, few studies have examined the effects of these political institutions on the use of citizen participation programs. This study empirically tested whether political institutions affect the adoption of citizen participation programs. The results suggest that the council-manager form of government increases both the adoption of citizen participation mechanisms and the use of citizen participation programs in functional areas, while nonpartisan elections are associated only with the adoption of citizen participation mechanisms. At-large elections show no statistical association with either type of citizen participation. These findings suggest that local political contexts play important roles in the adoption of bureaucratic practices such as citizen participation programs and still support the classical assertion that public administration is closely connected to politics.