Race, Partisanship, and the Construction of the Legislative Agenda

• In Event: Is US Local Politics Becoming "Nationalized"?

Abstract

A substantial literature examines the consequences of agenda-setting processes in Congress and the state legislatures, arguing that agenda-setting dynamics are central to understanding policy outcomes. However, despite the significance of these processes for state and national politics, longstanding data constraints have inhibited similar analyses at the local level. As a result, we know remarkably little about what gets proposed within local governments, which legislators tend to propose particular types of local legislation, and why some local bills ultimately receive a vote while others do not. In this paper, I address these substantial gaps in knowledge by conducting the first cross-sectional analysis of agenda-setting behavior in the local context. To do so, I use a unique collection of legislative records from over 100 cities and counties in the United States, which includes information on approximately 500,000 unique legislative proposals. By coding the policy content of each proposal, I first examine how the issue content of the agenda changes as a council becomes more racially diverse and as the distribution of member partisanship becomes increasingly imbalanced. Second, using data on the lifecycle of each bill, I evaluate whether members of certain racial or partisan groups are more likely to see their bills reach the floor. Collectively, my findings contribute to our understanding of the policymaking process at the local level by documenting how descriptive and partisan representation influence the types of bills that have the potential to become law.

Author

• Peter Bucchianeri, Vanderbilt University