Electoral Coordination in Council Elections in Small-to-Medium Sized U.S. Cities

• In Event: Voting Behavior and Elections in Cities

Abstract

Nearly every large scale democracy in the world has political parties that organize activists and interest groups into competing coalitions, sponsor candidates committed to a mutual agenda, and stand for election and re-election on the basis of performance in office. One noted scholar has gone so far as to claim that “democracy is impossible save for parties” that perform these functions for large and unwieldy electorates.



What, then, happens in the majority of small and medium sized American cities that hold elections but lack political parties? We seek to answer this question for a sample of 35 Los Angeles County cities whose populations vary from about 25,000 to 150,000. All of the cities in the study are ethnically diverse and many are majority minority.



Our proposal has both an elite and voter component. The former is based on semi-structured interviews with city councilors in the 35 cities and has found four main patterns: 1) A small, self-perpetuating and largely unchallenged network of civic activists controls city politics over long stretches, typically in lockstep with other major economic interests. 2) A range of diverse actors compete for office, sometimes fiercely, but the winners nearly always have strong links to locally important interests, especially chambers of commerce, developers, and city employee unions. 3) Locally important groups form party-like coalitions that recruit and support slates of candidates, sometimes openly and sometimes covertly. 4) Competing party-like coalitions regularly contest city council elections. The preliminary results suggest that each of these patterns may be roughly equally common, but that, if anything, the latter two patterns may be more common. The findings thus indicate that an important degree of electoral coordination is present in city council elections for half or more of the cities studied. (We are continuing to collect data and refine our concepts, so these preliminary findings may change.)



The majority of scholarship on city politics is based on either case studies of individual cities or closed-ended survey studies of officials in large numbers of cities. Our study seeks a middle ground. Semi-structured interviews permit us to learn about individual cases in much of their idiosyncratic but important detail, and the study of a moderately large number of cases gives us a basis for generalization.



The voter component of the study will be based on exit surveys of voters in 15 cities holding council elections concurrently with the March 3 state primary in California, and in two cities holding non-concurrent city council elections in April. Using undergraduate interviewers, we plan to conduct about 1,500 interviews of about five to seven minutes each. The survey component of the study will feature face-to-face contact with voters minutes after they have cast their ballots, compared to with typical national survey designs that have interview lags of days or weeks; a response rate of around 40 percent (based on our previous experience) compared to single digit response rates in typical national studies; and content that is tailored to the issues in each particular election. This last feature will permit us to assess the basis of citizen vote decisions.



Our analysis of elite politics has led us to the preliminary conclusion that, in all four of the patterns we discovered, various organized interests are major players. They either recruit or support most successful candidates and exert a large influence on city policies that affect them. What remains to be determined is how voters respond in elections. Do they understand and make meaningful choices between the issues raised by the group-sponsored candidates in council elections, or do they react essentially mechanically to whichever candidates send out the most mailers or knock on the most doors? Consistent with the title of our paper, we will also seek to understand whether the organization of electoral competition by party-like groups functions, as is widely believed by political scientists, to give voters more control over their government.



These questions are, of course, as difficult as they are normatively important. But we believe that our use of semi-structured elite interviews on a large number of cases in combination with our use of exit surveys in the voter study will give us an unusually strong basis for addressing them.

Authors

• Nestor Alejandro De La Torre

• Erik Grant Hanson, University of California, Los Angeles

• Alexander Munoz, University of California Los Angeles

• Ana Luisa Oaxaca Carrasco, University of California- Los Angeles