Elections and local control

Greater Greater Washington has a roundup, "Council race coverage roundup," on the various Ward council races in DC. Progressive Review's City Desk suggests that we look at David Schwartzman, Statehood-Green Party candidate for an at-large Council seat. If anything, his campaign site has one of the best quotes:

Remember, You have 2 votes for At-Large Council in November. DC Statehood Green Candidates do not take money from powerful developers, real estate lobbies or from other corporations. Democrats and Republicans do.

It's not that corporations and developers are always bad, but it is true that they want to get as much as possible (the "quid") while paying-giving up as little as possible (the "pro quo") in return.

At large candidate Patrick Mara is a candidate of the business interests. The business interests (Chamber of Commerce, Greater Washington Board of Trade, Federal City Council, land use bar and developers) overwhelmingly get what they want from the City Government--from the executive branch and the City Council. But it's never as fast as they want and as lockstep as they want, so they keep trying to get even more control by eliminating the occasional Councilmember who might pose an objection or two to something that particular groups really really want. Plus, they really don't like restrictions of any kind (such as historic preservation regulations) that make projects potentially less "predictable."

At the same time, local Democratic Party politics proves the points made by Robert Michels almost 100 years ago in Political Parties, about "the iron law of oligarchy." Wikipedia summarizes this as:

The reasons for this are the technical indispensability of leadership, the tendency of the leaders to organize themselves and to consolidate their interests; the gratitude of the led towards the leaders, and the general immobility and passivity of the masses.

It's why competition is a good thing. It's a shame that the Statehood-Green Party isn't more viable.

Even, as Harvey Molotch argues in "The City as a Growth Machine" that competition within the local political and economic elite is a chimera, that they are united around a growth agenda, as the abstract states:

A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities. Conditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic, and political forces embodied in this growth machine.

Political scientist Clarence Stone, a professor at University of Maryland has a competing thesis, that of the "urban regime." I don't think these theories are competing so much as different sides of the same coin.

In other words, they are reciprocal theories. "Growth Machine" theory explains the motivation of "the land-based elite," and "urban regime" theory explains in detail how the land-based elite operates and functions. (In fact, I think UR theory's explanatory power breaks down when political scientists attempt to explain the reasoning behind non-economic actions in the locality.)

In"Now What? The continuing evolution of Urban Regime analysis," Professor Stone writes:

An urban regime can be preliminarily defined as the informal arrangements through which a locality is governed (Stone 1989). Because governance is about sustained efforts, it is important to think in agenda terms rather than about stand-alone issues. By agenda I mean the set of challenges which policy makers accord priority. A concern with agendas takes us away from focusing on short-term controversies and instead directs attention to continuing efforts and the level of weight they carry in the political life of a community. Rather than treating issues as if they are disconnected, a governance perspective calls for considering how any given issue fits into a flow of decisions and actions. This approach enlarges the scope of what is being analyzed, looking at the forest not a particular tree here or there. (emphasis added, in this paragraph and below)

In discussing Atlanta, Stone writes: "Land use, transportation, and housing formed an interrelated agenda that the city's major economic interests were keen to advance;" and

By looking closely at the policy role of business leaders and how their position in the civic structure of a community enabled that role, he identified connections between Atlanta's governing coalition and the resources it brought to bear, and on to the scheme of cooperation that made this informal system work. In his own way, Hunter had identified the key elements in an urban regime – governing coalition, agenda, resources, and mode of cooperation. These elements could be brought into the next debate about analyzing local politics, a debate about structural determinism.

It's all about the governing coalition (the Growth Machine) and how they go about coordinating their agenda and how to interact, and the resources they line up (including the use of government agencies, laws, and regulations) to accomplish their goals.

Frequently, I say that if you haven't read "Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C., 1964 - 1994," the book about DC during the Barry Mayoralty, that activists have no business being involved, that you will get your clock cleaned (this can happen even if you read the book...) when you attempt to change things.

Dream City, even though the writers were journalists, not sociologists or political scientists, is a case study example of the Growth Machine thesis. And it sure explains, almost from an Urban Regime theory perspective, how the governing coalition works.

Without this broader perspective, a true understanding of local politics and power relations is not possible.

Mostly, the people who win in various races are the candidates supported by the Growth Machine. Not always. But most in-Ward candidates challenging the status quo aren't sophisticated enough to know how to work the system behind the system, and their grassroots orientation doesn't prepare them for the reality of how the political-economic elite structure truly works within the city.