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Mayors and the Challenge of Urban Leadership
Big city mayors rank among the most powerful and colorful politicians in America. Yet few books focus on the leadership challenges the occupants of the office face. Mayors and the Challenge of Urban Leadership examines twelve case studies of mayoral leadership in seven cities, from the New Deal era to the beginning of the 21st century. The prospects for mayoral success or failure are driven by how mayors manage the fit between political commitments and the broader patterns of political competition. City Hall powerhouses like Richard J. Daley of Chicago (1954-76), David Lawrence of Pittsburgh (1946-58), Tom Bradley of Lost Angeles (1973-83), and Robert F. Wagner of New York (1954-65) came to ...
Holding Bureaucrats Accountable
Lana Stein looks at the taxing question of how to make bureaucracies responsible to elected officials Stein carefully scrutinizes St. Louis bureaucracy, distinguishing those agencies that are responsive to elected officials from those that are not. On the responsive side, for example, she cites the Traffic Division of the Department of Streets, which has erected about 1,000 four-way stop signs (compared to 34 in Kansas City) because the aldermen, responding to parents concerned about the safety of their street-crossing kids, demanded them. Similarly, she finds that building inspectors are responsive to aldermen's requests that individual buildings receive priority attention. To tenants worried about unsafe living conditions, that's an important and meaningful gesture
St. Louis Politics
There are two defining moments in St. Louis political history: the 1876 divorce of the city from its county and the 1914 charter adoption. The institutions created at these times produced a factional and fragmented city government, thoroughly grounded in machine politics. Stein examines major themes in urban politics over the last century: race, redevelopment, suburbanization, and leadership. St. Louis mayors must deal with the comptroller and the president of the board of aldermen plus twenty-eight aldermen elected from wards. State law says the city must also have eight county offices--offices that perform county functions for the city. Power is difficult to amass in this factional and fra...
Local Politics and Mayoral Elections in 21st Century America
Some of the most populated and storied American cities had mayoral elections in 2013. Open contests in New York City, Los Angeles and Boston, for example, offer laboratories to examine electoral trends in urban politics. Cities are facing varied predicaments. Boston was rocked by the bombing of the marathon on April 15. Detroit is roiled by being the largest U.S. city to declare bankruptcy, and Chicago, which had an open, competitive election in 2011, is dealing with significant gun violence. San Diego’s mayor resigned in August 2013 due to sexual harassment charges and other mayors are surrounded by corruption scandals. Houston and St. Louis had non-competitive elections recently but thei...
Mapping Decline
Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form." Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of peo...
Heads of the Local State
In recent years there has been increasing historical interest in various aspects of local urban politics, resulting in a much better understanding of the recruitment and socio-economic characteristics of municipal leadership and the exercise of power at a local level. However, much less is known about the offices and office-holders standing at the ceremonial, political and executive head of towns and cities. Through a comparative analysis of mayoralty from 1800 onwards, this volume explores the characteristics of the office in relation to such issues as, the constitutional position of mayors, their ceremonial and executive roles, their representational status in relation to local, regional and central authority, and the public visibility of the office, which has been used to highlight or blur issues of race, gender, politics or religion within a community.
Personnel Literature
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Understanding Urban Politics
In Understanding Urban Politics: Institutions, Representation, and Policies, Timothy B. Krebs and Arnold Fleischmann introduce a framework that focuses on the role of institutions in establishing the political “rules of the game,” the representativeness of city government, the influence of participation in local democracy, and how each of these features influences the adoption and implementation of public policies. Part 1 lays the groundwork for the rest of the book by exploring the many meanings of “urban,” analyzing what local governments do, and providing a history of American urban development. Part 2 examines the organizations and procedures that are central to urban politics an...
Cities, Politics, and Policy
Just because Milwaukee isn't Manhattan, doesn't mean that those urban centers face completely unique challenges. Through effective comparative analysis of key issues in urban studies--how city managers share power with mayors, how spending policies affect economic development, and how school politics impact education policy--students can clearly see how scholars discern patterns and formulate conclusions to offer theoretical and practical insights from which all cities can benefit. Pelissero brings together an impressive team of contributors to explore variation among cities through case studies and cross-sectional analyses. Each author synthesizes the field's seminal literature while explaining how urban leaders and their constituents grapple with everything from city council politics to conflict and cooperation among minority groups. Authors identify both key trends and gaps in the scholarship, and help set the research agenda for the years to come. Lively case material will hook your students while the accessible presentation of empirical evidence make this reader the comprehensive and sophisticated text you demand.
Facing Up to the American Dream
The ideology of the American dream--the faith that an individual can attain success and virtue through strenuous effort--is the very soul of the American nation. According to Jennifer Hochschild, we have failed to face up to what that dream requires of our society, and yet we possess no other central belief that can save the United States from chaos. In this compassionate but frightening book, Hochschild attributes our national distress to the ways in which whites and African Americans have come to view their own and each other's opportunities. By examining the hopes and fears of whites and especially of blacks of various social classes, Hochschild demonstrates that America's only unifying v...
