Urban representation through deliberation: A theory and test of deliberative democracy at the local level

ABSTRACT

Despite the enormous size of the urban population, political scientists have very little knowledge of the capacity for substantive representation in large cities. This article develops and tests models of urban representation based on the deliberative democracy theoretical framework. Focusing on school districts in Los Angeles County, this article uses a unique survey of school district superintendents from within the largest county in the United States to develop a comparative index measure of deliberative democracy. The results from this article show that urban deliberative democracy is strongly correlated with increased political knowledge, high levels of minority political empowerment, and low levels of racial conflict. Furthermore, deliberative democracy is significantly correlated with greater concern toward policy issues prioritized by the school districts. These findings suggest the importance of promoting deliberative practices in urban, multiracial/multiethnic environments.

Acknowledgments

I thank Fernando Guerra and the Loyola Marymount University Center for the Study of Los Angeles for partnering with me to collect the surveys for this project. I also thank Franklin Gilliam, Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, Matt Barreto, Melvin Rogers, Michael Stoll, Lois Takahashi, and the late Mark Sawyer for their help with—and support while—working through the concepts for this project. I am grateful for the invaluable feedback from my colleagues at Brown University (Marion Orr, Wendy Schiller, Kenneth Wong, and Susan Moffitt), as well as Archon Fung. I also thank the participants of the 2016 American Political Science Association “School Politics” panel for their helpful feedback, particularly the extended advice from Clarence Stone. Last but not least, I offer a special thanks to Crystal Thomas.

Notes

1. In this article, I deploy Pitkin’s (1967) definition of substantive representation: “having a representative with congruent policy views acting as an advocate” (p. 200).

2. Berry and Howell (2007) estimate that 94% of articles published between 1980 and 2000 in the top-five ranked political science journals focused on presidential, congressional, or gubernatorial elections.

3. The survey did not ask superintendents about initial disagreement because we assume that disagreement is inevitable in any governance setting.

4. This method of measuring political empowerment and minority political empowerment is consistent with the existing literature. See Bobo and Gilliam (1990), Gilliam (1996), Gilliam and Kaufmann (1998), and Spence and McClerking (2010). Regular political empowerment factors in districts with both White superintendents and larger than median populations, whereas minority political empowerment excludes those districts.

5. For policy and program priorities of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, see Specialized programs: Responds to the unique needs of California’s diverse students. http://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/.

6. Sampling without replacement allows the sample size to be enlarged, while allowing each observation within the larger sample to remain independent of one another. Thus, each of the simulated districts had the probability of being selected into the larger sample. For use of sampling with replacement in previous political science research, see Mooney (1996) and Lewis and Poole (2004).

7. Awareness is measured by superintendents’ perceptions of how well informed residents of their districts are about the three separate policy issues. Their perceptions of each are combined into a single additive scale.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Collins

Jonathan E. Collins is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor of Political Science and Education at Brown University. He holds a BA in English from Morehouse College, an MA in African American Studies from UCLA, and a PhD in Political Science also from UCLA. His research interests center around democracy, race, and public policy—particularly education policy. His academic work has appeared in Local Government Studies and the Harvard Journal of African-American Policy.