An Exploration of the Political Dimensions of Cities’ Fiscal Policy Space

Drawing upon literature from political science, economics, and sociology that has attempted to consider how local preferences are translated into policy outcomes, we delineate four conceptually distinct areas of “the local political system”: resident and interest-group demands, partisanship or ideology, local political culture, and municipal institutional arrangements. After describing the data and measures used to characterize political features of the 100 cities in the Fiscal Policy Space (FPS) dataset, we show how those measures can be distilled into a smaller, meaningful set of indicators of political constraint on fiscal policy. Some illustrations of how the FPS cities sort out along these various dimensions are then presented. We conclude by offering several hypotheses about the degree to which each of these dimensions might constrain local choices about budgeting and service provision.