Joshua Sapotichne

Is Urban Politics a Black Hole? Analyzing the Boundary Between Political Science and Urban Politics

For many years, the scholarship of urban politics has drifted away from political science, both theoretically and methodologically. In this article, we systematically examine the boundary between urban political studies and the broader discipline of political science through an analysis of journal citations. We find that the analogy of a “black hole” is apt: No ideas escape the event horizon surrounding urban politics; furthermore, ideas from outside rarely penetrate the subfields borders. Our evidence suggests that this is mostly due to a stunted solipsism that has engulfed too much of urban politics, but some of the blame must rest with the increasing insularity of political science. We suggest a research agenda that highlights the inherent dynamism in urban politics, and conclude with an endorsement of framework-driven citation analysis as a method of examining the flow of ideas across scholarly boundaries.

Venue Shopping and the Politics of Urban Development: Lessons from Chicago and Seattle

How does the new institutional ecology of city politics structure opportunities for urban growth? We draw on policy agendas theory to explore two central aspects of this question: the process by which urban actors attempt to reach development policy goals by “shopping” for alternative institutional venues and the conditions under which extraurban institutions—such as state and special-purpose governments—provide favorable alternative decision settings. We conduct a comparative case study of two prominent megaprojects—Chicago’s new Comiskey Park (1986-1991) and Seattle’s Safeco Field (1994-1995)—in which policy-making authority shifted from city government to extraurban venues. Our analyses illustrate how the interplay of several factors, including the resources and capacity of relevant coalitions and the issue politics that surround the project, shape venue-shopping opportunities for urban megaprojects. In advancing these arguments, this research underscores the more general significance of venue shopping in urban growth policy processes.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? An Integrated Model of Urban Policy Interdependence

This article explores local fiscal policy interdependence by proposing and testing a particular spatial modeling method to examine how different expenditure domains interact with neighboring jurisdictions. The analysis examines the extent of spatial interdependence by policy domain and explores the most robust way of determining neighbors for spatial analysis. It concludes that space matters in ways that need to be taken into account in the development of models explaining local spending and that different functional domains of expenditures have different scales of spatial effects. The extent of spatial interdependence varies by spending domain based on the amount of local government discretion and control over the policy area.

Dimensionality, Issue Attention, and Agenda Dynamics: The Case of Federal Urban Policy

Does the stable, low-dimensional environment that scholars detect in analyses of congressional and mass behavior structure policy debate over a particular set of issues? Through analysis of an original data set of 6,560 congressional hearings held from 1946 to 2004, we map the underlying dimensional structure of congressional attention to a range of urban policy issues including housing, development, crime, and transit. First, we employ an innovative measurement model to demonstrate that the urban agenda space is neither one dimensional, nor stable through time. Second, we show that this dimensional structure is related to changes in issue attention, leading to sweeping issue realignments in the composition of the federal urban policy agenda. These changes are consistent with the shifting partisan and structural features of American politics. In all, our findings have far-reaching implications for issue politics at the federal level and for structuring agenda setting activities of political actors, including city governments themselves.