The Rise of Progressive Policy and Politics in America’s Cities

• In Event: Cities as Sites of Resistance

Abstract

Although long argued to be non-ideological, local politics over the past decade has increasingly shifted in a progressive direction. From the enactment of the $15 minimum wage, mandatory paid sick leave, and sanctuary city policies to the establishment of progressive caucuses in cities like New York and Chicago, progressivism is now an important factor—-and potential cleavage—within many big-city governments. However, despite a significant amount of anecdotal evidence supporting this progressive shift, the scope, scale, and sources of this trend remain unknown. In this paper, I take a first step toward rectifying this problem by investigating the breadth of progressivism in American urban politics, along with the unique local factors—ideology, council structure, and social activism, in particular—that might be underlying such a trend. To do so, I construct a new, longitudinal measure of local progressivism for 100 of America’s largest cities by evaluating changes in newspaper coverage of local political affairs over time—specifically, the extent to which individuals and policies are described as being progressive. To validate the measure, I conduct two in-depth case studies of council politics and legislative behavior in New York City and San Francisco. I then present descriptive trends for each of the 100 cities in my data, discussing both the extent of the cross-sectional variation and the timing of each city’s progressive shift. Finally, I combine my data with an array of social, economic, and political indicators to evaluate the sources of this change. In doing so, this paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on ideology and cleavage formation in local politics and it provides evidence supporting the continued study of nonpartisan, ideological cleavages at the local level.

Author

• Peter Bucchianeri, Harvard University