Abstract
The fields of American national politics and urban politics have each developed their own paradigms for discussing elections. It is rare that experts in one field have more than a passing knowledge of the other. Two important recent books, Zoltan Hajnal’s America’s Uneven Democracy: Race, Turnout, and Representation in City Politics and Brian Adams’s Campaign Finance in Local Elections: Buying the Grassroots, show how data from local elections can provide fresh insight into research problems that have for decades subsisted largely on information from elections at the national or state level.
Ever since the early 1980s, the consensus among political scientists has been that while the poor are underrepresented in the electorate, American election outcomes would not be markedly different if everyone voted or if the electorate mirrored the population. In America’s Uneven Democracy, Hajnal contends that because turnout is so low in city elections (averaging less than 30% in municipal elections, as compared to 62% in the 2008 presidential election and 41% in the 2010 congressional elections), it is also more uneven. Racial disparities in voting are more pronounced in city elections than they are at the federal level, and racial minorities are a larger percentage of voters in many cities than they are nationally. Low turnout has consequences for minorities both in terms of representation in government and in the policies pursued by governments.
The book presents three conditions that must be satisfied in order for low turnout to matter: there must be a severe demographic skew in turnout, demographic groups must exhibit different preferences over election outcomes or public policy, and the demographic groups of relevance must be large enough to have an impact on outcomes if they do vote. Hajnal shows that these conditions are met in racially diverse American cities. This is, then, an argument that race matters, but it is established in such a way that Hajnal can frame the book as one that is primarily about voting and only secondarily about race.
The book draws upon three different data sources: voting results from the nation’s 20 largest cities; a survey on the subject of voter turnout in all U.S. cities, conducted by the International City/County Managers Association (ICMA) in 1986; and a similar survey of California cities conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) in 2001. None of these sources alone is ideal, as Hajnal recognizes. The PPIC survey is used throughout as a means of testing whether the ICMA results are too out-of-date. While it might be easy to find fault with the representativeness of the surveys here, Hajnal is frank about the limitations of the data, and the limitations here are more a prompt to researchers to undertake future work than they are a problem in this book.
The book’s early chapters document turnout disparities and present simulations of equal turnout across groups in mayoral elections and multivariate analysis of race and voting in city council elections. The simulations are instructive, although, as Hajnal notes, they must be considered with care insofar as campaigns would certainly change if candidates expected different levels of turnout. Analyzing council elections is more difficult in part because many cities’ councils are elected in ways that discourage minority turnout—at-large races, large districts, off-year elections, and in systems where the council cedes much of its power to an appointed city manager. While the racial composition of a city does matter in regards to the representation of minorities on city council, the relationship is complicated by different turnout levels among different groups and different electoral institutions.
Hajnal pivots in subsequent chapters to looking at the way in which institutions and minority turnout interact in bringing about policy outcomes. In the fifth chapter, Hajnal regresses different types of government spending variables on the city’s racial composition, electoral institutions, and a variety of different controls. The results of these regressions are mixed—for measures of different categories of government spending, taxation, and debt, electoral institutions matter far more than race. On the other hand, when measures of electoral competition and an interaction variable for turnout and competition are added, these variables are highly significant and relatively powerful. The conclusion, Hajnal argues, is either that city governments respond to strong turnout, or that redistributive policies will energize voters and thus stimulate turnout. In either case, the consequence here is that minority turnout can influence the actions of white officeholders even where it does not result in increased representation of minorities.
Recent work at the national level has focused on mobilization as a solution to low voter turnout. Hajnal, however, believes that at the local level institutional change is both the most feasible approach and the approach with the clearest answers. He argues for, among other things, establishing on-year elections, district representation, partisan elections, and an end to staggered elections. These recommendations will no doubt be met with approval by many urban politics scholars.
There are two principal drawbacks to America’s Uneven Democracy. First, Hajnal could pay more careful attention to the counterarguments politicians would inevitably make about his proposals. Ask voters to choose city councilors on the same day that they choose presidents, some would argue, and you will see downballot races drowned out by national campaigns. Party labels, they would argue, are meaningless in many cities that are dominated by the Democratic Party. Whether one agrees with these claims or not, they merit some consideration.
Second, the book at times suffers from the lack of a clear benchmark. In the early chapters, Hajnal contends that the skew in the local electorate is much greater than the skew in federal elections. As a statistical proposition, this seems inevitable. When racial disparities, income disparities, and so forth are presented, however, one is left to wonder exactly how different local elections really are from other types of elections. It would be a relatively simple affair to make a clearer case as to how different local elections truly are, and such an approach would undoubtedly strengthen the book’s argument.
These are minor quarrels with a book that is likely to be influential for years to come. America’s Uneven Democracy succeeds in its task—it is a book about urban politics that provides a valuable correction to the study of voting and elections at all levels of government. As such, it is of value to urbanists and to students of elections more generally.
Another area of research on federal elections that has run aground in recent years is the study of campaign finance. There is little consensus on the effects of campaign finance regulations at the federal level, and research on state politics has been dependent upon the experiences of the small number of states with public financing provisions. Brian Adams’s Campaign Finance in Local Elections is the first comprehensive study of the financing of urban campaigns. Adams considers campaign finance data for 11 cities, and he frames his analysis of these cities’ elections in response to what is known about campaign finance at the state and national level. Campaign contributions and expenditures are not disclosed in very many cities, and piecing together a full study of the role of money in city politics will necessarily be a complicated endeavor. Adams has presented the book as an opening salvo in an effort to develop a systematic knowledge of campaign financing practices across American cities, and the book admirably fulfills that function.
Adams documents, among other things, the extent of the incumbency advantage in local politics (comparable, in terms of reelection ratio and financial advantage, to the U.S. congress), the extent of bias in the contributor pool (substantial), variation across candidates in fundraising coalitions (of which there is less than one might expect), and the effects of contribution limits and public financing (minimal). In all of these comparisons, he shows that local elections are in many regards less democratic than elections at higher levels.
Two features of Adams’s book are of particular value. First, he develops a notion of fundraising thresholds in the early chapters of the book in separating out competitive and uncompetitive candidates. Absent primaries and party cues in local elections, it can be difficult to get a sense of the nature of competition in these races. Adams shows that there are thresholds for competitiveness, but beyond a threshold point money matters little for challengers and even less for incumbents. The nature of this threshold is in part determined by characteristics of the city—not only its size but also whether radio and television advertising is feasible. This is a finding in subsequent studies as well, and it is a characteristic of local campaign finance that has no clear analogue at the state or federal level.
Second, Adams does an excellent job of disentangling the relationship between money and the city’s districting plan (not only how large the districts are but also whether councilors are elected at large). Because the number of cases here limits our ability to provide clear answers, and because it is difficult to develop a single variable (or set of variables) that would capture the different electoral arrangements, Adams provides summary statistics for each of the cities he studies, as well as some very useful case studies of individual races.
Adams reaches many of the same conclusions as Hajnal. The best way to remedy campaign finance disparities and to reduce the role of money in municipal elections, he argues, is not to rely on contribution limits or public financing but to push for changes in voting rules and election timing and to take steps to promote citizen engagement. Greater voter turnout and engagement will not only reduce the importance of money but will also remedy biases in the donor pool by prompting citizens of modest means to contribute money or become otherwise involved.
Adams’s book is a noble first step, and future studies of urban campaign finance will certainly build upon it. Like Hajnal, he does a good job of putting together varied information to provide a picture that may not be entirely representative, but is likely the best we can develop. It is unfortunate, but probably unavoidable, that the book relies so heavily on larger cities. The biggest problem with the data, however, is not where it comes from but that more is at times read into it than should be the case. The discussion of the contributor pool uses the occupation field required in most cities. Adams classifies donors according to occupation and then takes the median income for each occupation to make claims about whether a candidate receives money from higher-income or lower-income citizens. This is a suspect means of classifying citizens, as the occupation categories provided are overly broad and there is no reason to suspect that donors are representative of their occupations. Most notably, what are we to do with the large categories of donors who list their occupations as “homemaker” or “retired”? At the national level, this sort of approach has generally been frowned upon, and those who have looked at contributor characteristics have relied upon survey data. Adams is, however, on stronger ground when he looks at bias by zip code within cities. Here, one can at least describe donors as being from high-income or low-income parts of the city. Similarly, the campaign expenditure classifications provided by candidates are essentially meaningless, and the analysis of variation by city of expenditures shows little notable variation. Despite these problems, Adams deserves credit for the sheer amount of information he provides.
Both of these books break new ground in integrating the study of urban elections into the broader literature on voting, campaigns, and elections. One can only hope they will serve as a call to researchers to build upon them.