The Political Development of Urban Policy: Understanding the Role of Ideas and Institutions Through Intercurrence

Congress authorizes and funds various urban redevelopment programs, and local actors attempt to use these programs to address urban issues and concerns, yet many policies do not live up to expectations. Urban scholars tend to focus on local political or economic arrangements to explain this phenomenon, while public policy scholars emphasize the role of special interest or bureaucratic influence on policy success/failure. In this paper, I suggest a new framework for examining urban policy: intercurrence. I operationalize this theoretical framework, drawn from the political science subfield of American political development (APD), to examine the ideas and institutional ordering mechanisms manifest in the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). I argue that policy creation and evolution can best be understood by looking at ideas about and the institutional arrangements embedded within urban policy, specifically the relationship between the public and private sectors, between state, local and federal governments, and between the Executive and Legislative branches.