Who Contests? The Politics of Racial Policies in Urban America

• In Event: Racial Inequality and Governance in a New Era

Abstract

This paper draws on a four-city study of conflicting racial policy alliances over a thirty-year period to assess how partisan changes in mayoral regime affect policies designed to advance material racial equality. We argue that King and Smith’s account of modern American racial politics as structured at the national level between clashing "color-blind" and "race-conscious" policy alliances successfully identified most of the actors contesting racial policies in four major American cities over the last three decades. Policy outcomes vary across the different cities and across different issues because the rival racial policy alliances have different balances of power in different locales, both in relation to each other and in relation to national and state governing institutions.

Authors

• Desmond King, University of Oxford

• Rogers M. Smith, University of Pennsylvania