City governments are pragmatic, just like their constituents
By N.L. | CHICAGO
WITH lawmakers in Washington achieving precious little, cities and the suburbs are increasingly the places where things get done. This at least is the case put forward by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley at the Brookings Institution in their book “The Metropolitan Revolution”, published last year. Local leaders have more real-world problems to contend with and more power to address them. They are also less hindered by political turf battles and relentless campaigns, so they are more likely to take on the kind of big challenges that daunt federal politicians. This means mayors and governors are busily working to kick-start their economies, invest in critical transportation infrastructure and reform education. They are also far more dynamic than the federal government in areas such as immigration, climate change and obesity.
Does this make local leaders less politically ideological? Anecdotally this seems to be the case. Michael Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York, consistently flip-flopped between the Democratic and Republican parties. In power he was fiscally conservative but resigned to raising taxes to help pay for services and happy to nanny citizens when it came to large sodas. His successor, Bill de Blasio, is a more conventional leftist who campaigned hard against charter schools during his run for office. But now that he is in power, he has softened his stance. In Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is, on the face of things, a Democrat. But he has sacked many city staff, pushed back against some unions and he supports charter schools. Some leftists now reject him. He was dubbed “Mayor 1%” in a harsh book earlier this year.
To what extent, then, are these local leaders simply following personal whim? Do their policies accurately reflect the politics of their constituents? As it happens, yes, according to a new study to be published in the American Political Science Review this month. To reach this conclusion, Chris Warshaw of MIT and Chris Tausanovitch from the University of California at Los Angeles analysed large-scale surveys of public opinion on a range of policy areas in over 1,600 towns and cities across the country. The authors created an ideological score for each city based on how locals responded to survey questions on everything from affordable housing to preschool education. They found that the most ideologically liberal cities end up spending twice per person as much as the most conservative cities, have higher taxes and less regressive tax systems. Mayor Bloomberg’s soda tax, for example, seemed remarkable nationally, but reflected the rather leftist views of the city’s denizens (New York is the eighth most progressive large city in America; more liberal than Chicago or Baltimore, and slightly less than Detroit).
Overall this ideological ranking also confirms something everyone has known for a long time: most big cities are fairly liberal. There are exceptions, of course. Among cities with more than 250,000 people the most conservative are Mesa, AZ, Oklahoma City, OK, and Virginia Beach, VA. Within the state of Texas, urban centres all tend to be highly conservative. Houston leans slightly to the left, but Austin is an extreme liberal outlier.
A word of caution: many of the survey questions dealt with issues of energy, the environment and conservation, which could have distorted some of the results (by leaving out some other pressing policy areas). But the results seem to reflect conventional wisdom. Few would argue with the ranking of the top three most liberal big cities in America: San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Seattle.
