Race, Place, and the Politics of Urban Austerity in Michigan, 1970s-2010s

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three papers concerning the development of urban austerity in the U.S. state of Michigan from the 1970s to the 2010s. The first paper, “‘They Ran that City Down’: Urban Austerity and the Production of Jurisdictional Stigma in Michigan,” advances a theory of “jurisdictional stigmatization” to show how cities are blamed for their own crises and framed as undeserving of outside support. Bridging a gap between literatures on territorial stigma and fiscal federalism, I use the case of municipal receivership to identify key moments in the lawmaking process—across the legislative, executive, and judicial branches—where policy elites develop stigmatizing narratives of post-industrial cities. I show how cities like Detroit and Flint are especially vulnerable to urban austerity, given the country’s unique (among advanced capitalist economies) system of fiscal federalism and what political scientists have termed “segmented localism.” The second, “‘We’re Doing What Needs to Be Done’: Financial Emergency, Policy Abstraction, and the Politics of Inevitable Austerity,” proposes a concept of “policy abstraction” to describe how lawmakers deploy the abstract notion of “fiscal emergency” to facilitate the implementation of austerity policy despite popular opposition. This intervention addresses a question in the literature on democratic responsiveness—how public policy is made without support from the voting public. In Michigan, policy abstraction allowed lawmakers to frame austerity as the only solution to urban fiscal crisis, what I term “inevitable austerity.” I show how this rhetorical and technical strategy facilitated lawmakers’ ability to circumvent popular opposition by deflecting the critique that their actions were anti-democratic. The third, “Who Governs the Crisis City? Expertise, Race and Representation in Michigan’s Municipal Receivership Regime,” considers the twenty-one individuals who have been appointed as municipal receivers across ten cities and three school districts in Michigan from the 1980s to the present. I ask: what expertise did these individuals have to govern crisis cities? I identify four trends: a commitment to cost-cutting and privatization; management experience in the public sector (in early receiverships) and in the private sector (in later ones), and educational credentials in business; previous experience as an emergency manager; and special credentials. Then, considering the racially charged nature of debates over state takeover in Michigan’s high-segregation context, I trace a fifth trend: the development of a “racial credential” to promote the hiring of Black emergency managers. While the literature on racial representation suggests that Black officials are more likely to be responsive to the concerns of Black constituents, this paper shows how the racial credential was developed not to represent local populations resistant to takeover, but to implement austerity despite local opposition.