Local Interests

Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments

Sarah F. Anzia

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226819280
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A policy-focused approach to understanding the role of interest groups in US municipal governments. Local politics in the United States once seemed tranquil compared to the divisiveness and dysfunction of the country's national politics. Those days have passed. As multiple wide-ranging crises have thrust America's local governments into the spotlight, they have also exposed policy failures and systemic problems that have mounted for years. While issues such as policing and the cost of housing are debated nationally, much of the policymaking surrounding these issues occurs locally. In Local Interests, Sarah F. Anzia explores how local governments—and the interest groups that try to influence them—create the policies that drive the national conversation: policing, economic development, housing, and challenges of taxing and spending. Anzia examines local interest groups in terms of the specific policies they pursue, including how these groups get active in politics and what impact they have. By offering new perspectives on these issues, Anzia contributes to our knowledge of how interest groups function and the significant role they play in shaping broader social outcomes.

Chapter One

Interest Groups and Public Policy in US Local Government

For a long time, local politics in the United States seemed tranquil compared to that of Washington, DC. Even as divisiveness and dysfunction were on full display in national politics, local governance appeared relatively uneventful. Other than the occasional scandal or crisis, usually in the largest cities, it seemed like most local government was well-functioning government: effective policies, responsive elected officials, and political consensus.

The past few years have shattered that illusion. Multiple wide-ranging crises have thrust America’s local governments into the spotlight, exposing policy failures and problems that have been mounting for years. High housing prices in many metropolitan areas—fueled in part by a shortage in supply—have become a drag on growth, decreased mobility, and contributed to racial segregation.1 Police misconduct is now known to be widespread, not confined to a few cities or a few officers as it once may have seemed.2 Two recessions have exposed vulnerabilities in local government revenue structures and patterns of inefficient spending, which have combined to force cuts in public service provision.3 All is not well in local government, and it hasn’t been for some time.

Growing awareness of these kinds of problems has inspired a groundswell of reform efforts, including a YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement,4 calls to defund and reimagine policing,5 and pushes to curb growth in public employee retirement costs.6 But reform momentum often seems to rise and fall without major policy changes of note. Housing development continues to be delayed, efforts to densify snuffed out.7 Even after the massive protests against police brutality and systemic racism during the summer of 2020, few cities were quick to make significant changes to policing or police budgets.8 And in local governments around the country, growth in public employee retirement costs shows little sign of abating, and local governments continue to feel the crunch.9

Why does it seem like so little changes even as public recognition of these problems grows? A look at a few cities helps to illustrate. Consider Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a developer, Gamma Development, recently proposed a 23-acre, 76-unit, single-family housing development on the west side of the city. After the city’s Environmental Planning Commission approved the plan, the Taylor Ranch Neighborhood Association and nearby neighbors appealed the decision,10 arguing that the development failed to provide sufficient open space and would threaten the nearby Oxbow wetlands. In response to these objections, the city council sent the decision back to the commission for reconsideration, delaying the development of new housing.11 More than a year later, the proposed housing development had been downsized, the city was planning to purchase some of the land to preserve as open space, and none of the housing had been built.12

Consider also Seattle, Washington, where efforts to reform the police department have met strong resistance from the city’s labor unions. In 2010, community organizations wrote to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) requesting an investigation of excessive use of force by officers in the Seattle Police Department. The city entered into a consent decree with DOJ in 2012 that required that the city implement reforms, and the city did eventually pass a new police accountability law. But just a few months later, collective bargaining agreements reached with the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) rolled back some of the reforms, imposing new restrictions on how police officers can be investigated and disciplined.13 Community activists were outraged, but the city’s labor unions defended the sanctity of collective bargaining and due process for city employees.14 As Kenny Stuart, president of the Seattle Fire Fighters Union, told the city council, “Collective bargaining is a fundamental element of labor relations and the progressive movement.”15 The Seattle Times wrote that Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan “is almost certain to be aggressively lobbied to seek sweeping changes” to the contract but “also will face the sway of the labor community, one of her biggest backers, which has fiercely supported SPOG’s collective bargaining rights.”16

Then there is Redwood City, California, where the pandemic-induced economic downturn in 2020 collided with the city’s structural deficit problem to produce a $7 million hole in the city budget.17 To deal with the shortfall, the city proposed widespread budget cuts, including a 5.6% total cut to the fire department and temporary replacement of one of the two engines in the downtown fire station with a smaller, less expensive vehicle. But that proposal met resistance from the city’s firefighters and the Farm Hill Neighborhood Association,18 which warned of increased emergency response times and the endangerment of city residents. In response to the pressure, the city council walked back its proposal, agreeing to dig deeper into reserves and contemplate other cuts so that the second downtown engine could remain in service.19

These are just a few examples, but they share something in common: in each case, interest groups appear to play a prominent role. If we were to sit back and reflect on how to characterize policy making and political representation in these cases, we would certainly build in a role for real estate developers, neighborhood associations, and labor unions. It is simple and obvious. In Albuquerque, Seattle, and Redwood City, interest groups seem to be involved in shaping public policy.

Yet research on local politics has tended to ignore interest groups, and research on interest groups has tended to ignore local government. In studying American cities, most political scientists have focused on elected officials, the mass public, and active subsets of local residents, such as homeowners or voters.20 Recent scholarship on political representation in local government conceives of representation as a relationship between elected officials and citizens—and barely mentions interest groups.21 Meanwhile, the research literature on interest groups is almost entirely about national politics,22 and its theories offer few insights into what to expect of interest group activity in the local arena. It also offers little guidance on how to evaluate interest group influence, whether in the local context or any other. As it stands, we know stunningly little about the role of interest groups in local politics.

This book is a step toward remedying that. It is a book about interest groups in local government: how active interest groups are, what they do in local politics, and how they shape a wide range of local public policies, including the use of business tax incentives, housing development, spending on the police, and the size of local government budgets. It shows that interest groups are politically active in many cities and that they often do have influence. A major payoff of this in-depth look at local interest groups is a clearer account of why cities have the policies they do—and how it has a lot to do with forces that are hard at work even when it appears as though not much is happening. But by putting the spotlight on interest groups in local politics, this book also accomplishes something else: an approach to studying interest groups that is a departure from the way they have been studied for the past several decades.

The core of my argument is that to understand what interest groups do in politics, and what influence they have, we need to put the focus on what interest groups care most about: public policy.23 To explain the constellations of interest groups active in a government, we should start by thinking about what the government actually does—the policies it makes. And public policy is also the key to detecting interest group influence. Scholars focused on interest groups have long recognized that public policy is the place to look for the fingerprints of their influence, but they have gotten bogged down by a variety of conceptual, measurement, design, and inferential problems and have deviated from analyzing public policy as the dependent variable. In my analysis of local politics, I keep the focus on public policy as the dependent variable when testing for interest group influence, and I find that interest groups often do make a difference.

This fresh theoretical approach allows us to see things differently—and more clearly. For instance, we might think, from what we know about national politics, that local politics would be intensely partisan, that business would clash head-on with labor, or that the clout of groups with abundant resources would far outweigh that of groups with members of lesser means. Alternatively, from what has been said about local politics, we might guess that local government would involve few interest groups and little regular political conflict. None of that would be right. In this book, I apply a policy-focused approach to questions about interest groups in US municipal governments, and the result is a more comprehensive and more accurate view of the political dynamics of American local governments.

A Different Perspective on Local Politics

In recent decades, “American politics” has mostly been taken to mean national politics, and to the extent that political scientists have branched out to study other American governments, they have mainly looked at states—not local governments like counties, municipalities, and school districts. Yet local governments are and always have been an important part of American government. The nearly ninety thousand local governments in the United States spend roughly a quarter of the nation’s public money. They are responsible for public education, infrastructure, housing, public safety, public health, and other important services. The policies they make touch the day-to-day lives of virtually everyone living in the United States, and they play a significant role in shaping broader social outcomes, including the size of government and economic, political, and racial (in)equality. In all of the examples above—housing, policing, and fire protection—the issues at stake are nationally important, but the decision makers and the politics are primarily local.

Researchers and political observers have recently started to pay much more attention to local government—a positive development—but with that shift has come new debate about how best to characterize the dynamics of local politics.24 Within the relatively small group of political scientists who have continued to study local politics over the years, a prominent view is that local politics is distinctive—and perhaps even less “political” than state and national politics. By one account, the ease of mobility of taxpaying residents and businesses forces city officials to have a laserlike focus on economic development; and since all city residents benefit from a strong local economy (the argument goes), there simply isn’t much for them to disagree about—and little room for traditional politics.25 Another perspective depicts local elections as managerial in nature: instead of being defined by partisanship, ideology, or regular issues that divide local residents, they are decided on the basis of custodial performance, that is, whether incumbents successfully maintain satisfactory levels of taxes and services. According to this account, the issue divisions that do arise in local government are idiosyncratic, such as scandals afflicting particular places at particular times, and regular political conflict is rare.26

Recently, a newer wave of research has challenged that perspective and given rise to a very different account—one that depicts local politics as not only political but also similar to national politics in fundamental ways. Studies of the ideologies and party affiliations of city residents have found that cities with liberal and Democratic residents tend to produce different policies from those with conservative and Republican residents: for example, they spend more overall per capita and have more liberal environmental policies.27 Others have demonstrated that cities and counties with Democratic elected officials have greater expenditures than those whose elected officials are Republican.28 The conclusion to be drawn, according to some scholars, is that local politics is not that distinctive. Like national politics, it is divided along partisan and ideological lines.

While there are elements of truth in both of these accounts, both are off-target in key respects, as I show throughout this book. Accounts of local politics as partisan and ideological have not been sufficiently attentive to the fact that local governments are quite different from the federal government. They are smaller. Their institutions are usually different: most hold nonpartisan elections on days other than state and national elections and do not have independently elected executives or districted legislatures.29 Even more important, however, are the differences in what local governments do. It is not just that the range of policies they can make is more limited or that they are constrained by state and national government, as some have discussed.30 The actual substance of what they do is mostly different from the federal government as well, and the implications for their politics are hugely important.

What, then, do US local governments do? It varies, of course, but some generalizations help set the stage. The nation’s single-purpose governments are easiest to characterize because by definition they each do only one thing: school districts provide public education, library districts provide library services, and so on.31 The responsibilities of municipal governments vary both across and within states, but at the heart of what they do are economic development, regulation of land use (such as housing development), and the provision of services like police protection, fire protection, street repair, parks and recreation, and sewers and water.32 As figure 1.1 shows, in 2017, 17% of all municipal government expenditures in the United States went to utilities (water, electric, gas supply, and transit), 10% to police protection, 8% to sanitation (sewerage and solid waste management), 6% to highways and roads, 5% to both fire protection and health and hospitals, and 4% to parks and recreation. The functions of county governments vary more widely than those of municipal governments, but the ones that account for the largest shares of total county expenditures are health and hospitals (18%), public welfare (9%), police protection (7%), corrections (6%), and highways and roads (6%).33 A few of these local policies have parallels to the issues that divide the parties and define ideology in national politics, but many of them do not.

Figure 1.1 Local government expenditures, 2017

Instead of starting with partisanship and ideology, we should start with these core functions of local government and consider the kinds of interests they generate. In attempting to assess the forces that shape local politics and policy, we should put the focus on the issue areas that are at the heart of what local governments do. That is my approach in this book, and the picture that emerges is clear: Local politics is distinctive. In most places, most of the time, it is not strongly defined by national partisan and ideological alignments. Instead, local interest groups’ activities and a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• chapter 1.  Interest Groups and Public Policy in US Local Government
• chapter 2.  The Policy-Focused Approach to Studying Interest Groups
• chapter 3.  How Active Are Interest Groups in Local Politics?
• chapter 4.  What Kinds of Interest Groups Are Most Active?
• chapter 5.  Political Parties in Local Politics
• chapter 6.  Influence: Issues, Approach, and Expectations
• chapter 7.  Business and Growth
• chapter 8.  Unions, Public Safety, and Local Government Spending
• chapter 9.  Interest Group Influence in Local Elections
• chapter 10.  Local Interests and Power
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index