Do development zones in Chinese cities exacerbate administrative fragmentation or help to overcome it? In this article, I introduce a new typology of zone administrative logics that recognizes varying relationships between zones and the municipal party-state, and I analyze an original dataset of zone leader appointments to develop new empirical insights into China's urban governance. Qualitative evidence from the cities of Nanjing and Xi'an and quantitative evidence from a larger set of cities reveal that China's zone leaders often hold concurrent or prior postings in other local jurisdictions or in municipal government that position them to coordinate closely with other party-state actors. On average, zone leaders have more such linkages and greater mobility across units than comparably ranked leaders of urban districts and counties. Yet, zone leaders' appointment patterns vary across Chinese cities and over time, underscoring the importance of local context and the enduring tradeoffs involved in zone-style governance.
Cities across the United States are increasingly turning to local climate policy as national climate action stalls. Yet, public opinion research on local climate policies remains sparse. I conducted two national surveys (N = 4,000) measuring respondent willingness to pay (WTP) and policy prioritization for local climate policies. Drawing on a key distinction between adaptation and mitigation policies, I find that respondents are substantially more willing to pay for adaptation policies, contributing to mean WTP estimates of $250-$330 annually. These results replicate across time and survey vendors. A survey experiment further shows that high respondent WTP for adaptation policies is not an artifact of how policies are framed or which level of government administers them. Partisanship, age, and income are the strongest predictors of WTP, though partisan polarization varies considerably across policies. These findings point to local adaptation policy as a promising avenue for climate progress, even amid federal policy retrenchment.
This research explores how news media narrate urban economic development. Drawing on growth machine theory, I analyze 51 local newspaper stories (2010-2021) within the context of official city council meeting minutes and plans (2008-2017). I find that the newspaper promoted an ideal image of the city's business climate by emphasizing the economic "success" of certain local businesses. The newspaper defined this notion of local economic success through five frames: branding, collaboration, clientele, location, and adaptability. In doing so, the newspaper operated as a cultural intermediary by narrating the city's shifting economic conditions in a way that publicly justified and advanced the elite growth consensus. These findings demonstrate how news media may narrate contestable projects of economic change beyond coverage explicitly about gentrification. Consequently, this research aims to illuminate a wider range of ideological work that news media perform to imagine and ascribe meaning to changing urban spaces.
This article examines citizens' satisfaction with their municipal democracy according to whether mayoral elections were competitive or non-competitive. After defining different types of satisfaction and based on a survey of 4,026 respondents in the province of Quebec (Canada), we show that citizens living in municipalities where elections were non-competitive are more satisfied with the mayor than citizens living in municipalities where elections were competitive. These results suggest that-in the eyes of some voters-the mere fact that a citizen is available to hold office is sufficient to ensure democracy. More generally, our results underline the need for a detailed understanding of citizen satisfaction and the different ways in which it can be expressed in the various contexts and electoral mechanisms in force.
Contemporary empirical research suggests that citizen preferences influence municipal policy in the United States, a striking contrast to foundational theoretical accounts portraying local governments as constrained, managerial, and largely unaffected by constituent demands. Yet these conclusions largely rest on analyses of government expenditures, which capture the scale of government activity but not the micro-level allocative decisions at the heart of local governance. In this research note, we extend this literature by testing whether changes in local public opinion affect a broad array of municipal lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) policies across more than 500 cities observed between 2012 and 2023. We find that shifts in public opinion reliably predict shifts in policy: as cities become more Democratic (Republican), their LGBTQ+ policies become more (less) pro-equality. Our findings provide new evidence on local democratic responsiveness. At least in this policy domain, local partisanship and ideology appear to matter.
