New Research > A Robust Role For Citizens In Determing Policy Preferences

Municipal governments play a vital role in American democracy, as well as in governments around the world. 
Despite this, little is known about the degree to which cities are responsive to the views of their citizens.
An 84-page research article has just been published in the August 2015 edition of the prestigious American Political Science Review
[see link below for whole article].
It was widely cited online by The Economist in the rankings for most liberal and most conservative large cities in America.
This post today is a follow-up to an earlier one about Bloomberg's What Works Cities initiative that will help make the City of Mesa deliver better results for residents that is data-driven - but when there's no data and very little citizen expression of public opinion that creates public policy in municipal governments, Mesa we got a big problem.

Conservatism in America: Mesa #1
It is crucial to know whether city governments represent the views of their citizens, but when yours truly sees no or very few members of the public showing up for City Council Meetings or numerous committee meetings, ya just gotta wonder why they do not.
At one meeting, someone mentioned they hadn't heard a public comment [just fill out a blue card] in over ten years.
How do city governments reflect their constituents’ politics when the public chooses not to participate? . . . and a better question is Why?
The research cited here shows that institutions in municipal government have little consistent impact on policy responsiveness.
Simple institutional reforms are doubtful to enforce responsiveness.

Research Article

Representation in Municipal Government

American Political Science Review

American Political Science Review / Volume  109 / Issue 03 / August 2015, pp f1 - f4
Abstract

Municipal governments play a vital role in American democracy, as well as in governments around the world. Despite this, little is known about the degree to which cities are responsive to the views of their citizens. In the past, the unavailability of data on the policy preferences of citizens at the municipal level has limited scholars’ ability to study the responsiveness of municipal government. We overcome this problem by using recent advances in opinion estimation to measure the mean policy conservatism in every U.S. city and town with a population above 20,000 people. Despite the supposition in the literature that municipal politics are non-ideological, we find that the policies enacted by cities across a range of policy areas correspond with the liberal-conservative positions of their citizens on national policy issues. In addition, we consider the influence of institutions, such as the presence of an elected mayor, the popular initiative, partisan elections, term limits, and at-large elections. Our results show that these institutions have little consistent impact on policy responsiveness in municipal government. These results demonstrate a robust role for citizen policy preferences in determining municipal policy outcomes, but cast doubt on the hypothesis that simple institutional reforms enhance responsiveness in municipal governments.