Menino Authors Publish Research from Survey Data
Authors of the 2014, 2015 and 2016 Menino Survey of Mayors, Boston University Political Science Assistant Professors Katherine Levine Einstein and David Glick, recently published research from their interviews with over 70 American mayors in the acclaimed journal, Urban Affairs Review. Their article, Mayors, Partisanship, and Redistribution: Evidence Directly from U.S. Mayors, explores the relationship between national and local politics.
Over the three iterations of the Menino Survey, Assistant Professors Einstein and Glick have conducted almost three hundred interviews with sitting mayors. In addition to publishing their complete findings in a Survey Final Report each year, Einstein and Glick have used the data collected to delve further into mayors’ responses and explore new research topics.
Additional articles published by Einstein and Glick can be found below.
City Learning: Evidence of Policy Information Diffusion From a Survey of U.S. Mayors. Under Review.
Using a survey of U.S. mayors, more specifically, mayors’ own lists of cities they look to for ideas, we find evidence that distance, similarity, and capacity all influence the likelihood of a policy maker looking to a particular jurisdiction for policy information. We also consider whether these traits are complements or substitutes and provide evidence for the latter. Finally, we show that policymakers look to others for a variety of reasons, but report that they most often choose where to look for policy specific reasons.
Do Mayors Run for Higher Office? New Evidence on Progressive Ambition. Under Review.
This paper combines longitudinal data on the career paths of mayors of two hundred big cities with a novel survey of mayors to investigate about the extent to which mayors run for higher office, as well as the type of mayors who choose to do so. We suggest that ideological, institutional, life-cycle, and electoral factors all help to explain why so few mayors exhibit progressive ambition.
Cities in American Federalism: Evidence on State-Local Government Conflict from a Survey of Mayors. Forthcoming.
Previous scholarship on American federalism has largely focused on the national government’s increasingly conflictual relationship with the states. While some studies have explored the rise of mandates at the state level, there has been comparatively less attention on state-local relationships. Using a new survey of mayors, we explore variations in local government attitudes towards their state governments.
America’s Mayors are Taking on the Big Problems, But They Can’t Escape Partisan Divide. The Conversation.
Paralysis, gridlock, dysfunction: these are just three of the words commonly used to describe federal politics. Making things happen is no easy task in a polarized Washington, DC. But move a couple of levels down – to our cities – and a different picture emerges. Evidence suggests that in the face of an intransigent federal government, it is the cities that are tackling the big issues traditionally associated with higher levels of government.