First order change vs. second order change and DC politics

I am rueful over the current state of electoral politics in DC. While I argue all the time that it can make a big difference on who gets elected, depending on the level of the office--particularly President of the United States of America and Governor of the various states--at the municipal level in a place with oligopolistic politics, the reality is that who is the Mayor doesn't make all that much difference when it comes down to it, unless a person is really, truly transformational, or really really really really really really bad, e.g., Ray Nagin in New Orleans, Marion Barry for most of his terms as Mayor of DC, etc. It is no coincidence that DC's economic resurgence beginning around 2000 happened after Marion Barry was no longer Mayor.

That's the case in DC right now with the various people jockeying for power, especially for Mayor ("Gray's entry into D.C. mayor's race comes with two caveats" from the Post) but also for City Council Chair now that the current chair, Vince Gray, has opted to run for Mayor.

With one or two exceptions, the candidates or the names touted as possible candidates, are different shades of the same growth machine.

I find it sad and funny that the "Anybody but Fenty" crowd thinks that they won't eventually be disappointed by whomever becomes Mayor, because the tune the elected official dances to is not the tune that the people think they are hearing.

To review (extract from an old blog entry):

I am a fervent proponent of the Growth Machine thesis, first laid out by sociologist Harvey Molotch, in the seminal article, City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place. From the abstract:

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 is the "dean" of the school of the competing thesis, that of the "urban regime." I don't think these theories are competing so much as different sides of the same coin. "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. ("Growth Machine" proponents are sociologists, while "Urban Regime" proponents are political scientists.)

Professor Stone was kind enough to send me his paper, "Now What? The continuing evolution of Urban Regime analysis," from 2005. He 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.
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I came across this book, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Formation in the late 1970s or early 1980s. The major point is that "change" may not be substantive, which can also be the difference between "reform" and "transformation." The book distinguishes between first order change (moving things around) and substantive, second order change (transformation).

At the local level, often, "change we can believe in" isn't transformation, it's substituting a new cog for an old one, or replacing a burned out 75 watt bulb with another incandescent bulb, but even if you "change" to a CFL light bulb, not much has really changed.

Or in the terms of the Urban Regime thesis, while the individuals change, the governing coalition, agenda, available resources, and mode of cooperation remain the same. And the agenda? Well, that's the Growth Machine thesis in a nutshell: intensification of land use-real estate development.