Municipality Size and Dimensions of Conflict in Local Politics

• In Event: Political Economy and Local Democracy

Abstract

Early work in local politics advanced the idea that partisanship did not have a dominant role in local governance (Peterson 1981), but a growing body of research underscores the increasing relevance of national political divisions in local politics. Scholars have demonstrated the effect of local leaders’ partisanship on spending outcomes (Gerber and Hopkins 2011; de Benedictis-Kessner and Warshaw 2020), established connections between constituents’ positions on national issues and their representation in municipalities (Schaffner et al. 2020), and provided evidence that party affiliation is a significant predictor of local officials’ positions on salient issues at the national level (Lee et al. 2022). Results from these studies lead scholars to suggest that local politics is nationalizing. However, national and local governments have different responsibilities (Anzia 2021), raising questions about how and why national partisan divisions would influence issues in local government. Furthermore, most research on local politics focuses on large cities, generating questions about whether nationalization might be restricted to certain types of municipalities.

Importantly, local politics research has barely studied rural and small-town America. Municipalities with populations under 25,000, often a cutoff in the local politics literature, contain around one-third of the US population. Over two-thirds of municipal governments serve this population. Therefore, a large share of citizens and most local governments are understudied. It is expected that almost all municipal governments carry out basic functions, like providing goods, budgeting, and establishing rules around land use, but governments serving larger populations have the capacity to focus on issues beyond managerial ones. Smaller governments may not have the professionalized structure, budget and labor capacity, or officials with the same level of political ambition as in larger cities to consider national issues or focus on partisan debates. I argue that partisanship should have limited influence on conflict in municipal local government, particularly in smaller municipalities.

To test this theory, I first surveyed over 1,250 local elected officials in December of 2023, asking questions about local and national issues, officials’ backgrounds, perceptions of their constituents, partisanship, and ideology. Second, I use the LocalView dataset (Barari and Simko 2023) to analyze a sample of transcripts from local council meetings to gain insights into the range of issues, partisan conflict, and presence of national issues at the local level. Finally, I collect local meeting minutes to code roll-call votes across municipalities of varying sizes to assess the role of partisanship in decision-making and to identify nonpartisan dimensions of conflict. The analyses provide support for my argument: municipal officials' positions on local issues are not predominantly divided on partisan lines, and in the cases that they are, this occurs in big cities and on issues that are more related to national issues. Rather than partisanship, public space and growth (e.g., land use, where to build a new library, considerations when developing new homes) emerge as a primary dimension of conflict.

Author

• Anna Weissman, University of California, Berkeley