Scott A. MacKenzie

Redevelopment, San Diego Style: The Limits of Public—Private Partnerships

Fiscally strapped local governments have increasingly turned to public—private partnerships (P3s) for redevelopment assistance, empowering private actors to exercise functions typically performed by the public sector. While P3s can enhance project funding and completion, they create the possibility of agency loss, that is, public means—tax dollars, public powers, and other resources—being diverted toward private purposes. Using a principal— agent approach, the authors examine an ambitious and widely heralded P3 in San Diego to build a downtown ballpark and encourage private investment in surrounding neighborhoods. The authors identify a set of political, institutional, and partnership conditions exacerbating agency loss and thwarting redevelopment’s public mission.

Lost in Space? Information Shortcuts, Spatial Voting, and Local Government Representation

Voters face difficult choices in local elections, where information about candidates is scarce and party labels often do not distinguish candidates’ ideological positions. Can voters choose candidates who represent them ideologically in these contexts? To address this question, we conduct original surveys that ask candidates in the 2011 mayoral election in San Francisco to take positions on local policy issues. We ask voters their positions on these same policy issues on a written exit poll. We use these policy positions to construct comparable measures of candidate and voter ideology (i.e., ideal points). Within the exit poll, we experimentally manipulate cues to examine their effects on voters’ candidate preferences. We observe a strong, positive relationship between voter ideology and the ideology of the candidates they choose in the election. However, our experiments show that endorsements from political parties and newspapers with ideological reputations weaken this relationship. These findings challenge the view of local elections as nonideological and demonstrate that spatial voting theory can be usefully applied to local settings. They also indicate that voters may not treat political party and newspaper endorsements as signals of candidates’ ideological positions, but rather as nonideological signals of partisan affinity or candidate quality/viability.

THE L.A. SCHOOL AND POLITICS NOIR: BRINGING THE LOCAL STATE BACK IN

ABSTRACT: This essay critically reevaluates two key components of the L.A. School of Urbanism research program. First, we reconsider the L.A. School’s alternative to the concentric circles model of urban growth developed by the Chicago School. Second, we reexamine its account of Los Angeles’s modern development and transformation into a global city. We conclude that the L.A. School, much like the Chicago School it critiques, pays insufficient attention to politics and political institutions. Understanding how Los Angeles improbably grew from a frontier town to regional imperium and global city requires urban scholars to bring the local state back in. Based on recent scholarship, we argue that the local state played a critical and, frequently, autonomous role in key policy areas, such as city planning and water provision. By bringing the local state back into the L.A. growth story, L.A. scholars can offer a more robust theory of urban growth.

Southern California’s Crown Jewels: Historical Governance and Finance Lessons

This study offers an historical overview of how major public infrastructure projects were accomplished in the Los Angeles region in the absence of a formal regional general-purpose government. This study’s focus is on the governance and financing of Southern California’s “crown jewels”—water, port, and airport megaprojects crucial to the region’s improbable yet phenomenal 20th-century growth. Specifically, the authors (a) review scholarly debates regarding regional governance arrangements and their effectiveness; (b) assess the role of public infrastructure projects in the region’s historical development and looming 21st-century challenges; (c) analyze the performance, governance, and finance challenges of a regional agency—the Metropolitan Water District—versus municipal agencies—the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, and Los Angeles International Airport; (d) evaluate a failed regional initiative—the Southern California Regional Airport Authority; and (e) extrapolate the historical lessons to be gleaned from the region’s 20th-century strategic investment framework.

Life before Congress: Using Precongressional Experience to Assess Competing Explanations for Political Professionalism

Scholars have extensively studied career development inside the US House. The political experiences of House members before their election to Congress have received less scrutiny. What work has been done relies on imprecise measures which suggest that members’ political experiences have changed little over time. Using original data, I show that the amount of time spent in public office during the precongressional career increased by more than 40% between 1870 and 1944. To explain this increase, I review competing explanations for career development inside the House and use matching to estimate their impact on precongressional political experience. I find that two electoral system reforms—the Australian ballot and nominating primary—were major drivers of increasing precongressional political experience. These findings indicate that political professionalism was pervasive during this period and powerfully shaped by institutions that encourage members to emphasize their personal credentials rather than party affiliation.

Wanting What Is Fair: How Party Cues and Information About Income Inequality Affect Public Support for Taxes

Income inequality has risen dramatically in the United States, with potentially negative social, economic, and political consequences. Governments can use redistributive tax policies to combat inequality, but doing so requires public support. When will voters support redistributive tax policies? We address this question by conducting survey experiments where citizens express opinions about tax policies in a real-world context. We manipulate whether they receive party cues, information about rising income inequality, both, or neither type of information. We find that when citizens are given information about income inequality, they connect it to their views on redistributive tax policies. We also find that inequality information can induce Republicans to support a tax increase that their party opposes. These results challenge the prominent view of citizens as too ignorant to connect information about inequality to specific taxes. They also suggest that efforts to inform the electorate about inequality can influence tax policy opinions.

Lost in Space? Shortcuts and Spatial Voting in Low-Information Elections

Voters face difficult choices in low-information local elections. Despite the concerns this raises for voter competence, there are virtually no studies of whether and when voters are able to choose candidates who best represent them ideologically in these contexts. We fill this gap by creating same-scale measures of candidate and voter ideology during a local election and examining how candidate ideology affects voters’ decisions. We also conduct an exit poll in which we experimentally manipulate cues and examine their effects on voters’ candidate preferences. Our results show that the ideological proximity of candidates has large effects on voters’ decisions. However, exposing voters to endorsements made by political parties and newspapers with ideological reputations diminishes, rather than enhances, voters’ propensity to prefer ideologically-similar candidates. These results challenge the notion that local elections are non-ideological and that citizens who have access to cues make “better” decisions than those who do not.

From Political Pathways to Legislative Folkways Electoral Reform, Professionalization, and Representation in the U.S. Senate

The Seventeenth Amendment transferred responsibility for selecting senators from state legislatures to voters. Scholars argue that voters’ ability to sanction performance ex post altered senators’ legislative activities. I focus on voters’ ex ante screening of senators. Using original data on senators’ political experiences, I show that direct elections increased the professionalization of pre-Senate careers. I then use sequence analysis methods to identify career paths to the Senate. Pre-Senate career paths help explain which senators received important committee assignments. These findings challenge claims that direct elections had minimal effects on the Senate’s composition and that recruitment is unrelated to legislative behavior.

America’s Leading International Trade Centers and their Entrepreneurial Agencies

This is a comparative and historical analysis of the trade-development challenges that face the New York and Los Angeles areas, where more than one-third of all international U.S. airborne and waterborne trade (measured by value) enters and leaves this country. These two regions historically developed different governance systems for their airports, seaports and freight-rail systems, dating back to the early 1900s. New York has a centralized system for its air and sea terminals, featuring the bi-state Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Los Angeles has a highly decentralized system with semi-autonomous city departments in Los Angeles and Long Beach governing the seaports and international airports. The Los Angeles region’s freight-rail is governed by public/private joint-powers agreements, while New York’s is largely private. What impact have these different governance systems had on trade, infrastructure, and regional development? How have the regions grappled with challenges such as the hard times of the 1930s, the early 1990s, and the current economic downturn? Can these metropolitan areas manage the expected trade growth while dealing with increasingly strict environmental regulations, the greater costs imposed by post-9/11 security concerns, and newly empowered local communities? The entrepreneurial agencies discussed in this paper will occupy a major role in meeting these challenges, which will require greater levels of cooperation among these and other public and private entities. Does the multi-functional approach of the Port Authority place it in a stronger position to manage the challenges of the early 21st century? If so, how can such a large, complex agency balance burdens and benefits, and maintain accountability to its different constituencies? Does Los Angeles need more bureaucracy and less democracy? With wholesale governance changes more or less off the table, how can public officials in that region overcome their endemic fractionalization to serve the greater good? In their varying structures and range of responsibilities, these major entrepreneurial agencies illustrate distinctive ways in which large regions can design and operate transportation networks, as cities and states grapple with economic-development needs in a global environment. Their successes (and failures), and the opportunities and obstacles they face, should offer useful lessons to other cities and regions around the world. This paper is divided into three sections. The first part examines the early 20th century creation of these public agencies and their major projects and development through 1990. The second section explores the mounting challenges to these agencies and their trade facilities, 1990-2009. The final section considers strategies needed to grapple with long-term challenges, including competitive threats from rival trading regions, the need to handle expanding air and sea traffic, security issues, and environmental concerns. We address these questions using original source materials, interviews with part and current officials and stakeholders, and statistical analyses of regional trade, traffic and economic data.