The Role of Insider Advocacy in Effecting Political Change in U.S. Cities

• In Event: Who Governs the City? Public-Private Sector Tensions

Abstract

As democratic norms and institutions come under mounting pressure at the national government level in the U.S., democracy seems to be flourishing at the local level. Popular engagement in city politics has been growing in recent years, sparked by a series of protest movements, including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and #Me Too, along with other manifestations of mass-based mobilization around abortion, gun control, and the minimum wage. Urban politics has also been invigorated by demographic changes affecting American cities, particularly the influx of millennials, Gen Zers, and immigrants, all of whom have played an expanding role in community and city-wide affairs. The surge in bottom-up mobilization has, in turn, prompted many city governments to shift to the left over the past decade, embracing increasingly progressive positions on issues like criminal justice reform, immigrant rights, and precarious labor.

But while the swelling of grassroots activism has appropriately garnered much attention from journalists and scholars examining evolving patterns in urban politics, the contributions of left-leaning public interest groups have been overlooked. Such groups, with their relatively high level of stable resources and steady access to policymakers, have effectively taken advantage of broad-based mobilization to press for significant changes in local policy.

Through a case study of contemporary politics in Philadelphia, this paper seeks to illuminate the role of professionalized interest groups such as the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations and Community Legal Services in collaborating with insurgent movements around tenants’ rights and homelessness to bring about notable shifts in public policy with respect to affordable housing. In sum, activism grounded in both insider and outsider strategies and tactics appears to be most effective in yielding changes in local politics and policymaking.

Author

• Stephen J. McGovern, Haverford College