City Politics
City politics is a subfield of comparative politics.
Contents
Description
Work in the broader comparative politics field generally uses states as the unit of analysis. City politics instead applies these methods to cities.
Analysis in this field will not necessarily assume rationality or utility functions, at least not for cities. Explanations generally look like 'presence of local opportunities drew in resources away from other regions'. There is structuralism, but not not necessarily individual agency.
Historically this field focused on political machines: why they emerged in some places but not others, and what structures can be instituted to combat them, and so on.
Reading Notes
Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, William L. Riordon, 1905
Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City, Robert Dahl, 1961
Winning the West to Municipal Reform, Amy Bridges, 1992
Urban Resilience and the Recovery of New Orleans, Thomas J. Campanella, 2006
There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America, William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub, 2007
City Diplomacy: From City-States to Global Cities, Raffaele Marchetti, 2021
Company Towns: Single-Industry Dominance and Local Government Capacity, Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, 2025
Civil Service Adoption in America: The Political Influence of City Employees, Sarah F. Anzia and Jessica Trounstine, 2025
Who Knows How to Govern? Procedural Knowledge in India’s Small-Town Councils; Adam Michael Auerbach, Shikhar Singh, and Tariq Thachil; 2025