Racial Representation in American Local Politics

Abstract

In the last two decades, the United States has experienced a rapid diversification, particularly in major metropolitan areas. This increased diversification has motivated recent scholarly attention to venue of local politics - one that is defined by inequalities in political participation and its direct and durable effect on distributive outcomes. Given its significance, political scientists have devoted considerable attention to variation in policy, implementation, and individual outcomes, while paying comparatively little attention to the processes through which these outcomes are produced and to the identities and preferences of the decisionmakers who produce them. In the first study, I employ a mixed methods approach to studying the relationship between minority representation and policy outcomes, using land-use and housing policy as a setting. Using local election data and a regression-discontinuity approach, I find that electing a racial minority to city council results in a substantial increase in residential development. However, these findings are driven almost entirely by an increased allocation in single-family housing. To investigate the mechanisms behind this phenomenon, I conducted 60 semi-structured interviews with city councillors, mayors, and their staff. I find that minority official prioritize homeownership as an equity strategy to close racial wealth, while expressing skepticism towards multifamily projects, which they associate with displacement and historical urban scars. The institutional design of American city governments allow for individual city councillors to unilaterally determine development in their districts, which goes against narratives that require a critical mass of legislators to instill policy changes. The second article seeks to understand what city councils deliberate on, how demographics may affect the prevalence of issues, and address methodological limitations in the study of local government. Using a new dataset of city council agenda items, I descriptively find that city council agendas cover a breadth of policies, housing is increasingly salient, and that institutional design affects the types of policies considered. To evaluate whether demographic shifts shape the policy portfolios of city governments, I link the agenda data to Census and local election returns. Aggregate minority population share is largely unrelated to agenda composition, but disaggregated and institutionally stratified models reveal suggestive heterogeneity, indicating that demographic change translates into agenda attention only conditionally. In the third article, we assess when race becomes central to public deliberation. We argue that racialized speech rises with a group's demographic presence, according with existing work on diversity and rhetoric, but declines as the group approaches local dominance, driven by the competing forces of salience and simplicity. Testing this prediction on a comprehensive dataset of U.S. school board meeting transcripts from 2010 to 2026, we recover a statistically significant concave relationship between group representation and racialized rhetoric, suggesting that canonical threat and representation accounts describe the ascending portion of a more general curve. Taken together, this dissertation concludes that race continues to be a pervasive feature of urban affairs. Its effects are varied and complex, however, warranting additional study of how diversity affects local politics.