Big-city Politics, Governance, and Fiscal Constraints

Book excerpt: Big-city mayors and other political leaders face the triple challenge of assembling a winning political coalition; translating this into an effective governing coalition; and coping with a tightening local budget constraint. The challenge is still greater when elections have produced a change in ethnic control of local government, bringing into power new groups that want to use government spending to serve their constituents' demands but are resisted by those controlling the economic resources. This volume explores the political transition now going on in big cities. One group of chapters examines recent electoral politics in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Miami, and San Antonio, where different types of ethnic and class lines have been drawn, and where different strategies have been employed to adjust political machines to the new realities. A second group of chapters considers the business of governing under the conflicting pressures of community organizations, the press, the business community, and higher levels of government. A final group of chapters examines the fiscal and budgetary constraints upon big-city governments, and the difficulty that these governments, no matter how well motivated, face in generating jobs and economic opportunity for their political constituents.