Jessica Trounstine

Where Turnout Matters: The Consequences of Uneven Turnout in City Politics

There is a widespread concern that imbalances in voter turnout across race and class have led to biased outcomes in American democracy. Yet empirical tests have generally found that the unrepresentative nature of the electorate has little effect on who wins and loses elections. We challenge this finding by arguing that existing research minimizes the chances of finding bias because it focuses largely on national elections where turnout is relatively high and where minority groups are generally too small a percentage of the population to sway elections. By focusing on city elections we find that lower turnout leads to substantial reductions in the representation of Latinos and Asian Americans on city councils and in the mayors office. For African Americans district elections and off-cycle local elections are more important barriers to representation.

All Politics Is Local: The Reemergence of the Study of City Politics

The study of local politics has been relegated to the periphery of political science and many explanations have been offered for the marginalization of the subfield. I offer three related arguments for why scholars should revisit the study of sub-state politics. First, the local level is the source of numerous political outcomes that matter because they represent a large proportion of political events in the United States. Secondly, there are methodological advantages to studying local politics. Finally, analyzing politics at the sub-state level can generate thoroughly different kinds of questions than a purely national-level focus and can offer different answers to questions that apply more generally. Research on local politics can and should contribute to broader debates in political science and ensure that we understand both how and why cities are unique.

Who or What Governs?: The Effects of Economics, Politics, Institutions, and Needs on Local Spending

The core question driving the study of local politics is—who or what governs local democracy? After decades of study, researchers continue to debate the relative merits of economic, political, institutional, and bureaucratic accounts of local democracy. By providing a test that incorporates each of these four different theoretical perspectives, that analyzes major spending decisions that cities make, and that includes a large, representative sample of localities, we offer a systematic examination of local government decision making. We find that each of the existing one-sided stories is incomplete. Economic constraints are critical in determining what a government can do but the overall balance between redistributional, allocational, and developmental spending is also strongly influenced by political imperatives, institutional constraints, and actual needs.

The Provision of Local Public Goods in Diverse Communities: Analyzing Municipal Bond Elections

Scholars have shown that diversity depresses public goods provision. In U.S. cities, racial and ethnic divisions could seriously undermine investment. However, diverse cities spend significant amounts on public goods. We ask how these communities overcome their potential collective action problem. Using a new data set on more than 3,000 municipal bond elections, we show that strategic politicians encourage cooperation. Diversity leads officials to be more selective about requesting approval for investment and more attentive to coalition building. We show that diverse communities see fewer bond elections, but that the bonds proposed are larger and pass at higher rates. Diverse cities tend to offer voters bonds with more spending categories and are more likely to hold referenda during general elections. As a result, diverse cities do just as well as homogenous cities in issuing voter-authorized debt. Thus, political elites perform an important mediating function in the generation of public goods.

What Underlies Urban Politics? Race, Class, Ideology, Partisanship, and the Urban Vote

What is urban politics really about? Despite decades of research, there is still considerable disagreement about the relative roles of race, class, ideology, partisanship, and other factors in shaping the urban vote. In this article, we assemble a wide range of data on a diverse set of urban elections and offer a more explicit empirical test of what shapes urban politics. Our results suggest that local elections are partly an ideological battle, partly a partisan contest, and at least marginally linked to class, religion, and morality. Race, however, is the dominant factor in the local electoral arena. Local elections are in no small part a competition between blacks, whites, Latinos, and Asian-Americans over the leadership of their cities. We also assess how and why these divides vary across cities and electoral contexts finding that a theory of realistic group conflict best predicts patterns in the vote.

Turnout and Incumbency in Local Elections

It is well established that incumbents win reelection at high rates. But we know less about the ways in which institutional variation affects the incumbency advantage. Using data from more than 4,000 cities, evidence in this article indicates that institutions generating low-participation environments increase the proportion of city council incumbents who run for reelection and the proportion who win. These low-turnout environments are shown to have spending patterns that benefit particular subgroups in the population who have good reason to participate even when the costs are high.

Electoral institutions, gender stereotypes, and women's local representation

Despite dramatic progress in winning election to political office, women remain underrepresented at all levels of government in the USA. A great deal of research has focused on institutional barriers to equal representation, particularly at the city level. Yet, the findings have been inconsistent across studies and little attention has been paid to the possible mechanisms that might account for the relationships between institutions and representation. In this paper, we focus on one particularly well-studied institution – the method of election for city councilors. We use a decade of candidate-level data from a single, large state (California) to show that women are significantly advantaged in district (versus at-large) elections and in city clerkships compared with mayoralties and council positions. We suggest that this may be the result of the competitiveness of elections, the status of the offices, and gender stereotypes. We offer support for this argument by analyzing the proportion of women elected to city councils and the probability of victory for different types of offices including city council, mayor, and city clerk.

Identifying and Understanding Perceived Inequities in Local Politics

Although there is widespread concern about bias in American democracy, convincing tests of differential responsiveness are rare. We use a unique data set that surveys the views of a large cross-section of urban residents to provide greater insight into this question. We demonstrate clear differences in perceived responsiveness across demographic and political groups with racial and ethnic minorities, the poor, and liberals expressing less satisfaction with local outcomes. Our analysis suggests that these differences are unlikely to be due to underlying differences in individual attitudes but instead appear to stem from real differences in local conditions and perceived governmental responsiveness.

Political Schizophrenics? Factors Affecting Aggregate Partisan Choice at the Local Versus National Level:

In a sample of 12 states across all regions of the United States, I find that one of every three counties supports a different party for president than for its local legislature. I use a unique data set containing partisan affiliations of county councillors to analyze contexts that might lead voters to choose different parties at different levels of government. I find support for three explanations of representational splits: incomplete realignment, local electoral factors, and differentials in party strength. This article takes a step toward understanding how parties and partisan identities operate in a federal system.

How (and How Not) to Bring History into the MPA/MPP Classroom

Abstract Students entering Master of Public Administration (MPA) or Master of Public Policy (MPP) degree programs are not often historically oriented. However, a historical approach can be extremely useful in the classroom. This essay describes three guidelines for bringing history into the building of syllabi and lectures for an MPA/MPP course: teach theoretically, make the historical lessons relevant, and invoke history judiciously.