Scholars of urban politics have long debated the issue of what cities can and should do to promote the economic well-being of their residents. As the of election Zohran Mamdani illustrates, urban residents are increasingly demanding that city governments do more to address the increasingly exorbitant costs of housing, childcare, and transportation. One obvious solution is to raise taxes on the private holders of wealth. By the same token, his election has prompted handwringing on the right about the “inevitable” flight of capital out of New York City. Scholarship that runs the gamut from the public choice school associated with the “city limits” perspective (Peterson 1981) through to Marxian accounts (Logan and Molotch 1987) all recognize that the private ownership of wealth and the mobility of capital puts cities in a bind, especially in a context of highly circumscribed levels of federal urban spending. Though several scholars (Logan and Swanstrom 1990; Kantor and Savitch 1993; Schragger 2016) have demonstrated that cities have greater latitude to promote egalitarian public policies than these perspective allow, few would argue that the deep structural problems of economic and social inequality can be fully resolved by tax-and-spend liberalism (Imbroscio 2010).
Can Politicians Bargain with Business?: A Theoretical and Comparative Perspective on Urban Development
These authors examine the capability of local government to influence economic development by formulating a framework that treats state-business relations as a bargaining process. This framework suggests that governmental influence is tied to the distribution of bargaining advantages along three dimensions of a liberal-democratic political economy: market conditions, popular-control systems, and public-intervention mechanisms. The authors offer an explanation of how characteristics of these dimensions strengthen or weaken city governments in dealing with private enterprise; experiences of U.S. and Western European cities are drawn upon to illustrate this. They conclude that differences in bargaining resources accounts for wide variation in local political control of business development.
Urban America Reconsidered by David L. Imbroscio | Paperback | Cornell University Press
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina laid bare the tragedy of American cities. What the storm revealed about the social conditions in New Orleans shocked many Americans. Even more shocking is how widespread these conditions are throughout much of urban...
