There are nearly 20,000 general-purpose municipal governments—cities—in the United States, employing more people than the federal government. About twenty of those cities received charters of incorporation well before ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and several others were established urban centers more than a century before the American Revolution. Yet despite their estimable size and prevalence in the United States, city government and politics has been a woefully neglected topic within the recent study of American political development. The volume brings together some of the best of both the most established and the newest urban scholars in political science, sociology, and history, each of whom makes a new argument for rethinking the relationship between cities and the larger project of state-building. Each chapter shows explicitly how the American city demonstrates durable shifts in governing authority throughout the nation’s history. By filling an important gap in scholarship the book will thus become an indispensable part of the American political development canon, a crucial component of graduate and undergraduate courses in APD, urban politics, urban sociology, and urban history, and a key guide for future scholarship.

Over the second half of the 20th century, American politics was reorganized around race as the tenuous New Deal coalition frayed and eventually collapsed. What drove this change? In The Cities on the Hill, Thomas Ogorzalek argues that the answer lies not in the sectional divide between North and South, but in the differences between how cities and rural areas govern themselves and pursue their interests on the national stage. Using a wide range of evidence from Congress and an original dataset measuring the urbanicity of districts over time, he shows how the trajectory of partisan politics in America today was set in the very beginning of the New Deal. Both rural and urban America were riven with local racial conflict, but beginning in the 1930s, city leaders became increasingly unified in national politics and supportive of civil rights, changes that sowed the seeds of modern liberalism. As Ogorzalek powerfully demonstrates, the red and blue shades of contemporary political geography derive more from rural and urban perspectives than clean state or regional lines-but local institutions can help bridges the divides that keep Americans apart.

Orren and Skowronek survey past and current 'APD' scholarship and outline a course of study for the future.

Drawing together leading scholars, the book provides a revealing new map of the US political economy in cross-national perspective.

Some of the nation's wealthiest philanthropies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in education reform. With vast wealth and a political agenda, these foundations have helped to reshape the reform landscape in urban education. In Follow the Money, Sarah Reckhow shows where and how foundation investment in education is occurring and presents in-depth analysis of the effects of these investments within the two largest urban districts in the United States: New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, centralized political control and the use of private resources have enabled rapid implementation of reform proposals. Yet this potent combination of top-down authority and outside funding also poses serious questions about transparency, responsiveness, and democratic accountability in New York. Furthermore, the sustainability of reform policies is closely linked to the political fortunes of the current mayor and his chosen school leader. While the media has highlighted the efforts of drastic reformers and dominating leaders such as Joel Klein in New York City and Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., a slower, but possibly more transformative, set of reforms have been taking place in Los Angeles. These reforms were also funded and shaped by major foundations, but they work from the bottom up, through charter school operators managing networks of schools. This strategy has built grassroots political momentum and demand for reform in Los Angeles that is unmatched in New York City and other districts with mayoral control. Reckhow's study of Los Angeles's education system shows how democratically responsive urban school reform could occur-pairing foundation investment with broad grassroots involvement. Bringing a sharp analytical eye and a wealth of evidence to one of the most politicized issues of our day, Follow the Money will reshape our thinking about educational reform in America.

Most American cities are now administered by appointed city managers and governed by councils chosen in nonpartisan, at-large elections. In the early twentieth century, many urban reformers claimed these structures would make city government more responsive to the popular will. But on the whole, the effects of these reforms have been to make citizens less likely to vote in local elections and local governments less representative of their constituents. How and why did this happen? Ariane Liazos examines the urban reform movement that swept through the country in the early twentieth century and its unintended consequences. Reformers hoped to make cities simultaneously more efficient and more democratic, broadening the scope of what local government should do for residents while also reconsidering how citizens should participate in their governance. However, they increasingly focused on efficiency, appealing to business groups and compromising to avoid controversial and divisive topics, including the voting rights of African Americans and women. Liazos weaves together wide-ranging nationwide analysis with in-depth case studies. She offers nuanced accounts of reform in five cities; details the activities of the National Municipal League, made up of prominent national reformers and political scientists; and analyzes quantitative data on changes in the structures of government in over three hundred cities. Reforming the City is an important study for American history and political development, with powerful insights into the relationships between scholarship and reform and between the structures of city government and urban democracy.

Engines of Change, which is in the Oxford Studies in Postwar American Political Development series, provides the first full account of the role of national intra-party "factions" in American politics. Drawing from the last 150 years of American political history, DiSalvo explains how factions have shaped the parties' ideologies, impacted presidential nominations, structured patterns of presidential governance, and impacted the development of the American state.