Mayors, Partisanship, and Redistribution: Evidence Directly From U.S. Mayors

Policymakers and scholars are increasingly looking to mayors as policy innovators capable of addressing critical challenges, including income inequality. A robust scholarly debate contests whether mayors are (1) limited by economic constraints and unable to prioritize redistributive initiatives, or (2) spurred to pursue equity-oriented policies according to partisan and ideological preferences. No existing research, however, directly and systematically measures local political elites’ preferences for redistribution. By interviewing and surveying 72 American mayors—including many from the nation’s largest cities—we measure when and why mayors prioritize redistribution. We find that, while a majority of mayors’ responses are consistent with being constrained by economic imperatives, a sizable minority prioritize redistributive programs. We also discover that partisanship explains much of the variation in a mayor’s propensity for redistribution. This suggests that national political debates may be shaping local priorities in ways contrary to conventional views. ∗Authors names are listed alphabetically. Einstein is corresponding author. The authors thank Boston University’s Initiative on Cities, specifically Katharine Lusk, Conor LeBlanc, Tom Menino, and Graham Wilson, for their collaboration and support in the design and implementation of the 21st Century Mayors Survey. They also thank Paul Lewis, Cathie Jo Martin, Kris-Stella Trump, and Chris Warshaw for very helpful comments on the manuscript. Many politicians, policymakers, and academics, dissatisfied with federal and state government, have increasingly pointed to cities as venues for addressing socioeconomic challenges. As Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter succinctly summarizes: “Cities are incubators of change and innovation, and mayors are at the forefront of it all—we get things done” (Mathis, 2014). This optimism in cities includes redistributive policy, an arena that influential scholarship (e.g. Peterson, 1981) claims cities are constrained from pursuing. For example, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio made redistributive initiatives a centerpiece of his campaign. Moreover, at the 2014 U.S. Conference of Mayors meetings, he joined with several other mayors to form the “Cities of Opportunity Task Force” to investigate cities’ options for implementing equity-oriented policies (Taub, 2014). Such examples notwithstanding, scholarly research offers little systematic evidence about how often city leaders prioritize redistributive policies and what affects their propensity to do so. In fact, leading theories of local policymaking imply or claim that city leaders will not pursue redistributive initiatives and that, contra most elements of American politics, mayors’ partisan affiliations do not meaningfully affect such priorities. Peterson (1981) famously argues that economic forces induce city leaders to pursue growth and focus on their tax bases. Recent empirical work on mayoral partisanship bolsters this perspective by arguing that mayors’ partisan affiliations do not affect cities’ spending patterns in areas other than policing (Gerber and Hopkins, 2011). These results are especially striking given the powerful left-right divide on redistributive policies at the national level, and the importance of partisanship as an explanatory variable more generally. On the other hand, some recent research suggests that mayors do have leeway to follow electoral concerns and respond to partisan commitments. These studies depict a potent relationship between mass preferences and urban policy outcomes (Hajnal and Trounstine, 2010; Tausanovitch and Warshaw, 2014; Einstein and Kogan, 2015). Their findings, combined with some important limitations in the mayoral partisanship research, mean that questions about partisanship’s affect on local policy are very much open ones.