Person:

de Benedictis-Kessner, Justin

Who deserves to participate in local democracy? A wide body of research shows that property owners are deeply overrepresented in local political proceedings, especially those related to housing and land use. We know little, however, about whether such inequities conflict with the public’s norms of democratic equality. This article explores perceptions of democratic inclusion in local housing politics, and whether these views can be altered with more information about political inequalities. Using survey data from 13,619 respondents across 57 cities, we find that: (1) members of the public prefer to hear from homeowners and longtime residents in political proceedings; and (2) disseminating information about local participatory inequalities increases the likelihood of the public wanting to hear from a renter, albeit by a substantively small amount. These results show that public persuasion may not be the most fruitful avenue for reforming these inequitable local political institutions.

A growing body of scholarship investigates the extent to which national partisan polarization filters down to the local level. There has been little evidence, however, on: (1) the size of the local partisan divide; (2) the extent to which it varies by policy issue; and (3) how these divides compare at the elite and the mass public levels. Using responses to questions about local policy preferences from nearly a decade of nationwide surveys of mayors between 2015 and 2023 and from 25,072 members of the public in 90 cities between 2020 and 2023, we uncover notable variation in local partisan polarization across different issue areas. Elite partisan polarization is more substantial than it is among members of the public on nearly every policy issue for which we have directly comparable data. Despite this gap in polarization between elites and the public, there is also evidence of congruence: a subset of data for which we can match mayors to their own constituents on identical questions reveals that mayors take positions aligned with a majority of their constituents’ views about 69% of the time. Democratic mayors align with their Democratic constituents more than with their Republican ones, and Republican mayors do the opposite. The differences in representation for copartisans and outpartisans are greater on more polarized issues. Together, these results challenge a traditional consensus that local politics is apartisan, establish scope conditions on when partisanship might shape the policy outputs of local government, and show how partisan polarization can translate into differences in the quality of representation.