This paper examines Bermuda's effort to abolish elected municipal representation, an extreme manifestation of longstanding debates over the value and role of urban local government. The case provides a window onto widely relevant questions about the value of cities as loci for governance, trade-offs between different definitions of efficiency, and the merits of local autonomy. Drawing on interviews with individuals familiar with the proposed changes, the research finds that most interviewees and members of the public do not support abolishing local elections. Four key differences of opinion regarding the proposed changes were identified: competing interpretations of how “efficiency” relates to municipal governance, divergent perspectives on the value of local autonomy, different beliefs regarding how best to respond to inequalities, and disagreements concerning whether incremental adjustments to institutions are preferable to sweeping change. The paper concludes by drawing lessons for Bermuda and other places engaged in debates over urban governance.
Scholars, officeholders, advocacy organizations, and the media have expressed concern that the growing violence against officeholders harms democracy by increasing politicians’ self-censorship in office. Self-censoring includes avoiding contact with constituents, avoiding addressing controversial issues, and depressed political ambition. This may be particularly true for women as they are more likely than men to experience violence and more of specific types of violence. Using a survey of all U.S. mayors in cities of 10,000+, we demonstrate that violent experiences do indeed result in meaningful self-censorship. We also find that self-censorship is more prevalent for women largely because women face more and more personalized violence such as sexualized violence. Thus, this research contributes to the literature by examining the relationship between violence—including levels and types—and self-censoring behaviors by officeholders. It adds a new layer of understanding of the consequences of violence aimed at those who hold public elective office.
Intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) has emerged globally as a way of addressing the many challenges faced by local governments. Although it offers potential benefits in terms of capacity, efficiency, and cost reduction, IMC raises fundamental questions about democratic legitimacy. This paper systematically examines the democratic implications of IMC using an analytical framework centered on three dimensions of legitimacy: input (representation and participation), throughput (accountability and transparency), and output (distributive equity and perceived fairness). A comprehensive review of the academic literature reveals the democratic consequences of IMC across these three dimensions. Our findings suggest that IMC often marginalizes local councils while empowering executives and creating complex accountability structures where responsibility becomes untraceable across multiple principals. Moreover, the review identifies significant research gaps regarding the representation of political opposition in IMC arrangements and the long-term effects on local democracy and distributive equity. We conclude by proposing a research agenda to guide future studies and support the development of democratically robust cooperation frameworks.
Issue publics—groups of citizens who care intensely about particular policy issues—are rarely studied in municipal politics. This research note provides the first systematic analysis of municipal issue publics using a nationally representative 2025 survey of more than 6,000 Canadians, including 1,300 open-ended responses. We identify 32 distinct municipal issue publics across areas such as housing, policing, public transit, climate policy, taxation, and snow removal. Forty-five percent of respondents named a specific municipal issue they care deeply about. We show that issue public members are distinctive in their demographic characteristics and policy attitudes. Residents sort into issue publics along observable lines such as age, homeownership, and ideology, and issue public members often hold policy preferences that diverge from those of the broader public. These patterns have important implications for local advocacy, political mobilization, and municipal democratic representation.
The longstanding U.S. approach for treating chronically homeless people with mental illness and/or substance use disorders has been Housing First (HF): providing permanent supportive housing with wrap-around services, with no requirements on participants to engage in behavioral health support. The Trump Administration has recently reversed course, adopting an alternative strategy: Treatment First (TF). This research note addresses the question of which approach is more effective for treating mental illness and substance use disorders. My review of results from randomized controlled trials conducted in the United States demonstrates that neither HF nor TF approaches represent panaceas in helping the chronically homeless improve their mental health or free themselves from addiction. Results imply that we should adopt a more heterodox strategy that can better tailor treatments to individual circumstances—and build the requisite human, housing, and institutional resources in the public health domain to support such—if we are to fight the symbiotic challenges of chronic homelessness, mental illness, and substance use disorders successfully.
In this article, I focus on Los Angeles' fractured political decision-making in the late 1980s and early 1990s to demonstrate how the city government functioned within constrained and fragmented conditions. Methodologically, I use interviews with public officials and archival data to demonstrate how the city government functioned and responded to a moment of crisis. I specifically focus on how police and developers grew and strengthened their political interests and economic power. The growth of the carceral state and the power of developers within the urban sphere have and will continue to have important and detrimental consequences for the American political landscape. Both police and developers are critical to reproducing urban inequality through formal and informal city policymaking, and are important to understanding how people within certain neighborhoods comprehend themselves as part of a polity and how they feel about governing institutions.
The federal government created the Community Rating System (CRS) in 1990 to encourage local flood management. County and municipal governments can join the program to reduce flooding risk and enable residents to access discounts for flood insurance. We ask What is driving CRS program participation across counties over time? Analyzing three decades of panel data on county CRS uptake, we find overall low program uptake among counties with a floodplain (17 percent). More resourced counties, indicated by greater population and higher resident incomes, were 3 percent and 84 percent more likely to join the program, respectively, suggesting that lower-resource counties may need more support to implement CRS and similar programs. Counter to the growing partisanship in environmental policymaking, political party affiliation is not significantly associated with county CRS participation, suggesting that flood adaptation may cut across party lines in ways that current climate policy often does not.
Over the past eight decades, scholarship has demonstrated that racial attitudes are shaped by local demographic contexts. While this literature offers a sophisticated account of how interactions with proximate space structure racial attitudes, little is known about the impact of racialized perceptions of non-proximate spaces. This paper examines how racialized perceptions of distant cities influence perceptions of racial threat and policy preferences among white Americans. We advance two hypotheses: that racialized perceptions of cities can evoke racial threat even without geographic proximity, and that policy preferences are shaped by the racial groups respondents believe policies will benefit. We test these expectations using one observational study and two original survey experiments. Across all studies, whites view cities imagined as having larger Black populations as more threatening and less deserving of federal aid, particularly among respondents with limited familiarity with those cities, underscoring the importance of non-proximate space in structuring racial politics.
Crises affect researchers’ ability to conduct interviews, focus groups, and ethnographies. I discuss my interactions with participants to explain how I overcame the challenges of recruiting and building relationships in three predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago: Greater Englewood, Bronzeville, and Calumet Heights. I detail experiences with the practice of participatory research across three distinct Black communities. I discuss what responsibilities were owed to these communities in exchange for their cooperation, and how these responsibilities varied by class and positionality among participants. This analysis introduces a broader discussion of practices, strategies, and obligations urban politics scholars can consider when conducting ethnographies, focus groups, and interviews in urban environments during times of crisis.
Given the meagre results of applying more bureaucratic and market-based governance solutions, co-creation is gaining ground as a strategy for promoting a green and fair transition in deprived urban neighborhoods, and it is broadly agreed that the facilitative steering and leadership of co-creation processes is paramount to success. While extant urban planning research provides important empirical documentation and theoretical advice regarding such leadership, public governance theory also offers important insights. This conceptual article considers how the concept of meta-governance, defined as the governance of self-governance, can further contribute to our understanding of how local leaders can inspire and support efforts to co-create a socially and environmentally sustainable transition in challenged urban areas. As suggested by meta-governance theory and illustrated by case studies reported in the GOGREEN database, not only process facilitation but also the strategic design of institutions and collaborative platforms emerge as crucial for promoting local co-creation of a green and just transition in deprived urban neighborhoods.
This paper descriptively documents the early childhood care and education (ECE) landscape in neighborhoods that experienced socioeconomic (SES) ascent and descent in the Chicago Metropolitan Area (MSA) between 2009 and 2019. Using data from the Illinois Early Childhood Asset Map and the American Community Survey, we analyze changes in ECE seats across provider types. SES ascent was most prevalent in Cook County, where zip code tabulation areas (ZCTAs) that ascended had a greater increase in ECE seats than the rest of the MSA. We do not find statistically significant differences in ECE availability between descending and stable ZCTAs, regardless of their location within the MSA. We also find little evidence that SES neighborhood change is associated with changes in the supply of Head Start or ECE capacity measured as the number of children per seat. Our study contributes to urban and educational research by highlighting how neighborhood SES change intersects with ECE access.
In response to the socioeconomic harms caused by hyperincarceration and public demands for reforms, efforts have emerged to reduce the number of people who are incarcerated in the United States. Criminal justice reforms are complex, requiring coordination across multiple levels of government and thousands of public and private actors. This paper investigates whether and how the design of such reforms generates feedback effects across governments by exploring how local policymakers in California responded to Public Safety Realignment. The study documents that cities with higher shares of arrestees increased their social policy expenditures post-Realignment, suggesting the policy's design may have contributed to substantive feedback effects between the state and local governments. The findings contribute to the broader discourse on the political status of justice-involved populations and the diffusion of policy priorities, indicating a potential shift toward a more holistic approach that considers the root causes of criminality.
Transportation is a core responsibility of local government, yet its role in shaping electoral outcomes remains unclear. Using data on 548 candidates for local office in the United States, this study analyzes campaign website content with logistic regression and descriptive statistics to examine which candidates include transportation issues and whether doing so is associated with electoral performance. Results show that the inclusion of transportation platforms varies across candidate and institutional contexts, with differences between city and county elections. Importantly, candidates who include transportation policies perform better, on average, among non-incumbents, mayoral candidates, and those in mayor-council or strong mayor cities. Overall, these findings suggest that transportation is not only a policy domain but also a salient electoral issue in many local contexts, particularly in city elections. The results further indicate that including transportation issues may offer a strategic advantage to candidates for local office.
The following exposition describes two novel empirical methods devised to measure citywide gentrification: the Dynamic Measure of Citywide Gentrification and the Cross-Sectional Measure of Citywide Gentrification. This paper tests for these measures’ viability. These measures were regressed against demographic variables, and many of the coefficients are statistically significant. These measures are associated as expected with each other when graphed and regressed, though the correlation and R 2 coefficients are lower than expected. Prominent cities identified as highly gentrified by each measure conform to expectations, and prominent cities identified as least gentrified by the Dynamic Measure also conform to expectations. For prominent cities, each measure's identification of highly gentrified cities generally conforms to the other measure. Ultimately, this paper provides evidence for the viability of these measures to assess gentrification at the level of the city. Local policymakers should expect gentrification to emerge across downtown districts.
This study examines the housing market impacts of the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) on Chicago's South Side during the pre-opening period (2013-2024). Using spatial hedonic difference-in-differences models, we analyze property sale prices across distance buffers surrounding Jackson Park to assess whether proximity to this high-profile anchor institution generated anticipatory price effects. Despite conditions typically associated with speculative appreciation, including extensive media coverage, documented investor activity, and expectations of neighborhood transformation, we find no statistically significant price increases in areas closest to the OPC (within 0-1.5 miles). Instead, significant appreciation emerges only at 1.5-2 miles from the site, where prices rose approximately 12 percent above market trends in 2023-2024. This counterintuitive spatial pattern challenges conventional proximity-based models of anchor institution effects. We explore potential explanations, including construction-related disruption, uneven policy coverage, forward-looking investor behavior, and pandemic-era market dynamics. Overall, the findings demonstrate that anticipatory price effects are conditional on local context rather than automatic responses to major developments.
Cities produce mountains of waste daily. Yet too often waste is poorly governed, and becomes a climate, public health, and environmental policy problem. This article investigates how effective civil society pressure can be in achieving sustainable waste policies in densely populated cities. The paper draws on over 50 interviews to illustrate how following legacies of authoritarian rule in the waste sector, activists in Argentina recast waste as a vehicle for exercising participatory rights that undergird urban democracy. Local activists leveraged national and transnational networks to participate in a global struggle for waste justice. Battles for equitable and participatory waste management are influencing waste policy at multiple scales and effectively recasting waste as a collective, public problem, even as waste management continues to be a pressing urban governance challenge.
