Dick Simpson

Reconstructing the Local State The Role of External Constituencies in Building Urban Tourism

The growth of tourism is fragmenting urban politics into a constellation of public/private institutions that operate largely independently from the democratic institutions of local government. In this article, the authors present preliminary evidence to show that the political interests that represent the tourism/entertainment sector are beginning to wield influence in municipal politics through campaign contributions and other political activity. They also show that those political interests have become largely independent of municipal authority through their control of institutions that undertake large-scale infrastructure projects connected to tourism/entertainment. It is suggested that mayors are able to forge alliances with these independent centers of power and, thereby, are able to bypass democratic processes.

Council Coalitions and Mayoral Regimes in Chicago

We explore the structure of voting coalitions among members of the city council in Chicago at 10 different points in time from 1955 to 1995. In doing so, we develop a typology of mayor-council relationships that we use to categorize city politics, and we find four basic patterns ranging from complete mayoral domination to highly fractured councils. None of the city council voting patterns over the last 40 years meets the expectations of most theories of representative democracy. If city councils in other major cities follow the same patterns, these findings would call into question the degree to which urban politics fits the norms of deliberative democracy. The methodologies developed here would allow for the comparative study of city councils in various cities and a more accurate method of measuring at least some key aspects of regimes in different cities in different time periods.

TWILEY W. BARKER

Twiley W. Barker, 83, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, died July 13, 2009.