Local Appointed Boards and the Diluting of Democracy

• In Event: Urban Inequalities: Causes and Redresses

Abstract

Cities in the United States routinely transfer policy making authority to appointed boards and commissions. Despite the accumulation of power in these quasi-public bodies, we know little about who sits on these boards or what kinds of decisions they make. In this paper, I theorize that these appointed boards serve two functions, both of which have the potential to damage local democracy. First, cities create a veneer of democratic accountability by outsourcing unimportant tasks to a large set of use unpaid volunteers; these volunteers are more likely to be women and people of color and they make almost no decisions with city wide consequences. At the same time, a second set of boards make important, inequality enforcing, and unpopular decisions in policy spaces like pensions, employment, police, and infrastructure. These boards are populated by political insiders (who are more likely to be white and male) and serve to limit the degree to which voters can hold elected officials politically accountable for unpopular decisions. These two functions of boards combine with the general lack of knowledge about who sits on these boards, how membership is selected, and what these boards actually do to limit the degree to which local residents can hold their governments responsible for policy decisions.

Author

• Mirya R. Holman, Tulane University