Electoral Politics Is Not Enough: Racial and Ethnic Minorities and Urban Politics

6. Urban Regime Theory and the Representation of Minority Interests

Chapter 6 Urban Regime Theory and the Representation of Minority Interests Government responds unevenly to African American and Latino interests. Within the four Connecticut urban areas under investigation, city leaders substantively represent African American concerns to a greater extent than they understand and address Latino interests. Representation of Latino and African American policy preferences differs across these four cities as well. In three cities, leaders barely comprehend or attend to Latino interests, whereas in the fourth city they understand and react to some Latino concerns. Across these cities, leaders vary greatly in the extent to which they know and act upon African American interests. In one city, they thoroughly represent African American interests. In another, African Americans receive a relatively high degree of substantive representation. In the third city, leaders maintain a moderate understanding of African American interests but they tend not to address some of the issues that affect this minority group. In the fourth city, leaders neither comprehend nor respond to African American interests. Which conditions affect city leaders’ awareness of and responsiveness to racial and ethnic minority interests? Why do leaders vary in the extent to which they represent minority interests, both within each city and across these urban areas? How do leaders differ in the ways in which they gain awareness of minority interests, and what lessons can we learn from this variation? In nonreform cities with strong political traditions and a history of whitemajority rule, representation of minority interests exists above and beyond electoral politics. In this setting, African Americans and Latinos must employ extra-electoral resources to enter the governmental strata and gain policy 107 108 Electoral Politics Is Not Enough responsiveness. Based on previous studies, one would not necessarily expect African Americans and Latinos to employ such unconventional channels. Browning, Marshall, and Tabb and Button emphasize the strong effect electoral politics exerts on minority representation.1 Furthermore, civic associations traditionally excluded African Americans, and therefore many African Americans and Latinos held negative attitudes toward neighborhood groups.2 In spite of conventional wisdom that suggests otherwise, this study finds that African Americans and Latinos utilize unconventional means to gain responsiveness from government leaders. Differing political structures and traditions help explain why Mollenkopf could not apply Browning, Marshall, and Tabb’s theoretical framework to New York City.3 In reform-government cities, African Americans and Latinos use electoral politics to represent minorities because political parties do not hold great sway over elected and appointed officials in these settings. In nonreform jurisdictions, however, electoral politics limits minority officials. Strong political traditions and parties, despite a lack of competition, often require candidates to support the party’s agenda even when this action asks African American or Latino officials to endorse policies opposed by minority constituencies. In Browning, Marshall, and Tabb’s cities, conventional channels provide responsiveness to minority interests because reforms limit the extent to which elected and appointed officials use government as a patronage tool. By contrast , in older, nonreform cities in the Northeast, electoral politics provides limited receptiveness to minorities because officials, regardless of race, maintain greater flexibility in using government patronage to enrich their political allies and themselves rather than representing their constituents. The differences between reform and nonreform government cities help explain why factors that influence responsiveness in Northern California cities and parts of Florida hold limited applicability in older nonreform, Northeastern cities. Why do conventional explanations, including the size of the minority constituency , descriptive representation, political competition, and socioeconomic status not account for variations in responsiveness to minority interests? Bissinger, who wrote about Philadelphia in the early 1990s, also infers that the size of the African American electorate lacked a strong effect on the representation of minority interests in this nonreform Northeastern city.4 In A Prayer for the City, Bissinger documents how Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell paid copious attention to anything that dealt with race. Rendell knew that an African American mayoral candidate would hurt his reelection chances by splitting his already fragile electoral coalition. In an attempt to hold his voting base together, he offered patronage to African Americans and hesitated to appoint whites to top positions for fear of electoral retribution. However, many minority voters contended that Rendell did not substantively address African American interests. They argued that the mayor spent his Urban Regime Theory and the Representation of Minority Interests 109 time working on the needs of downtown businessmen and the Center City without paying enough...