Why Cities Lose
The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A prizewinning political scientist traces the origins of urban-rural political conflict and shows how geography shapes elections in America and beyond
Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography.
In the late nineteenth century, support for the left began to cluster in cities among the industrial working class. Today, left-wing parties have become coalitions of diverse urban interest groups, from racial minorities to the creative class. These parties win big in urban districts but struggle to capture the suburban and rural seats necessary for legislative majorities. A bold new interpretation of today's urban-rural political conflict, Why Cities Lose also points to electoral reforms that could address the left's under-representation while reducing urban-rural polarization.
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Political scientist Rodden (Hamilton's Paradox), of Stanford's Hoover Institution, argues in this insightful but dry work that the ways rural areas seem to control national elections are as old as the republic itself and didn't start with recent gerrymandering. The winner-take-all system (rather than proportional representation), a relic of British colonial rule, and the persistence of two parties have exacerbated a power struggle between city and country that goes back to Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, producing a Democratic Party with a lock on urban centers and statewide offices in certain states, while the Republican Party carries the exurbs and rural areas which oftentimes translates into decisive control of other state legislatures and Congress. In Pennsylvania, Rodden's main case study, Republicans have controlled the legislature for decades thanks to the clustering of Democrats in urban areas. Rather than focusing on the 2016 presidential election or the 2018 midterms, Rodden dives deeply into the historical context and patterns, concluding that ending underrepresentation of city dwellers will probably require redistricting or proportional representation. This polished and data-heavy examination will interest serious political enthusiasts, academics, and data geeks, but probably not the general reader.
